Everyone--
Thanks for the nice welcome!
Robin--
Yes, I am familiar with Stan. I think his son recovered from autism with MB12 and Valtrex (a viral kid).
My son has tried it all and not made major gains on anything although biomedical has helped him for sure...that is why I continue on that path.
I work at a well-known Defeat Autism Now! doctors office so I am very familiar with all that biomedical stuff. It is a life saver for a select few, it helps many and for some it does nothing no matter what they try.
I am so happy that there are others on this site that have used NFB and seen success. I am praying that it will help my son in some way and not just be another case of $$$ down the toilet and lots of time wasted. Fortunately, the office where I will take my son is within 5-10 minutes of our house.
I hope your son does better soon hootie. Stan's son never tested positive for any viral infections. He says this in a video on youtube during a conference.
Have you had your son's glutathione levels tested? You may also be interested to know what his amino acid levels are. Most autistic kids test normal for every standard blood test that there is. However, you may be surprised to find some of his amino acid levels off.
Specifically, check the glutamate, glycine, cysteine, lysine and creatinine levels. Also do a vitamin check and a metal test.
but most importantly, check his glutathione levels. Glutathione is different than glutamate, but is made from 3 amino acids; glutamate, glycine, and cysteine.
Glutamate and glycine are neuro excitotoxicity amino acids. New science has discovered that these levels are off in many people with neurological disorders with great speculation that the glutamate and glycine from geletin in the MMR and other vaccinations may be a contributor.
However, it's important to understand what glutathione is also before only blaming vaccines. Glutathione is the body's mosy powerful antioxidant and when the level becomes low, then the liver does not function properly either.
In fact, alcoholics and pill poppers usually get low glutathione before their liver goes bad.
When the liver cannot properly detoxify bad stuff out, then the body will begin to store toxins in different parts around the body by circulating in the blood and finally saturating the organs and causing oxidizative stress on the RBC's.
Think of it like an apple. Peel it and let it sit for a few hours, then it will brown. But let it sit for a month and it will decay. This is what low glutathione levels do in a sense.
Once the glutathione levels become low, all that extra glutamate, glycine, and cysteine have to go somewhere else too. If it no longer is being used to produce glutathione, then it will store in the body and eventually damage and kill off cells in the brain. Too much damage, and ADHD, speech delays, autism, schizophrenia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, and other problems will begin to occur.
In addition to cell damage, when the glutathione levels become low, heavy metals will also become rich in the body and store first in the blood and then thin out by leeching into the organs like the brain. This is because the liver can't detoxify heavy metals when the glutathione is low.
Glutathione is like a sticky cell that usually absorbs poisons in the body and carries them off. But when it is low, the toxins overtake the glutathione and homeostasis becomes unbalanced throughout the entire body.
You can use glutamate blockers to help, but that only treats some symptoms. If you get the glutathione levels back up, this will fix many of the problems leaving only old dead and damaged cells floating around to fix.
Stem cell therapy works for some and not for others because it all depends on the current glutathione levels, damage that already exists and if the equilibrium (homeostasis) problem is not fixed first, then stem cell therapy will not last long either.
This goes for almost every biomedical therapy that there is for autism as well. I have a list of over 50 effective therapies for autism right now. But the problem is that they don't work for all ASD cases and some don't last long, while others work like miracles.
ASD is caused by many factors. Genetics, chromosomes, environmental toxins all play a role. Just like baking a loaf of bread takes exactly the right amount of ingredients to get bread, so is autism. If one autism ingredient is missing, you either don't get it, end up with ADHD, or have other similar conditions that are on the mild spectrum.
Autism is not the big mystery that many people think. The research is already all done, but no one has organized it well. What I just explained is a drop in the bucket to what I really know and I'm just one person. Imagine if we got politics out of the way and really focused on finding a cure for autism without any blame. That would be amazing and what we really need.
And oh yeah, Valtrex has a direct affect on the glutamate and glycine levels in the body. So does HBOT therapy, GFCF diets, Hyperthermia (high fever), and lots of other strange things.
Because autism is caused by so many things, it is also reversed by many things. This confounds most people because they can't pinpoint anything when they get stuck on one topic. An open mind finally made it obvious to me that amino acids have a lot to do with autism.
Girls have more estrogen than boys. Estrogen protects glutathione more-so than testosterone. This is why girls get autism less.
To conclude, autism for many (not all) is really only a case of unbalanced amino acid levels in the brain, along with toxin poisoning from low glutathione levels as a precursor to all of it. Once the body's equilibrium is thrown off, it can take weeks to several months to notice the damaging affects that we see as ADHD, speech delays and autism.
Balancing the equilibrium back out by correcting the glutathione levels may be promising for recovering an autistic person. However, there still may be oxidation cell damage that theoretically stell cell therapy may correct or with enough time the child could recover quite well on their own through a natural healing process, influenced by positive therapies for autism.
Chelation by DMSA has been the most promising way to both remove metals and raise glutathione levels. DMSA will show a positive mercury and lead poison test once initiated because these metals will eventually stop flowing in the blood stream and embed within the brain tissue and other organs.
Because DMSA is a form of removing metals from the body, it can also remove good metals that the body needs so a good average supplement is recommended during chelation.
In addition, DMSA has been proven as one of the safest and most effective methods of chelation in an autistic child, leaving very mild temporary side effects for some with long lasting positive effects for many as well.
I hpe this helps a little. I'm by far no doctor, but instead a father that is currently watching his daughter recover from autism every day. 5 months ago she lost all of her language and I know by research was about to fall into the epilepsy category because she was ill every day with several negative symptoms associated with some autism cases.
She was suspected to have a problem at around 18 months, but as first time parents we missed the early signs and did not get a diagnosis until she was 2 and 1/2 earlier this year.
Since then, I have dedicated my every free moment and obsessed over helping her. I'm not your average google researcher though. I personally have sifted through several hundred if not thousand scientific articles from PubMed and other scientific databases.
In addition, I have created a system that automatically researches autism for me 24hours a day and reports to me only associations that I am interested in. once I find something like "glutamate, glycine and autism" or "DMSA", I add it to my algorithm and watch the important stuff come to me. Multiply that by 1000 autism topics and you can start to get the point.
So my time is more well spent with my daughter, yet in my free time, I sift through my algo and focus on the good stuff.
I'm a noob, so I can't post more links, but will upon request. In the mean time, go to pubmed and look up
PMID: 19043938, 19161050 and 19284184.
I'm sure you'll find some great info from the other parents here.