Sunday, January 15, 2012

The Insanity Of Autism: Do Other Disorders Deal With This?


The Insanity Of Autism: Do Other Disorders Deal With This?

This blog post could also have been called "The Baggage Of Autism" or "Why I Hate Google’s Suggestions…"  :-)
 (no this is not me... but it's what i feel like today)

Ok, I'm telling you all right now that this is gonna be all over the place… and I don’t want this to turn into a blog post that’s pro or anti biomedical treatments for autism, or pro or anti medicine.  What this post is about is how EXHAUSTING it is for my kid to have what I feel like is the one disorder that nobody knows a f&$king thing about. 
Autism seems to come with a lot of excess baggage.   Not a day goes by where I don’t see a story or a posting for some new possible “cause” for autism or “link to a cause” and not a day goes by when I don’t read about a treatment method that’s helping asd kids immensely.
And I believe some of the studies are important and I believe them and I believe that some of these radical treatments are helping some kids and I’m THRILLED for them!
But it is EXHAUSTING to read all the time and having this FB page and blog doesn’t help.  Literally every day someone comments on something I wrote on FB or the blog about some treatment method that worked for their kid and they’ll post a link… or they’ll comment on how I shouldn’t give Kyle this med because of such and such report.  And then there goes old Autism Daddy wasting 45 minutes at work reading how asd kids were helped by this doc or that diet or this treatment or how this med can be harmful. 
Are there any other disorders like this?  Disorders where there’s so many treatment options and you’re just on your own to figure it out? What are down syndrome or cerebral palsy like?  Are there a million/gazillion different treatment options?  And a million/ gazillion different teaching methods?  A million/gazillion possible causes or triggers?  Seriously, I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I really want to know...


What also gets me about autism is “Google Suggestions”.  What I mean by that is I hate when Kyle’s  doctor prescribes something like a cream for his eczema and I go to do a Google search for “hydrocortisone and autism” and before I finish typing “au” it knows what I’m looking for which means that literally thousands of people searched for the same thing… and I go on to do the search and lo and behold over 9 MILLION results come back… some with scary headlines…and I’m like, “do I even bother reading these?”
Try it with ANYTHING!  What’s the mildest drug you can think of? Tylenol, maybe?  Do a search for Tylenol and autism and over 2,000,000 results show up… some saying it’s bad for asd kids, others finding  Tylenol to be a possible trigger to autism…  But I bet if you dig deep in those results you’ll find stories of asd kids whose lives were changed for the better with Tylenol.    You can’t f&cking win!

Your kid have allergies, or a cold, or maybe is having trouble sleeping? And once in a while you think about giving him a Benadryl?  Well don’t you dare do a Google search for “autism and Benadryl”!  Over 1.5 million results show up pretty much telling you not to…
With vitamins it’s the opposite.  Do a Google search for ANY vitamin & autism.  Google suggestion will know exactly what you are looking for and then you’ll find MILLIONS of results saying Vitamin C cured my son, Vitamin E took away his adhd, Zinc reduced the spitting/ saliva play!
Again, it’s not that I don’t believe some of these claims.  I’m just frustrated that there’s so many freaking options out there.  That’s why I’m so curious to hear from parents of kids with different neurological conditions (mr, cp, down, etc) to see if they have to deal with this INSANITY or are the treatment options more cut & dry.
By the way I did a lot of the same searches with down syndrome & cerebral palsy (Tylenol and ___, Benadryl and ___) and yes for some there were millions of results but for almost none did Google suggest something.  Google wasn’t sure what I was searching for which means there hasn’t been many people doing those searches.

As I said this blog post is all over the place.  I know this might sound CRAZY but maybe I’d be better off raising Kyle if there was no internet. I was going to say I’d be better off raising Kyle 20 years ago, but I’m sure that the services are much better now.  So I’d love to stay in 2012…
But if I could go into a time machine and go into the future and see the 30 year old Kyle.  If he’s still severely autistic despite everything we’ve tried, but  he’s happy, then I’d like to come back to 2012 and just not have the internet to put ideas in my head. 
Send him to school, get him lots of therapy, make sure he’s happy.  If he has an infection and the dr prescribes an antibiotic just give it to him. Since there’s no internet at my disposal I can’t search “amoycillin and autism” and read the 1.6 MILLION SCARY RESULTS!!
Sometimes I really believe that saying “ignorance is bliss…”

That’s all I got.  I’m gonna end it there…   My Friday rant!  :-)
http://autism-daddy.blogspot.com/2012/01/insanity-of-autism-in-2012-do-other.html?spref=fb

2 comments:

  1. Since I know of several people who have cured their children of Autism by eliminating all things "wireless" and toning down other forms of electropollution in their homes and lives, I think this father would be better off doing away with wireless devices. But then again, who listens to me? Fortunately, a few actually do.

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    1. I agree, wireless is probably the number one cause of most problems we face today. The news will never tell on their $3 trillion a year customer. Barrie Trower, microwave weapons expert, has warned the world of these dangers. Yet they are installing smart meters on the sides of our homes.

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