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…

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…