biomedical

How Do I Know If an Autism Treatment Helps?

by Stephen M. Edelson, PhD Interventions available today for individuals with autism include nutritional, biomedical, educational, sensory, and behavioral. They present a bewildering array of choices for caretakers, who often want to know, “How do I know if an autism treatment helps?” How many different treatments does a child need? How soon should one expect results? When is the best time to add a new treatment? When should one abandon a treatment that is not helping? How do we know? In evaluating any intervention, we need to be as objective as possible. Below are some tips to help determine when a child has improved from a specific treatment: Control Timing Parents eager to see improvement sometimes try several new treatments at once. Then when the child improves, it is impossible to determine which one(s) really made a difference. A general rule is to try a treatment for about two months and determine whether or not it was helpful before beginning…

The “R” Word: Sensory Processing Disorder Recovery

You may or may not know my personal recovery story. I have recovered my 2 sons, now ages 5 and 7, from sensory processing disorder (SPD), asthma, allergies, acid reflux and eczema with a biomedical approach, which means correcting nutritional and hormonal deficiencies, removing toxicities and correcting gut dysbiosis. Most people don’t know that sensory processing disorder recovery is possible, but my sons have recovered from it. I’m still working on failure to thrive, mitochondrial dysfunction, hypothyroidism and persistent eczema in my older son. In addition, they both had developmental delays, and my older son had severe hypotonia as a baby. I have recovered from immune dysregulation, in which I had shingles twice, the worst case of poison-ivy ever, bronchitis (which I’d never had before), constant sinus infections and constant colds that would last 3-4 weeks at a time. My older son had immune dysregulation, too, when he was younger: he would go to preschool, get sick and be out…

Healing Modalities

Approaches to Healing

Healing Modalities

While we would love to list organizations and healing approaches that are backed by leading medical institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, or Mt. Sinai, the truth is that few of the mainstream conventional medical institutions have much to offer children with chronic illnesses in terms of actionable protocols for recovery or cure. While a tremendous amount of research is ongoing at these prestigious institutions (and we hope to see answers soon!), families dealing with chronic illnesses do not have time to wait. Thus, parents and some pioneering physicians and medical researchers have found that in order to heal children they have had to step outside the boundaries of convention. Remarkably, parents, physicians and researchers who have dared to step outside of convention have healed and recovered children from illnesses that were once thought to be lifelong or incurable.   One very important caveat is necessary here: Depending on the severity of illness, the path to recovery…

The “R” Word: Recovery from Sensory Processing Disorder

You may or may not know my personal recovery story of how my sons have experienced recovery from Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). I have recovered my 2 sons, now ages 5 and 7, from SPD, asthma, allergies, acid reflux and eczema with a biomedical approach, which means correcting nutritional and hormonal deficiencies, removing toxicities and correcting gut dysbiosis. I’m still working on failure to thrive, mitochondrial dysfunction, hypothyroidism and persistent eczema in my older son. In addition, they both had developmental delays, and my older son had severe hypotonia as a baby. I have recovered from immune dysregulation, in which I had shingles twice, the worst case of poison-ivy ever, bronchitis (which I’d never had before), constant sinus infections and constant colds that would last 3-4 weeks at a time. My older son had immune dysregulation, too, when he was younger: he would go to preschool, get sick and be out for at least a week at a time, then…