Eat It and Beat It

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This mom, Jane Casey, proposes that she helped her 2 autistic son's to fully recover from autism. Is this possible? I have been of the belief that you certainly can help your autistic children but that they will always be autistic. Am I wrong? Should I buy this book? _ Paul- father of 7yo with AS.

It sounds like hokum to me. I do not know anything about the book, but her child may have been misdiagnosed or who knows what. A "cure" does not match up with what mainstream people say about autism.

You can change the environment to reduce the severity of symptoms and can teach coping mechanisms. Cure? Nah.

Autism typically has a cluster of behaviours doctors look for. There are things you can do to reduce or eliminate those behaviours. If those behaviours become non-existant or non-problematic, it's easy to assume the Autism has been cured. If the child were to be re-tested without having those behaviours, s/he may end up with a different diagnoses like, a Learning Disability. I find the testing to be quite subjective.

If one wanted to say my daughter had been "cured" of autism, one might be able to. Her symptoms are usually mild and unless you catch her during a "flare up," she seems typical enough. One would be very wrong though.

I have never met a real-life "cured" person, but I'd have to say the video "evidence" of people who have supposedly been cured has always been less than convincing to me. The people are still quirky and odd. So what I see is someone who has learned to compensate for their deficits, not someone who no longer has deficits.

I am not saying I don't believe in a cure, because to be honest, I do not know. But what I do believe is that even if a small subset of the conditions that we currently call autism can be "cured," I think the vast majority cannot. Can symptoms be lessened? Yes, sometimes. But the underlying wiring does not "poof" go away and magically get replaced by typical wiring. At least that's MHO.

I will say, though, that if you want to buy the book and read it, I see no harm. I have a read a lot of books that I do not agree with, but you can still learn something anyway. And I think that one should purposefully expose oneself to things that contradict your beliefs, anyway. It encourages critical thinking.

I think it is highly possible that there are various medical conditions that can result in a person exhibiting autism-like behavior. Since there are no definitive medical tests that can determine if a person's autistic behavior is caused by a difference in neurology or some other medical condition, I believe there are people who appear to get "cured" of autism when their underlying medical condition is addressed and their autistic behaviors subside. If this is true, then the person in question never had autism to begin with so it is erroneous to say that he or she was cured. All that being said, buying a book is not a large investment to make. Many people have reported a major improvement in symptoms and problem behaviors with a change in diet however many have also tried dietary changes and not seen any improvements.

I work with young adults on the spectrum in university and many are indistinguishable from their peers to all intents and purposes - they cope with life well, they interact with skill, they achieve their academic targets...........

These are people who have found a way to manage that works for them and allows them to live "as if they were not autistic", though mostly that's only in public.

But they are all still firmly on the spectrum - a little digging and you find that although they seem just like their peers on the surface the way they think and the strategies they use to manage their lives are not the same, they have the sensory differences and the patterns of behaviour still embedded, they just deal with them in a way that looks as if they have recovered or grown out of their autism.

The ones that manage this are almost always the ones who had good support earlier in their lives and none of them has had the dietary or medical interventions we are talking about here.

I support them because they still need support, they wouldn't be on my books if they didn't.

Dietary interventions can help - chemical additives and reactions to foods are known factors in the well-being of all children, and our children tend to be more reactive than most. Glutamates are being researched extensively as a factor in autistic brain development at the moment, dairy products, sweeteners and food colouring can impact on ADHD children, etc, but those who respond dramatically to restrictive diets are rare. For others it helps but the impact is nothing like as impressive as parents hope and even these children are few and far between.

A word of warning, some dietary interventions can lead to a child not getting the nutrients they need in the way they need them and can do more harm than good - be careful, this is your child's only life!

Emily Willingham has an excellent article on "growing out of" autism here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillin ... of-autism/

It's critical to note that many of the people described as having "grown out of" autism have symptoms that the study authors decided to pin on “inhibition, anxiety, depression, inattention and impulsivity, embarrassment, or hostility” instead of the autism these people supposedly grew out of. Yep - whatever.

It annoys me that if you and your caregivers work spectacularly hard to intervene and meet your needs and you are successful, they simply erase your struggle. Just because you are successful at mitigating your deficits does not mean that the deficits don't exist any more. Nobody says the double amputee Paralympian has feet.

ETA: Looks like this is one of those "autism diet cure" books. Many, many kids of parents on this board - and adults on the rest of the site - have difficulty with different kinds of foods. They have all kinds of food intolerances and allergies that are real and diagnosed, and report an improvement in general symptoms when those foods are avoided, or when treatment is provided. ANYBODY whose digestive system is out of whack will see global effects, for instance improvement in behavior or focus, etc. Anyone who is uncomfortable or sick for whatever reason has a reduced ability to cope. Period.

There is no clinical evidence that any particular type of diet can cure autism. (See the Mayo Clinic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/autism ... nt/AN01519 )

apparently the statistical evidence shows that a child left to their own devices without any extra support, (I'm assuming this means with an ordinary caring family and a generally supportive attitude in school) is statistically more likely to develop to the point where their autism is imperceptible on the outside than one who has had major intervention such as intensive behavioural programs, medication or specialist diets.

Sorry, can't find the source but it was an academic paper I read last week

That doesn't mean some therapies are not effective, only that it is rare for anyone to develop to that point and generally it occurs with children who do not have intervention more often than with those who do - this is possibly partly because the children most able to develop their own strategies and least severely affected by their sensory differences, etc. are less likely to get additional support in the first place but more likely to develop their skills in all areas naturally

The analysis discussed the problems with the sampling and how broad the level of outcomes for any child on the spectrum can be - I know many people who have had intensive support for much of their lives who will never be able to look after themselves, never mind "look" as if they have grown out of autism, and I know many people who have had little or no support and have managed to do exactly that.
I also know many people who have had good levels of intervention who have made significant progress in their lives that almost certainly wouldn't have made that progress without significant intervention but who will never look as if they have outgrown their autism.

The paper is accurate in it's description of what happens and the likelihood of the particular outcomes, it does not say that therapies per se are ineffective but it does tell us that these expensive, sell your soul to cure your child of autism therapies are not working for most children because those children would show up in the statistics and tip the balance towards children with support being more likely to "recover" if the therapies were as effective as they pretend they are and that simply isn't the case.

It is a warning - don't sell your child to pseudoscience, it's not worth it - the outcomes are no better than for children who get decent "ordinary" support and you could end up doing more damage than you realise


If I find the paper again I will post the link but I read many papers every week and this paper was one that made an interesting point but is not relevant to my area of study so I binned it after reading.

The logic of the authors is completely confusing to me. It seems ludicrous. And I'd like to see who they are, where they are from, and what viewpoint they were trying to sell. But this is their reasoning?

Autism treatments cost a lot of money and the only ones who seem to ever "recover" didn't have any in the first place, therefore do not waste your money on autism treatments?

First of all, many parents who engage in interventions do not hope or wish to recover their kids. They wish to improve the quality of their lives.

Second, how could you even guess what the quality of life would be for kids who were not among the exceptionally few who are going to "get better on their own" if their parents failed to get them help? Perhaps my daugther would be sitting in some special classroom right now, parroting back everything everyone said to her, or banging her head, or spinning aimlessly for hours on end, wasting away because she cannot tolerate most foods. Because that's the trajectory she was on.

Do I think the fact that she is doing so much better is 100% attributable to her therapies? Absolutely not. Do I think it is attributable to my stellar parenting? <scoff> No. I believe the fact she is doing so much better is because the therapies helped her become the "best me she could possibly be." IOW, neurology will always constrain people. There is an "upper real limit" of where any of us can function. All that will happen in life is that we will slide up and down between this limit and the "lower real limit" but we will never go beyond our limits, save tragedy (car wreck resulting in brain damage, etc). I think that the right therapies help people move toward their upper real limit.

The problem is that there are many things that we call "autism" and not all of them are amenable to the same interventions. People may waste considerable time and money on interventions that quite simply are not going to help in their particular case. But the fact that they do not help this particular child with this particular type of autism is not evidence that it doesn't work. Add that to the fact that some parents do not recognize or accept when the upper real limit has been reached, and you get people bankrupting themselves chasing a dream that will never come true.

But that doesn't mean therapies are insufficiently effective for people to pursue them.