Top 10 signs of subjecting autistics to quack reatments

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My initial post (which was over in Autistics in the News if I remember correctly) was merely to let people note that there is a blog entry out there that's worth working at that has to do with quack therapies.

I think the entry is valuable for two reasons:

1) It brings attention to quack therapies
2) It demonstrates that yet another person seems to be getting on the anti-quack band-wagon.

There was a link toan article in the blog post about British Columbia cutting funding for ABA therapy, which is something that autistics have been pushing for for a long time now as it has been shown to be largely ineffective in terms of long term studies. Just the other day, BC let go 43 ABA therapists.

I think this is a step in the right direction because:

1) Not only are the people who practice ineffective/quack treatments being let go, but
2) The people who want to use them now have fewer places to turn.

Ouinon, you have given me more reading to do than I have patience for, but I really appreciate it. Us, readers, need to remember that you didn't jump onto this train lightly. If memory serves me right, when I first joined this forum you were just considering eliminating gluten on yourself, as an experiement. One advantage the AS community has it that it can and does experiment on itself, and there are ADULTS with AS telling us that diet changes helped them. That isn't parental wishful thinking. It's a clue that maybe there is actually something there, at least for some. There are others that tried and reported that nothing changed. It's just a maybe; we all know that.

Putting your information together with the recent post from PenguinMom, where she shared the journey of testing on her daughter, starts to form a picture of who should consider diet changes and how to go about determining what issues may be involved. The quacks managed to find something, even if they didn't get it right in detail or reason. Some people are highly affected by diet. Its not as simple as going on a GFCF diet, but the AS community always knew that, it didn't make sense to throw out such a blanket. But some kids do have undiagnosed senstitities that create issues in their lives, I do believe that. Getting to the right answer for each child, however, is a problem, because there ARE so many quacks out there. Who do you go to? How do you test? It's frustrating, because no one is fully educated on it properly. But just reading on this forum in the last days, the comments from a variety of sources, it seems like the picture is getting clearer.

Nothing will turn someone who is ASD into an NT, but many things can make that person feel happier and healthier, and being happier and healthier can improve some of the negative aspects of being ASD.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 15 Nov 2009, 1:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As an Aspie with Celiac Disease I can say with absolute certainty the being gluten free DOES NOT cure Autism. I can also say with absolute certainty in my case only that it does lessen the negative aspects of AS and enhances the positive. Your mileage may vary.

This is absolutely my own experience. A completely gluten-free and relatively sugar-free diet eliminates the depression, ( black hole and suicidal at times ), feelings of alienation, chronic anxiety, and hypomania/manic-depression which had reduced my life to ruins over and over again, and reduces the frequency and severity of overwhelm, meltdowns, and irritability, aswell as clearing brain-fog, and it helps me sleep, etc, but does not alter my aspie "base"!


I was in the first few months of completely excluding gluten for the ninth or tenth time since finding out about the connection between diet and mental health in June 1992, and this time I have succeeded in sticking to it ( 26 months so far ), for more than the 18 months max which I achieved in 2002-2004, and much longer than the few months at a time which I had managed before that ( and the full effects of a gf diet only really kick in at six months ). I have been "experimenting" with diet for 17 years.

It just occurred to me that one reason why I feel the need to reply to this sort of thread, which appear on a regular basis on WP, is that when I first found out about the diet angle the internet did not exist, ( barely ), the only support that I had for my investigations ( I started with a classic, water-only four-day fast, the results of which blew me away they were so extraordinary, followed by rice and salad for several days ) , was three books from the library, and almost everybody that I spoke to about it thought that I was going mad again, was exaggerating, making things up, deluded/imagining things, paranoid, or neurotic at best.

And this scepticism was a significant factor in my abandoning, over and over again, my experiments. With only three books to go on, and no support, it was difficult to cope with the various inevitable setbacks I experienced. It took me a long time for instance to find out that flavoured potato crisps use gluten to stick the flavouring on, that corn chips are the same, that soya sauce has gluten in, that hydrolysed vegetable protein is gluten, that dried fruit and various other products are often dusted in flour, that the icing sugar that is shaken over apparently gf desserts in restaurants is very often "cut" with flour, that most bacon/ham is cured with wheat, and that modified starch ( in many yoghurts for example ), may be from corn and may be from wheat, and is almost certainly contaminated with gluten.

The few friends that I still had after several years of the excesses caused by manic-depression reacted to my efforts with pity, and saw my setbacks as proof that it was all in my mind, ( which by the way is the title of one of the earliest books on the subject, "Not All in the Mind" by Dr. Richard Mackarness, which I wore out with borrowing from the library ), and very often I ended up believing them, would be discouraged, and give up in frustration, again. I lost years of potential recovery time that way, and it wasn't until the internet began to make it possible for people to inform themselves, ( and people, especially aspies/auties, have the "patience" to read thousands of pages of stuff if it really interests them ), that I was able to stick to a gf diet for more than a few months.

Anyone who goes on an exclusion diet, who attempts to use diet to improve their physical and mental health, needs information and support; it is very difficult to avoid gluten, or dairy, or sugar, etc without information, and very hard to exclude such common foods, which are practically part of a person's identity in this culture, without support, and so when I see threads which suggest that it is all in the mind, an attitude which is neither informed nor supportive, I see a serious need to reply.


You test by going on an exclusion diet, for at least 7 days, preferably 3-4 weeks, avoiding the food(s) that you think may be a problem, ( either because you have already noticed you seem to be somewhat addicted to/compulsive around them, or because they are the most common offenders ), and read sites/forums like Gluten Free and Beyond, or Celiac.com, both of which I linked to above/on previous page, for information on safe foods, ( aswell as for the support ), and see how you feel.

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