"We Trust In…." by Ed Arranga, Executive Director of AutismOne

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by Ed Arranga, Executive Director of AutismOne

We trust in our faiths, but most of all we need to learn to trust in ourselves. We need to believe we will find the answers to help our children get better.

It’s hard and every parent reaches a point where they feel it’s too much. And it is. Autism will push you past any limits you may have set for yourself.

Living in the “algorithm age” of solving problems and the dangerous offshoot axioms of minimalism and proof by construction are our children. Parenting is hard enough. Parenting on the edge of an revolutionary paradigm can be downright intimidating.

Lacking in all the supposed sophistication of medical algorithms dealing with autism is the modern parent who refuses to be defined by a recipe-type approach to both the diagnosis and the prognosis.

Recognizing mainstream medicine has it all wrong and their drug-dealing treatment “recipes” are recipes for disaster is a good starting point.

But it’s only a starting point. The truth in this journey is found farther down the road and rests, to a large degree, on the amount of trust a parent puts in their own experience, learned judgment, and, at times, gut instinct. .

The starting point needs to be the parent. You know your child better than anyone. You know your child’s environment better than anyone. You know what your child responds to better than anyone. You love your child more than anyone. .

Developing the “critical” eye is a never ending process. The dynamics we deal with are double edged. Our children are growing and changing daily. Foods once tolerated can suddenly cause problems. The environment is never the same from day to day, presenting its own set of challenges.

Often, when our children are going through troubling times and everything that has worked in the past fails to bring relief it is the most innocuous of suspects that turns out to be the problem.

While there are a seemingly endless number of culprits when our children take a turn for the worse keep it simple. Look for an easy answer although it will only be easy in hindsight. Let me give you two examples.

Ian is my younger son. He is 12 and extremely sensitive to food and to the environment. Last year, after 3 years of steady progress, he took a turn for the worse. Christmas was a nightmare. Ian’s behaviors became more and more erratic and aggressive. The crying was nonstop; the tantruming daily.

This year, only a month or so ago, Ian’s behaviors again took a nosedive. The laughing, loving little boy was less and less and the screaming more and more.

It rips the family fabric. There is only one family member – the screaming little boy who must be attended to. Every other concern is of no concern. Saving one member is in effect saving everyone.

So the hunt begins. What has changed? Is it hormones? New food? A toothache? Constipation? The search goes on for weeks and months.

In the first case, last Christmas, the culprit turned out to be Gerber’s organic peas. The most recent case turned out to be the couch.

Simple and immediate salvation. Removing the Gerber’s from Ian’s diet and the couch from the living room was like turning a switch. We had our boy back.

The puzzle lay in the gradual changes to a new food and the change in the position of a couch in the living room to a new location in the same room.

Each was accepted at the time with no ill effects. It was the accumulation of toxins that pushed Ian over the edge.

Gerber’s is pasteurized and pasteurized food is poison for our children. An assumption on my part that Gerber’s was not cost Ian months of pain.

The new position of an old couch created more contact as it became Ian’s seat of choice. A change in proximity of 3 feet caused 3 weeks of agony.

Accepted wisdom would not accept what happened to my little boy. The gradual descent and sudden reversal of behaviors based on food and odor (most likely VOCs) does not calculate in algorithms based primarily on generating life-long cash flow.

There is no mainstream-medical ROI on advising parents to pay attention to the smallest details; on nutrition; and dangerous environmental chemicals. The prescription pad not the patient chart pays dividends.

In many ways, you do not have a choice. Let me retract that. You have 2 choices: you can leave your child’s health care in the hands of those who created the problem or you can learn to trust in yourself and begin healing your child.. .