The Center cannot Hold

It doesn't take the most observant person to notice that our children are in deep trouble. Almost 50% of US children now suffer from chronic illness, more than 50% if you consider childhood obesity a chronic illness, which I do. (Childhood obesity=broken gut microbiome) Debilitating asthma, Crohn's, severe ADHD, regressive autism, Diabetes 1, anaphylactic allergies, food intolerances - these previously rare conditions now have become commonplace among the children of my family and friends. Thanks to the connection of social media I can see these frightening, undeniable trends - photo streams of my friends' children receiving intravenous immunosuppressant drugs for Crohn's, or being hospitalized yet again for another asthma event, or injecting themselves with insulin. We now keep an epi-pen at our house because so many of my sons' friends have anaphylactic allergies. What is happening to our children?

 Some of us can continue to ignore it - the disturbing whisper telling you something is not quite right with our children, that something terrible is happening to the current generation. I could not - I got what I call the 2x4 across the head from the universe when my son regressed into autism at 18 months. My bright, verbal, engaged baby boy, who had reached all of his milestones in a reassuringly average schedule, began to slip away like a beloved grandparent into Alzheimer's. There was no dramatic, triggering event, no high-fever, or seizure, or vaccine reaction, just a gradual slipping away. He slowly lost all his language and interest in toys and playing. He didn't run up to greet me when I returned home. He became obsessed with electronics and numbers. (He was so adept with my iPhone that he cracked the password). He would pore over numbers in books, laughing at them like they were delightful joke he had ever seen. He stopped pointing. He stopped responding to his name. We would marvel that he could go up to a license plate and name all the numbers and letters but didn't seem to know his own name, like he was some absent-minded professor. We had no idea that these 'splinter skills' were a sign of an unbalanced brain in crisis. But even these precocious skills began to wane and he disappeared into his own world. He began to stim - to run back and forth making an eerie high-pitched squeal. Despite assurances from our pediatrician, who felt he was 'too connected' to have autism, we could no longer deny that something was terribly wrong. And I'm far from alone. Out of my high school class of 90 women, seven of us have children with regressive autism. Almost without exception at my job across the country, every one of my colleagues has a close family member or best friend who have children who regressed. I believe these children are our final wake-up call, and we're being hit where it hurts most to force us into action. And yet the medical community continues to hold the line that the explosion in autism diagnoses - from 1 in 10,000 twenty years ago to 1 in 42 boys today - is due to 'expanded and better diagnosis'. Is anyone really swallowing that anymore?


 The center cannot hold - the denial that autism is medical rather than some mysterious developmental disorder; the risible 'expanded and better diagnosis' explanation for the epidemic; the disgraceful, vicious attacks on the 'science' blogs toward heartbroken parents who dare question current medical practices because they saw regression with their own two eyes, who know with every fiber of their being that their children were not born this way. The numbers are too staggering and parents are too connected by social media to stand for the lies anymore. But the medical and scientific community will defend the inviolability of vaccines until the bitter end because there will be such a crisis of confidence from the public that they know they will never recover their trust again. So many lives destroyed. These aren't quirky kids who are socially awkward and good at math and who will rule Silicon Valley someday. They are often nonverbal and still in diapers. They self injure because they are in such agony and also suffer from comorbidities like seizures, debilitating autoimmune conditions like Crohn's, and severe gut dysbiosis. They will require expensive care for the rest of their lives, if they don't drown first (10 times more likely than a neurotypical child), or beaten to death by or left to die in a hot van by a caregiver. But the situation is not hopeless. Children can heal, and this is blog will be about our children's recovery. Here we will chronicle what we're doing to heal our children, to share what we've spent hundreds of hours researching and testing: diet, supplement, protocols. We also want people to know that they're not alone.