One indication of the severity of the epidemic of allergy and similar disorders is the existence of a magazine called Living Without. Judging by volume numbers, it is 11 years old. Supporting the idea that autism may be caused by digestive problems, two of the six events on their event list involve autism.
Seth, in recent reading on evolutionary medicine i discovered that there’s an inverse relation between allergies and cancer. Allergy is protective; it functions to keep environmental insults at bay. Maybe allergy has increased because we have more of these insults now.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4014202?dopt=AbstractPlus
That autism symptoms would be aggravated by digestive problems — as by any persistent distraction — is trivially obvious. Reports of major improvements in autistic patients after digestive distress is relieved should, therefore, encourage us to treat autistic patients’ digestive problems promptly. It would be silly to conclude that these digestive problems actually caused the autism, not least because very many autism patients don’t have digestive problems.
Similarly, major improvements resulting from chelation might lead one to conclude that all autism patients should get chelation. This neglects that one of the key features of chelation treatment is mineral supplementation. Before trying dangerous chelation, try safe mineral supplementation.
Dennis, thanks for the link, that’s a fascinating correlation. I didn’t know about it.
Nathan, that the link between autism and digestive problems is because “autism symptoms would be aggravated by digestive problem” strikes me as too flexible to be helpful. You could use it to explain just about any linkage of another disorder and autism. No one is “concluding” that this one bit of info is persuasive; it is just added to other bits of info. As for “very many autism patients don’t have digestive problems,” I didn’t have obvious digestive problems before I started eating lots of fermented foods. Yet I benefited from them. You seem to be dismissing the autism/digestive problem correlation rather than trying to learn from it.
It is a signature symptom of autism-spectrum to have difficulty processing and blocking distractions. Some have more trouble with one stimulus (touch, sound, etc.) than another. Many of the more recognizable symptoms (“stimming”, particularly) are actually attempts to compensate for that difficulty. Some fraction have digestive difficulties — probably a higher fraction than the general population, because they are less able to articulate their distress, or to get it acted upon. (Likewise, for urethral or ear infection.) Still, it’s just a fraction, and the path from subtle cause to life-disrupting effect is painfully clear to anyone with experience with even one autism-spectrum patient.
Blaming our children’s autism on digestive distress is almost as cruel a joke as blaming it on vaccination or on our own lack of empathy. We are always trying to find any hint of something that might help. We’ve heard of all the fads, and tried them all, and hundreds of other things besides. Sometimes something seems to help one child in five, and that’s about as successful as anything ever gets.
You didn’t have any obvious digestive problems, but you benefited from eating fermented foods. Probably our kids, and we, would benefit the same ways. (I did have, and did benefit.) A wide sea lies between “benefits from treatment of” and “condition is caused by”.
There’s evidence suggesting that gluten-free casein-free diet is helpful for autism. That’s why lots of parents put autistic kids on GFCF diets, and these parents are a major readership for GF publications.
Seth, not quite sure where to put this in your blog comments, but here’s an interesting piece of a Q&A with a guy who’s been living without money since 2000…he lives in a cave and eats foraged stuff and roadkill and dumpster-dives.
He mentions that he’s way healthier now than when he had money….. perhaps some anecdotal evidence that it’s better for us to have more exposure to ‘germs’ and whatnot.
https://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/Home/6–do-you-get-sick-from-dumpsters—roadkill