Can autism get lesser?

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It means you are an older Aspie.

Am wonder whether aspies can also 'upgrade' their label to,as some auties get rediagnosed with AS,wouldn't that mean aspies who aren't affected enough/don't fit criteria anymore are 'upgraded' to either PDDNOS or just 'on the spectrum'?

How about, "well adapted?"

If she did get that treatment from these quacks (which is what they are), it would be at the expense of hundreds of other people who didn't really have the infection but received unnecessary and potentially dangerous medical treatment, if it's actually even a treatment for the real condition at all. I mean, if these people diagnose everyone who comes to them with candida, and treat them for candida, then certainly if someone with real candida comes to them then they'll get diagnosed with it and treated, but it won't be due to any diagnostic prowess on the part of the doctors. They remind me of a psychiatrist I once saw who diagnosed all of his patients with bipolar whether they had it or not. I knew a guy who really was bipolar and was perfectly happy with him, but he ignored the fact that most of the rest of the guy's patients didn't really have it and were diagnosed with it anyway. They say that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

And it's true that some people do end up with things that are hard to diagnose, and that those people can die from those conditions. And that's horrible and tragic when it happens. And it's also true that there are doctors who might be diagnosing nearly every patient who comes through their office with the same condition, and that someone might end up lucky and get it treated that way. And it's lucky if the person happens to go to one of those and get the right treatment. But I imagine that is very rare, and most of the people who get treated there, much like me, don't actually have it. I actually had a hard-to-diagnose and potentially fatal condition when I went through a couple of those quacks, but unfortunately for me it wasn't one of the ones they happen to find trendy to diagnose, probably because they wouldn't get a lot of money from testing for it or treating it (the test is a very simple ultrasound, the treatment is fast, surgical, and then almost always over for good).

I've also heard of more than just one person dying because they really did have systemic fungal infections and the treatments given by these quacks are not always ones that actually work on systemic fungal infections (such as many different dietary treatments they prescribe -- not all of them even give anti-fungals). I had real medical conditions when I saw these people (I saw more than one), and they did not diagnose the ones I really had, but I certainly got diagnoses of several things I did not have. (And I know all about places like Great Plains, who IIRC did some of my testing. The tests they do are often highly suspect. The answers they give tend to be very similar for every person, and they specialize in blaming incurable diseases and conditions on their pet diagnoses, and then offering similar treatments (at best, they have good but very unscientific intentions, and at worst, they are getting money off of very vulnerable people like my parents were at the time -- they also offered my parents to give me Secretin, which was popular at the time despite having been proven no better than, and often worse than, placebo, and it's not at all popular anymore).

And it's really important to know that for the most part these people are not right, that there is plenty of scientific evidence against the bulk of what they are saying, and that they frequently make their money by offering cures to vulnerable people. While some of their descriptions sound scientific, real scientists with expertise in their fields can usually tell they're often nonsensical as compared to how the body actually works. Certainly many hypotheses both medical and otherwise go through a phase of being considered unrealistic before they're more or less proven, but it does not follow from that that everyone who's considered unrealistic is right, in reality it's a very small amount that are. I've watched a lot of this stuff come and go over the years, I grew up with somewhat gullible parents who were taken in by many of these fads for both me and my brothers, I'm in communication with a lot of scientists whose jobs are in this field, and seriously, a lot of these people describe bodily scenarios that sound perfectly plausible to a layman but nonsensical to people whose jobs are to understand the body more than most of us do. (And by the way there are so-called "natural" or "alternative" remedies that have genuine scientific backing, such as some herbs being useful for anxiety, so it's not some kind of conspiracy against non-pharmaceutical options or anything (and many quacks do use pharmaceuticals, besides -- that's what antifungals are, and they have proper uses and improper uses).)

"Well adapted" or "well adapted to mainstream society" or something both sound right to me, they capture the process of adaptation without making the person sound less "really autistic" or something just because they've managed it, and it avoids the idea of HFA/MFA/LFA altogether.

And the whole thing about claiming autistic people aren't autistic if they manage to adapt to a non-autistic society, or if someone just plain disagrees with them or is different from a stereotype, is just out-and-out wrong, both ethically and factually.

I have known people who stated outright that Donna Williams is not autistic because she once said that autism was not a part of her. They said any "real" autistic person would view it as a part of them. Sorry, but autistic people have a whole range of opinions, and what opinion someone has says nothing about whether they're autistic or what kind of autistic person they are.

Our life experiences or what sort of autism we have can sometimes influence what our views are, but it's only one part of a whole lot of influences and it doesn't always go in the direction people think. For instance I suspect that contrary to stereotype, it's possible that some people view autism as less of a part of who they are because they're so close to living a non-autistic life that they wish they could go that extra inch closer to it, and think if they could get rid of autism they would because it would make them that much closer to the life they're almost leading. Not everyone obviously, but it's just as plausible as them thinking they want to stay autistic because it gives them such-and-such a skill or something. People interpret our lives differently, it happens.

anbuend, I understand what you are saying and I agree that some, maybe even most, of the alternative doctors are quacks. I first heard about alternative conditions and treatments on infomercials late at night and I was skeptical enough that I ignored them. I still won't even consider homeopathy, bioresonance, energy fields, and stuff like that.

However, I found out about the Autism Research Institute (ARI) while learning about autism (I have HFA). In 1967, the experts believed autism was caused by poor parenting. Then, Dr. Rimland had a son born with autism and he knew the experts were wrong. He's started the ARI and they've been researching autism for 40 years. They send questionnaires to parents to ask them what they've tried and what works for them. Then, they collected the results and conducted scientific research and studies to show that the treatments are effective. On their website, they list possible causes/triggers of autism (vaccines, mercury, viruses, and Candida) and have conducted scientific studies to support them. They published a paper called "Candida-caused Autism" 20 years ago in 1988 after many parents reported that their normal, healthy children became autistic after doctors incorrectly prescribed them antibiotics to treat ear infections. Parents reported that giving antifungals to their autistic children for fungal infections also made them less autistic and they have research to back it up.

In my case, I took antibiotics to cure a sinus infection. The antibiotics worked but my health (mostly neurological symptoms but also physical symptoms) got much worse which made me more autistic. I had a toenail fungus so I asked my regular doctor to prescribe an antifungal. Normally he prescribes Lamisil (which is ineffective for Candida) but since Diflucan also works for nail fungus and because I felt it might help other problems (Candida), he agreed to prescribe Diflucan. If someone is autistic and has a nail fungus, they may as well ask for Diflucan. Worse case scenario is it cures the nail fungus but does nothing else which would be same results as Lamisil. However, Diflucan may improved autism as well as physical health while Lamisil probably wouldn't do much else.

Candida-caused Autism paper published 20 years ago. It's not some quack alternative diagnosis (even though quacks may overdiagnose it). It's backed up by decades of research.

The Autism Research Institute is the first and best organization researching treatments for autism that treat the cause of symptoms. They have documented cases of children fully recovering from autism. They have before and after videos and testimony from doctors not affiliated with them who diagnosed autism and then removed the diagnosis.

Conventional doctors are taught in Big Pharma corrupted medical schools to only accept treatments that have been conclusively proven in several large double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. The problem with that is that it costs several million dollars to conduct these studies and only Big Pharma has the money to prove their treatments effective. Big Pharma only wants to treat symptoms for life because it's more profitable. No one will ever spend millions of dollars to prove a natural cure effective which is why a cure for any disease will never be proven. Health care systems have relied on testimonials and trusting their patients to tell them what works for thousands of years because it works. The drug companies created our medical system so they could monopolize health care to the detriment of our health.

The reason Candida is such a problem is because conventional doctors have been incorrectly prescribing millions of antibiotics for chicken pox, ear infections, and other viral infections for which antibiotics are completely ineffective. If you want to talk about quacks, it's the conventional doctors who give antibiotics to treat viral infections who are the quacks. It's been known for awhile that antibiotics cause Candida overgrowth.

Drug companies created antibiotics -> allow doctors to overprescribe them -> results in chronic Candida infections -> $billions in profits to treat symptoms while patients suffer. Big Pharma and conventional doctors are the real problem.

Link to Effective Treatments for Autism and AS

Oh good grief, the ARI? You don't even need to be a doctor to get on their DAN! doctors list. All you have to do is attend a one-day training. I saw two DAN! doctors, and they were the two I'm talking about. One of them, by the way, ran an energy healing business on the side. The other one was rather famous for seeing fungus-induced illnesses, everywhere.

Bernard Rimland did a good thing in fighting the refrigerator parents theory, but that's about all he managed to do right when it came to the science of autism. Most of the theories he has championed turned out extremely wrong. He (and the ARI, and DAN which is affiliated with it) were the ones who were big on Secretin back when I saw DAN! doctors, that's why I got offered it so forcefully. Rimland has also said that instead of creating good services in the community, they ought to rebuild the large state institutions and put severely disabled people of all sorts back in them. They are a good example of research that only looks scientific but to actual scientists looks almost laughable (if it were not for the fact that so many people buy into it). And he in particular is an example of someone who did one good thing and then took advantage of his fame for that, by championing a whole lot of treatments that were not in fact real or accurate. Many of them failed genuine double-blind placebo-controlled studies, and yet he kept pushing them anyway.

The doctors and scientists I am in contact with have no ties to Big Pharma, but some of them have been harassed to astounding proportions, received death threats not only directed to them but to their spouses and children, been accused of receiving money from Big Pharma, and accused loudly in public of being the devil, just to name a few of the aspects of harassment they have gotten from people who share the views you describe. All for contradicting "findings" (if they can be called that) similar to those of the ARI with actual science. I have received similar harassment from some of the same sources (at one point even being accused of being paid to claim to be autistic and to contradict some of those ideas), and trust me if I were in the pay of Big Pharma I would demand a better apartment than I've got. There simply is no conspiracy here, but as long as properly controlled research continues to contradict some people, they will claim there is one, because they see that as the only reason science would contradict them.

I also find it really strange that Big Pharma's involvement in everything is invoked by people like this whenever they want to claim that something or other is harmful, but at the same time they use drugs created by Big Pharma to supposedly treat things that are supposedly causing autism. This makes no sense to me. If Big Pharma were really in this for the money they could make a fortune on those drugs by claiming they cured autism and skewing all the research to support it. But really, despite doing many things they ought not to do, this is not one of them. They simply aren't creating autism and then covering it up. And there's a lot of evidence that some of the supposedly "secret" conversations within the CDC for instance, and all that, were completely fabricated to go along with this myth about autism causation.

Are you aware of the history of so-called regressive autism, and the numerous purported causes? It used to be supernatural causes, as in at a certain age the fairies or the demons or whatever would take the real child away and leave a fake one (a demon, a fairy, or an enchanted inanimate object) in its place. I knew an autistic guy whose online handle was Elfchild because in the region he grew up in that was what they still called people like him. Then after that started falling out of vogue and autism became a medical label, people would come up with any possible event that either coincided or seemed to coincide with the child "developing autism". That's why, in the rock opera Tommy, they invoked a traumatic event, the witnessing of a murder, for causing autism. That used to be what it was actually blamed on (and it was often not called autism, but childhood schizophrenia, because autism was thought to be from birth and childhood schizophrenia was more often what they called what would today be called regressive autism, which is another reason for fewer autism diagnoses back then). It was maybe from the divorce of the parents, or the family dog being run over by a car, or whatever bad event, no matter how major or minor, happened just before the kid lost certain abilities (or before it was obvious that the child was failing to develop them).

Then when autism had finally gone from mythological to psychological to biological, people of course invoked biological events that happened near or at that particular time. So it would be vaccinations, or treatment for ear infections, or a high fever from a common childhood illness, or even just having the illness at all even without a fever, or something else like that.

And of course the gene for Rett syndrome was discovered, and some "high functioning autistic" mothers of "Rett" children discovered that they had the Rett gene, and that this was the cause for their otherwise seemingly "regressive autism". Since Rett syndrome is a genetic condition considered to be on the autism spectrum, that actually causes a person to lose certain skills at a certain point in development (just as autism can work that way and still be genetic, hmm).

Basically, people have found pseudoscientific evidence for every single one of those purported causes, and I'm still inclined to believe it's primarily genetic, and not at all the stuff of ARI's pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and stuff. I also remember encountering this information as a young autistic adult and not knowing there were other points of view on it, which is why I'm saying this, so that anyone else who reads this knows that not everyone says that ARI's "science" is actually scientific.

As others indicated, the research shows that autistic spectrum symptoms can "improve" with age. I am a case in point. At 51 years old, I am, in terms of aspie traits, entirely different from how I was as a kid. Like (the other) Mark said, most people would think I am just eccentric.

I believe the ARI mentions on their website that it's a list of people who attend their training, not doctors they recommend. Bad DAN! doctors doesn't mean there's something wrong with the ARI.


Secretin helped some autistics and was shown effective in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. I'm sorry it didn't help you. They recommend treatments before they are proven so some will eventually be proved ineffective. If the benefits is greater than the risk, I think it's worth trying even if it's not proven.


That's sad and offensive. I strongly oppose institutions.


The problem is most alternative treatments will never be studied due to the cost so they will never be proven effective even though they may cure thousands of people. I think it's unethical to treat symptoms first if there's any evidence (even though it's unproven) that treatments can cure the problem. Also, there's evidence of drug companies suppressing information and paying researchers to create bogus studies.



Big Pharma creates drugs to treat symptoms because it's more profitable. I fully support them. Like any business, their goal is to make profits. However, when it comes to my health, if they can't cure it, I'm looking for alternatives. Their antibiotics probably saved thousands of lives although when used incorrectly contribute to chronic health problems. My problem is they suppress information and create biased studies, not that all their drugs are bad.



Anti-fungals are off-patent so they don't make any money off of them. A small company made an anti-viral called Ampligen to treat CFS and AIDS. The FDA banned it, probably due to pressure from big drug companies who would lose $billions treating the symptoms of CFS and AIDS. Lifetime treatment is way more profitable than a one time cure.


They may be unknowingly causing it. The problem is the medical system relies on expensive studies that no one will perform unless they can profit from it. So if autism could be cured with antifungals, it would never be proven.



There's always someone who gets crazy ideas but that doesn't mean that all new ideas are wrong. For autism, there's scientific studies supporting mercury (from air and seafood) as well as viruses as a cause of autism. Lyme and Mycoplasma fermentans are known to cause autistic symptoms and scientific studies show a mother can transmit them to her fetus and M. fermentans has been found to contaminate many vaccines. Numerous viruses are also found in many vaccines.


A genetic cause for most cases doesn't have any more evidence than mercury or viruses as the cause especially since mercury and viruses can cause genes to mutate. I'm high-functioning autistic. I used to believe I was different due to genetics so I never bothered to see a doctor to get evaluated. I watched the movie Miracle Run on lifetime about HFA and then researched autism. I was very suprised there was a name for the way I am. I always assumed I was different due to normal variation in genes and that there would be no name for it. I always wished I was normal, but I always wanted people to accept me for who I am. I didn't like autism being called a disorder. Thanks to the ARI, I learned about the gluten-free/casein-free diet and antifungals and they really help me alot. That's what convinced me that autism isn't genetic. I'm happier now and understand people better. I wished I learned about it sooner. It really sucked being neglected, rejected, bullied, harassed, and mistreated because of something I couldn't help. I wanted to fit in and have friends but was unable to. Now that I'm improving, I want everyone to know so they won't have to suffer like I did. (I'm not saying autism is all suffering or a horrible life. I think we all have weaknesses that most of us are interested in improving)

This one is interesting because it's a review of 15 entire studies on the stuff:

This is one of many studies, interesting because it includes attempting to single out those with gastrointestinal symptoms and it still doesn't check out:



And this one is interesting because it examines the placebo effect on parents's observations and changes in attitude caused by things like the assorted medical-looking effects of doing something like Secretin:



I didn't ever get Secretin because even then I was aware it was pretty shoddy science supporting it if any, and there was already only one double-blind study out (just out, the doctor had of course not heard of it), and the outcome was against it. That study was the following:



There are indeed areas where I think science has screwed up. I really, really don't think Secretin is one of them. It's been done to death and the benefits are just not there, and were probably not there even for the people you think "benefited" from it. Interesting thing is that in many of the trials, the children improved whether they got it or not though. That's the thing, with things like autism, as well as a lot of the diseases these people treat: They rely on the fact that improvement happens anyway, especially when someone thinks they're going to improve, that remission and relapses are things that happen and that if a person is doing a treatment right as they hit a remission of a disease then they'll credit the treatment (but if they don't they won't usually blame the treatment, either), etc.

I have to say that if anti-fungals weren't drugs that could create problems in their own right, I'd agree they were harmless, but they're really not, they can cause all sorts of problems in their own right, and if autistic people are going to be encouraged to take them with no real evidence (real evidence from real laboratories, I mean) of an actual fungal infection, there'd better be real science behind it.

I read the studies on secretin. I still think it makes sense to treat people before the treatments are fully studied as long as the risk is low and the potential benefits are great. Conventional doctors prescribe unproven treatments all the time except conventional docs kill their patients with their drugs.

The anti-fungal Diflucan has side-effects but I think its safer than Advil. Nystatin isn't absorbed so there aren't any serious problems associated with it.



The problem is that no one will ever develop a test and conduct enough studies to prove it effective because no one can make any money from it (cost of tests will exceed revenue).

The Great Plains Lab tests for tartaric acid, a toxin produced by yeast such as Candida. If tartaric acid is high enough, Nystatin is prescribed and taken until tartaric acid goes down. They conducted research and ran a small study to show that antibiotics (Flagyl) raises tartaric acid and Nystatin lowers it. Tartaric acid is a known muscle toxin. Two autistics had so much of it that they could barely walk until they were treated. The ARI recommends the simple urine test followed by a harmless anti-fungal that isn't absorbed if the results show that yeast may be a problem. There's potentially huge benefits with minimal risk.

The problem with the idea of yeast causing symptoms of autism, is that it is a myth that was created at a time when nearly every known health problem was attributed to candida albicans and could be cured by "Cantrol". Turns out that Cantrol was in the business of making money and that's it. They promoted the idea that candida was the bane of everyone's existence. http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRel ... ndida.html

So it entered the autism quackery scene about 20 years ago. Then it faded out as being a primary cause of autism, and became a secondary problem because thimerosal bumped it out of first place. Now the story goes, you have a normal baby at birth. It gets a vaccine. The vaccine destroys it's "gut" in some or several undefined and scientifically groundless ways.. then the candida takes over.

Now here's the really cool part, there was this lab called "immunosciences" that all the quack doctors sent autistic kids' blood samples to. And Immunosciences, aka immunoseances, found candida in every sample that was sent to them, essentially. You know why? Because they weren't actually using a test for candida. Their test, whatever it might have shown, it wasn't specific to candida.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K80T-6zhG9Q[/youtube]

But here's the happy ending part. The people who oversee lab quality, so that insurance companies and the gov't aren't paying for bogus lab results (see: the "Caldrius bird"), told immunoseances that they couldn't sell their bogus lab tests any more and the lab went belly up. http://www.immuno-sci-lab.com/ClientLTR%20w%20Ltrhd.pdf

Isn't it nice to see a happy ending to these things? And no, it wasn't a conspiracy from big pharma to shut down these people. Big pharma probably lost money in the deal because they'd have fewer people buying dangerous antifungals!

ARI recommends all kinds of very harmful stuff, including chelation. And their DAN! quack Anju Usman sent Tariq Nadama to an ear/nose/throat surgeon to get imaginary aluminum chelated from him (he didn't have high levels of anything else according to the bogus lab tests that Usman uses (DDI). And the DAN! quack Roy Kerry slaughtered Tariq at 5 years old with an infusion that probably was extremely painful, besides deadly. I mean when they give lethal injections they aim for painlessness, I don't think Kerry was as concerned as the executors and the State are for avoiding pain (or the appearance of pain). They had him tied down when he was slaughtered. Yeah, that DAN!/ARI group they're great people.

I think you'll find that Great Plains is one of the worst quack labs there is. No really. But if people want to believe in this stuff they will. Great Plains used to promote, I don't know if they still do, dessicated cow brain pills for multiple sclerosis. You see there's probably be some cow myelin protein in the pills and that would somehow fix or replace the human myelin protein being lost from the human brain in MS. I mean how gullible are people? Very. Really, really a lot gullible. I would doubt that you'll find anything on pubmed about tartaric acid in autism. Tartaric acid is found in grapes, isn't it?

If you go to my blog you can find links to stuff discussed in the following quote from that blog entry.
http://autismdiva.blogspot.com/2007/09/ ... sions.html


emphasis added.

I was just reading where a mom was worried because her little boy always had his hand in his pants,... as in his hand was resting under his waistband. He'd do it in the day and while he's sleeping, but he's not acting like he's in pain or anything. She and the other moms on the list diagnosed this as "yeast". I bet they are better at diagnosing "yeastiness" than the Caladrius bird.

Last edited by autism_diva on 24 Dec 2007, 8:15 pm, edited 4 times in total.

After reading that, Diva, it would seem that the quackery of looking for a scapegoat for "causing" Autism goes back further than the mercury militia!

I thought the argument was that the vaccines damaged the brain, not the gut? It doesn't really matter - neither of them are correct anyway.

There's good evidence that Candida contributes to autism symptoms. The antifungal Nystatin was shown effective in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study to help people with multiple symptoms who were never tested for Candida. Mainly patients suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome but the study shows Nystatin helped even without any testing (meaning only some people had Candida yet the improvement was enough that Nystatin was shown to be effective). The point is that even without testing, Candida can be treated and it will improve health so it should be tried to treat autistic symptoms. http://fampra.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/co ... l/18/3/258

The Quackwatch site is a joke, probably run by Big Pharma to keep people from getting well so they can make more profits. Don't believe everything you read.


Chelation isn't harmful. It's FDA approved for use in children to treat lead poisoning. It also chelates mercury and other heavy metals. I believe the boy died because the doctor made a mistake and injected him with the wrong drug (so it had nothing to do with chelation). Anyway, the ARI recommends oral DMSA for chelation which is relatively safe, not injections.

You think conventional docs are better. Did you know that Western medicine/Big Pharma/conventional docs are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US, killing 250,000 Americans every year? The side-effects of correctly used drugs kill over 100,000 people every year. Don't believe me? This was published in the highly respected Journal of the American Medical Association. Here's the link http://www.yourmedicaldetective.com/public/335.cfm

Being autistic isn't normal. Searching for a cause for autism isn't any different than searching for a cause for Alzheimer's disease. And there's increasing evidence that mercury causes autism.


Vaccines damage the brain, gut, immune system, and probably the whole rest of the body. Vaccines contain known toxins such as mercury, aluminum, glutamic acid (MSG), and formaldyhyde. Many vaccines are also contaminated with stealth virus, Mycoplasma fermentans, and other pathogens that cause chronic infections. Vaccines have also been shown to damage the immune system which leads to chronic, highly profitable, diseases. A judge recently awarded compensation after it was shown by extensive evidence that vaccines caused a child to develop autism. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund has already paid out $2 billion to compensate victims of vaccine damage. The reason the money comes from a government fund is because Big Pharma made a deal with the corrupt politicians in our government to exempt them from any harm caused by their dangerous vaccines. Even better, they're allowed to make $billions in profits from the chronic diseases they cause. Vaccines aren't tested for safety. They haven't even been tested for effectiveness to see whether they even work. The diseases they supposedly protect against had declined over 90% before the vaccines were even introduced and would have continued to decline without vaccines. Also, during measles outbreaks in the US, most people who got measles were vaccinated against it. They got measles because the vaccine was ineffective.

In summary Vaccines - no proof their effective, not tested for safety, may cause autism and other autoimmune disorders - If you want to be healthy, SAY NO TO VACCINES!

Chelation is harmful. Not only does it remove bad metals, but it also removes the ones we need.

The boy died because the doctor injected him with too much. The official cause of death was hypocalcemia caused by the drug used.

Hypocalcemia is a common side effect of chelation. But it's not usually fatal. The doctor who did it to him is a quack with a history of malpractice.