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Ok, I'm a newbie. Son diagnosed in last 10 weeks with Aspergers. Am hearing from some people about Chelation therapy and how our kids have high levels of lead and mercury in their body and hair and yeast in their gut that needs to be eliminated and can be through diet. Says they can cure Autism? Gluten and casein free diet. Wow......more research

Be very careful of doctors who promote chelation, anti-candida (yeast), or other extreme holistics. I am(fairly) sure that some of these doctors are genuine, but there are alot of scam artists out there. There are also a lot of misguided zealots who do more harm than good. Try mainstream doctors/therapists first, and collect as much research as you possibly can from all sides of any debate on anything even slightly controversial.

There have been several recent threads about the gluten/free casein free diet. Read as much as you like. Feel free to read my blog, my family was initially taken for a very expensive ride. Learn from our mistakes.

Some of the stuff may work for some kids. Some of the stuff falls into the can't harm, could help catagory. Some of the stuff is downright painful and dangerous to put a child through.

Any doctor who tells you that you NEED to do any of the experimental stuff is a doctor you should not trust.

While it's a wonderful plan to live a healthy lifestyle including a good diet, DO NOT let anybody tell you that AS will "go away" if only you'll spend your money on "treatments." There are NO chemical causes or cures for AS supported by legitimate medical research. Depending on your specific situation, I'll allow that there might be some benefits to certain medications, or in avoiding exposure to certain compounds. But lead and mercury? Hair in the gut? Absent any specific evidence of exposure to unusual amounts of lead or other poisons, anybody recommending treatment for such a thing can be written off as a quack. Even if they have a real medical degree. NT's in particular can get caught up in believing things that would make no sense if they really stopped to analyze the situation. I'm an engineer, and I can't begin to list the number of times I've had well-educated engineers spout total idiocy simply because they'd turned off their brains for the moment. All the Aspy's I know don't have that "off" switch.

I'm a newbie to Wrong Planet, but I've lived with AS for my 48 years, plus having two sons in middle school with AS (only one of us is formally diagnosed). AS isn't a "disease" to be "cured" but a different sort of mind. A mind that expects people to say what they mean and mean what they say. A mind that can sense possibilities and learn how to make them facts. A mind that CAN'T stop analyzing, even while dreaming. Unfortunately, the NT's all around us have built a world where those things are considered weird and dangerous. And that's the main problem I have to help my sons learn to live with.

As far as I understand diet may work for some kids that specifically have trouble processing some things like Gluten, but it would be the minority.
Sorry to say, but none of the rest holds up to any scrutiny. There's no evidence based results, just the usual anecdotes by desperate people who don't want to face the reality that there is no 'cure'. Which is understandable.

I love the smell of Snake Oil, in the morning.

Ignore all that...love your son for who he is! If he is having intestinal problems you can have him tested for Celiac or food allergies other than that just try to feed him a healthy diet.
Here is a article about chelation therapy and how children have died from it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11640868/

Last edited by liloleme on 02 May 2010, 9:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

A lot of people allow their reason to be clouded by their hope. Please do not listen to these people or their sources; the internet is full of information that sounds good, but is completely quack. Here is a fact: no valid scientific study has ever supported chelation therapy, and the therapy is actually so dangerous that the NHA pulled it's study early to prevent further harm to the children involved. Chelation has been proposed, over the years, as a cure for all sorts of ailments and it has always been proven to be false. If it wasn't dangerous I might say "oh, well, if you want to throw dollars down the drain, go for it" but it IS dangerous. The medical professionals propelling it are every bit as much out for profit as the so-called big pharma they are trying to convince you is squashing their voices. Many, many scientifically minded members here have researched this thoroughly and come to a consistent conclusion: the whole theory is quack.

We've got some good threads on the diet question, and it does seem something valid got stumbled upon there. I urge you to read the specific threads for information on who might benefit and when.

The difficult thing in evaluating any autism therapy is that our kids don't progress on a straight path to start with, and are affected by so many things we aren't aware could be involved. That makes it easy to miss-attribute progress to a treatment, when either it probably would have happened anyway, or it was related to some other unnoticed environmental factor. You will hear a lot of anecdotal evidence as a result, but it isn't evidence.

I've got my own "miracle" stories, but they don't involve medical intervention of any type: just things like finally getting it that my son needs to pace to calm himself down, and things like that. It won't gather headlines, but it also won't make our family go broke, and I haven't put my child at any medical risk. These are the little secrets you will learn in a community like this one, and they will enhance your child's life far more than a stream of expensive and questionable medical interventions.

LOL! Great minds think alike...

And if you're willing to buy my autism curing diet - I'd be more than willing to part with some of my magic beans... For a very small 'donation' of course...