Pulls on Your Heartstrings
All of my friends know that I am constantly researching, unturning stones with the hope that I’ll find any tidbit of information that may help Travis to live his best life. When they come across any information or articles that I may be interested in they forward them to me.
One of my friends gave me a copy of an article she thought would interest me. The first thing I look for when reading an article is the source and the author. She printed the entire article and I couldn’t find the source or the name of the author.
Then I saw it, in small letters on the corner of each page. “Special Report.” The first thing that comes to my mind is that this article is an advertisement. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain some good information. I just read it differently. I realize that there is likely going to be a product or a service to sell. I read it with a hint of skepticism.
If you’ve been following our story, you know why I might be skeptical.
The article/advertisement is titled, “Reversing Autism”. That got my attention. I want it to be possible. It tells the story of Karen Thomas, mother of Jacob. Jacob was diagnosed with autism in 2005 when he was ten years old. Very close to the same time and age that Travis was diagnosed. You have my attention.
Thomas is a holistic health professional and a massage and craniosacral therapist.
Here are some of the ways she described Jacob in the article:
Hyper-focused to the point where people would be talking to him and even say his name and he wouldn’t hear or respond.
Extremely oppositional.
Profoundly anxious.
Per the article, “Desperate to understand what was going on with her firstborn, over the next five years Karen took Jacob to multiple physical and psychological therapists who said things like, You’re not being firm enough with you’re discipline. You need to give him stronger consequences. It was ridiculous, says Karen. They just basically told us that we were bad parents.”
Sound familiar?
At the time her local bookstores didn’t carry any books on autism. She found a bookstore out of town that carried books on autism. The owner of the bookstore had a child on the autism spectrum. “I picked up a book and started reading it right there in the store, and it was like I was reading about Jacob, says Karen. Eventually a psychiatrist specializing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) confirmed Jacob’s diagnosis. She reported that Jacob was fairly high functioning, but with the worst case of oppositional defiant disorder she had ever seen in her career.”
All too familiar.
“Try to parent that, jokes Karen. You sort of go through this relief now that you have an answer. And then you have grief. And then it’s okay, now what do I do?”
Jacob was seeing a behavioral therapist who suggested that he may need to be medicated. Karen didn’t want to “drug her child”. She says, “With my holistic background working with the brain and my craniosacral background, I knew the brain can feel its way back if you can just get whatever is in its way out of the way. So I went to work.
Today, after 14 years of Karen’s intense research into the many causes and triggers of autism, developing treatment protocols and working with her son on her own, Jacob is fully recovered and away at college.”
As Karen says in the article, “I was so determined to figure out what was going on and to help him get better. I’m just sorry it took so much time researching, going through all of the trial and error trying foods and supplements, they’re expensive, and then you have to try them for a decent length of time, a couple of months or so to see if it’s going to do anything, and then continuing research, reading countless books.
I spent $150,000 and thousands and thousands of hours researching. But it was worth it, because not only have I recovered my son, it has put me in a position to help others.”
There it is.
She might actually have some good information of value. She deserves to be paid for the knowledge she has gained in her thousands and thousands of hours of research.
What I personally don’t care for is the advertisement itself. It pulls on your heartstrings. Makes me feel guilty that I didn’t accomplish what she did. But if I buy and follow her program, I can reverse Travis’s autism.
Per the article/advertisement, “Diet was the first thing she zeroed in on. Karen discovered that diet was indeed a vital key, and not just the elimination of gluten and casein. Through a process of trial and error, she learned she had to also eliminate sugar, processed carbohydrates, food dyes, MSG, and aspartame.
Karen says, it was hard changing his diet when we started because kids become very addicted to the opiates that are created in the body from eating gluten and casein. Wheat and dairy break down into peptides called gluten exorphins and casomorphins, which mimic opiate drugs, attaching to the same receptor sites in the brain.
Cutting out refined sugars wasn’t easy either, because the Candida in Jacob’s gut created wild cravings for a sugar fix. But slowly his gut health improved, and the cravings died along with the Candida.”
Let’s just stop here for a second.
I know how hard this process is, because we tried it with Travis. Picture your child not being allowed to eat any grains or dairy. No sugar. No processed carbohydrates. No food dye. Or aspartame.
It’s much easier today than back when we tried this with Travis. Today you can go to Whole Foods or Sprouts to find the appropriate foods. Or even order online.
He couldn’t eat school lunch. I paid $4 per quart for goat’s milk. Goat’s cheese is expensive too. I had to buy all of the specialty flours. I calculated what it cost me once to make him lasagna with all the specialty ingredients. It was like $28.
You can’t have the treats other students bring to school for their birthdays. Eating at restaurants was very difficult.
In Travis’s case you add on his intellectual disability and his mental illness. So you are unable to teach him why it is important for him to eat a restricted diet. He doesn’t understand. His mental illness told me that I can’t make him do anything that he doesn’t want to. And if you try to, my life is not worth living. I’m tired of being different. Eating different. Feeling different.
Many parents of kiddos with ASD have difficulty getting their children to eat anything. Their kiddos are very finicky eaters, sometimes only eating a few different things, over and over.
I will say that I 100% believe eating better will make your children feel better and even behave better. The younger you start them on this process, the better. It becomes a way of life. Breaking children, and even adults, of bad eating habits is hard. I am a case in point!
Per the article/advertisement, “Karen also put him on a regime of prebiotics and probiotics. Gut health is vital she says. The gut controls the brain and houses 80% of the immune system, so you have to work with the gut and support the organs of detoxification and the lymphatic system, because these kids have really poor detoxification.”
We did try this with Travis. We worked with two different naturopathic health professionals, with two different gut support and detoxification systems.
Per the article, “Heavy metal detox was the next thing Karen tackled. Per Karen, I learned that when you’re pregnant, the body of the baby is used by the mother’s body as a conduit to detoxify, so if you have a lot of toxins, your baby is getting all that. To clear Jacob’s system of mercury toxicity, Karen used a zeolyte formula (microporous alkaline aluminosilicate minerals) to draw the mercury out of his cells. Zeolyte tastes like water, and you spray it in their mouth because you’ve got to do things that are easy for them. It doesn’t allow for reabsorption of the toxin, and it won’t pull out the good minerals.
Detoxing from mercury, however, did temporarily jack Jacob’s autism symptoms through the roof. When testosterone and mercury come together it’s like a bomb going off. Karen says it really exacerbates the effects of mercury. That’s one of the reasons why the boy-to-girl ratio for autism is so much worse for boys. Girls have protective estrogen in their system that will shield the brain. Even though he was in the process of detoxification, when he hit puberty the mercury in Jacob’s system combined with the elevated testosterone levels, and all of a sudden he was in total rebellion, refusing to go to school or cooperate with Karen’s efforts.
Karen says, it was a constant battling for a while, and there were times I thought I was going to have a stroke.”
I resemble that remark. Still.
Karen calls the next step, supporting recovery. She describes it as dealing with coinfections. Per the article, “Karen found that most doctors working with autistic patients either didn’t know about dealing with this, or they couldn’t identify and handle the coinfections properly. Over 90% of children with autism have Lyme disease, she says bluntly. It mimics the symptoms of autism. It’s really hard to diagnose and is highly prevalent. So are mold biotoxins, which affect the gut and the brain, stirring up a chronic inflammatory response.
Dr. Jodie Dashore, PhD (Integrative Medicine), OTD (Neurology), MSc (Neurology), a leading global naturopathic practitioner in biotoxin illness, ASD and Lyme disease, agrees that dealing with coinfections is a huge part of autism recovery.
Dashore, who lives and works in New Jersey and is a close friend and consulting associate of Karen’s, also has a fully recovered autistic son, Brian, who had 10 false-negative tests for Lyme before finally being properly diagnosed. Eventually we found that he had 11 comorbid infections. Once all the coinfections were cleared, his autism went away.
The final step in Karen’s work with Jacob included brain support with supplements and repair with craniosacral therapy, which balances the bones on the head that surround the brain. These bones can easily get displaced and pushed out of their normal movement patterns.
Displaced cranial bones can pinch on the vagus nerve, which affects respiration. So if you have a child with asthma it could be that. It also affects digestion and is a really big contributor to anxiety. If the temporal bones around the ear are misaligned, she says, speech and balance are affected. Misaligned temporal bones are also associated with anger issues.
Four years ago, Karen wrote and published a book on her autism recovery protocol titled, Naturally Healing Autism: The Complete Step-By-Step Resource Handbook for Parents. She also started a web-based program called Autism Moms Mentoring Program that takes parents of children with autism through a step-by-step process of recovery.”
This article/advertisement must be at least two years old. It says her book was published four years ago. I looked it up, it was published in August of 2015. I have not fact checked all of her claims, so I wanted to remind everyone that I was quoting Karen Thomas and the article written about her, which I also believe was written by her.
The one claim that stood out to me was that over 90% of children with autism have Lyme disease. I immediately asked “the Google” as my husband Tracy likes to say. I immediately come up with an article at www.webmd.com titled, “Study Debunks Lyme Disease-Autism Link, Children with Autism no Likelier than Others to Have Signs of Tick-borne Infection”, by Serena Gordon.
The study was conducted at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. The study failed to find any evidence to back up a suggested association between Lyme disease and ASD. Health experts are concerned that if parents suspect that Lyme disease has played a role in their child’s autism, they may seek treatment with long-term antibiotic therapy.
The study analyzed blood samples from 70 children with autism and 50 children without autism. The testing was done by the CDC recommended two-tier testing and didn’t find any of the children to be positive. The sample size was large enough that these findings can rule out a high prevalence of Lyme disease in children with ASD.
Karen Thomas states that Lyme disease mimics the symptoms of autism. I’m thinking, is it possible that her son was misdiagnosed with autism? Maybe she cured him of Lyme disease.
I found her website to be very informative and plan on listening to some of the podcasts. But at the same time I now know that I will need to conduct further research on her claims, I very quickly found information contrary to her claim that 90% of children with autism have Lyme disease.
Her website advertises that she will be having an Autism Recovery Live Masterclass. This is a free three hour online event scheduled for September 18th, 2021 at 11am Eastern time. I probably would attend myself if I wasn’t going to be lumber-jacking at our cabin that day.
Her website shares testimonials, but Thomas is quick to offer a disclaimer that each child is unique and has a different timeline to their own level of recovery.
In my opinion, some of her treatment protocols may have merit, while some may not. Some families may choose to consult with her and follow her program, and some may not. Keep in mind she has a background in holistic care. And she was able to perform the craniosacral massage herself, rather than having to pay a professional.
Some families may not be able to commit to the entirety of her program. For whatever reason, lack of knowledge or may be even financial. I know some of the stones we unturned lead us to many treatments that were not covered by insurance. As a young family we maxed out our credit card paying for different treatments for Travis. Finding the treatments locally could also be an issue.
So if it doesn’t work, it’s because you missed a piece. Or each child is unique. Or has a different timeline. Or their own level of recovery.
The moral to my story. Make the best decisions you can for your family. Guilt free.
Tracy told me once that he hated reading novels at school, having to define the plot and identify the moral of the story. He wondered why the author didn’t just tell you. And so I did. He even says that maybe the author was just writing a story. Maybe. Or maybe he just hated the essay questions on the test about whatever book he was forced to read. That’s why someone invented Cliff Notes. Lol!
Oh, and Travis did a few sessions of craniosacral massage. I don’t know to what extent it helps, but the therapist told me he fell asleep each time. I think I may have him do a few more sessions. It must have felt good to him if it resulted in him falling asleep.
“Beware the pull on your heartstrings - it’s often the pursestrings that are actually being reached for. - Barbara Mikkelson