Friday, January 16, 2009

DAN! Doctor & Cranial Sacral Doctor

Cranial sacral is amazing!! I had no idea how it could help or what all it could do. Course, we have an amazing doctor who is MUCH more than a cranial sacral specialist or chiropractor, and that’s always an advantage ;). I didn’t realize in what ways and how much cranial sacral was helping until our 4th week (and 6th treatment) into it, and after we’d been away for a week and a half through Christmas and New Years.

We went to a beach house on the Alabama coast over the holidays for 1 week! That was great, what wasn’t so great was that Jordan went backward in some of his progress and even developed a couple new things he had never done before that are classic autism behaviors – walking on toes, flapping hands when he got really excited, and opening and shutting cupboard doors for an inordinate amount of time. I definitely noticed these things and it really scared me. He also got really crabby and fearful. Fearful, like, if he was not being held by me he’d just scream – forget any independent playing on his own, or being able to make dinner with both my hands and arms available – no, one arm was always full with him, that or he would be clinging to my legs screaming. These irritable, fearful, dependent behaviors were very common and continued for many many months not so long ago, so I didn’t really notice them creep back into our lives. We attributed it to the molds and mildew around the house, and the chlorine from the pool he was swimming in almost every day and how those were affecting him.

Come Thursday after vacation and his cranial sacral appointment. The doctor did some adjusting and stimulation…I don’t know just what…but as we were walking out of the office he said a new word (hum, hadn’t heard one of those for a week). We got outside and he bounced happily down the path – alive, alert, happy, coordinated, not clinging to me. By the time we got home he had said 3 new words! We walked through the door and he ran off to play – ran off, by himself, hmmm, wow! I thought I’d check my email quick. He came up behind me where the bookshelf is and said “Read a book” as he pointed to the bookshelf!! Wow, a whole phrase, and he pointed! A month ago, he couldn’t even point at things he wanted. He would tug on my shirt and indicate a direction with his arm, but not a pointed finger! And then, he patiently waited while I finished my email (and without me holding him), whoa! If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I’d walked out of the doctor’s office with a different boy than the one I went in with – a much happier, alert, active, coordinated, confident one! These great improvements didn’t stick at 100%, and there was a little regression through the following week, but I’d say overall, he retained up to 65% of these for the week.

Friday, we got the remaining test results and treatment plan from the allergy specialist and DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) doctor. In addition to his leaky gut and systemic yeast overgrowth, it confirmed what we knew with his gut bacteria – he has lots of bad bacteria, and not much good bacteria, has lots of inflammation (from allergies), and the big one – he has heavy metal toxicity.
That brings us to his treatment plan. We’ll work on fixing them in this order: Correct his GI issues (kill yeast/heal gut/absorb nutrition), treat allergies, detoxify (chelation). So, we came home with some supplements – probiotic, antifungal, cod liver oil, enzymes, and L-glutamine (an amino acid that heals the gut).

That’s where we start for this month – things are in progress!

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