[.ca] Unraveling the Mystery of Autism and Pervasive ... (ISBN 0767907981)

We've seen it with our own eyes:
This book is one of 3 that changed our family's life. (Facing autism which made us know in our hearts the diagnosis was right & William shaw's book which details more of the science of this stuff are the other two.)I believe that there are many reasons children are on the autistic spectrum and that this book will only help some. Our son now 4 1/2 was diagnosed with PDD NOS within days of turning 3. We saw some familiarities with the medical issues in this book and thought it worth looking into. (relux, ear infections, persistently loose stools, Milk obsession, food intolerances affecting behaviour in a cousin, bad reaction to vaccin in a normal sibling). Wanting to be more scientific than 'try it and see' we had a number of tests done over the following 6 months. Sure enough the results were consistent with the theories: food sensitivities, enormous yeast& bacteria overgrowth, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, amino acid imbalances. I cried for a week when I realised the 'lifestyle change' the diet would mean (just coping with life seemed such hard work). But I can honestly say that it doesn't seem that onerous now and it wasn't nearly as difficult as I first feared. We made the changes progressively - Dietary eliminations. Vitamin & mineral supplementation. Probiotics, antifungals.We saw improvements in 'behaviour'and what convinced us that these were real and not just wishful thinking was that they were accompanied by other changes: *At 3 1/4 you could have called our son's name from 2 ft away, all day and unless you were touching him or in his face he didn't know it. After 3 days CFGF he suddenly responded to his name from 20 ft away from then on he would look up/around when his name was called. Having woken up 5 times a night EVERY night for months beforehand our son slept through and in the last 18 months he has woken up in the night on only 3 separate occaisions (wet bed/ fell out). I don't need to tell anyone going through this kind of sleep deprivation themselves what a difference that made. *When we treated the yeasts and bacteria we saw a change in attention span, eye contact and a spontaneous desire to talk to US. This coincided with his first(that I could remember) "beautifully" formed poops. I can't imagine how we'd have managed potty training without this change). Post treatment tests showed great improvement in results. We have had recently had confirmation of this when our suspicions of a problem this summer (poor attention span, weak eye contact, less complex speech) led us to test again and following alarming results we treated the yeasts again and Wow, what a difference. We think we have seen improvements from supplementation changes but the more gradual changes are possibly due to other reasons. We are great fans also of his wonderful ABA and AVB therapy he has received in the last year. We are still making changes but it certainly seems that the more normal his body chemistry is the more normal he seems. We believe the changes we've made have helped him be able learn from his excellent teachers. Our son is catching up fast. His communication skills are now only about 6 months behind (from being 'in the bottom 1 percent of children' at age 2 1/2) and people who don't know autistic spectrum disorders don't guess he's any other than a little behind in speech. He will be attending a normal kindergarten next year (no aide expected to be necessary) but continuing speech therapy probably. It hasn't just saved our son. It's saved our sanity. Bringing up a son who had almost no ability to understand what was being said to him and was clearly so frustrated that he couldn't make his needs understood was like living on Mars. Between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 the tantrums were explosive and could last hours despite all the very good advice we did get from the state early intervention program. The need for routines was all encompassing. This book enabled us to open a window in our son's mind that we and his teachers could pull him through. I worried if doing all this biomedical stuff would change his "personality". Didn't I love him as he was??. It's difficult to explain but he is still quite definitely the same person and fixing the problems feels a bit like putting on my glasses in the morning. I can seem 'him' clearly now. When I first told friends and family about what we were doing they smiled sweetly but obviously thought I was nuts. Now the change in our son has been such that I can't count the number of times I've been told "you should write a book about this". I tell them I would......but there already IS one.

No magic bullet:
This is an very useful book for all parents of PDD and ASD kids, and contains some of the best and most readable discussion of dietary intervention I have seen. The GFCF diet has been enormously helpful to my son, and this book would have been wonderful to have when I was first trying to figure it out. But it makes me crazy that Seroussi attributes all of her son's recovery to diet and completely dismisses the huge number of therapy hours that her county and/or school district provided to her child; and I also feel that Seroussi comes outrageously close to implying that the recovery of Catherine Maurice's children was spontaneous. Buy this book, and also buy books about therapy and special education, and buckle down to a lot of work, and a lot of love. -Sara from Colorado, the Land of Almost-No-Help.

Hope for parents:
A little over a year ago my son was diagnosed with autism at 2 1/2 years old. He would not make eye contact, had basically no language, slept about four hours a night and would not really interact with others. I came across the name of this book in an article on MSNBC. I am a physician and was initially doubtful, but we didn't have much to lose. We started the GF/CF diet, and after 2 difficult weeks my son began his return to us. We have used several other biological interventions and extensive behavioral therapy. My son now plays with friends and family, SLEEPS, stims very little, and enjoys preschool. His remaining isssue is expressive language and that is improving daily. If you are a parent, relative, friend, caretaker or therapist working with a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, you owe it to your child to at least find out more about biological interventions, and this book is a great place to start. Thank you Karyn Seroussi.

Beepofer is getting better!!!:
At a time when not many books on the subject were out there (now there seems to be too many to choose from :)), this one by far could have saved me months in research. She tells the story from a very personal perspective being brutally honest, yet packed with facts, data, etc. Oh yeah and she makes the mysterious scientific stuff understandable. It's been four (seems like 20) years since my family entered this strange new place where it seems all of the rules are backward, conventional medicine has given up long ago and you struggle with what is right or what could help and no one can really tell you for sure... I laughed, I cried, but best of all for the first time in a long while I had hope. I loved this book and I hope one day to be able to leave it on the shelf of 'remember when...'

A Knockout Read!:
This book reads like a novel, with so much good information. I was blown away, and the price was so reasonable. This book is a must have, if you need information on Autism. Excellent!!!