I Can Vouch For The Pain Of New Autism.

July 29, 2007

Dear Friends,

I can vouch for what Dr Bryan says, as he describes the "new autism". The gut, the entire nervous and neuro-muscular system, the brain are severely affected. It is very difficult to accurately describe what goes on. Imagine all sorts of boring insects gnawing at your innards and wasps, flies and mosquitoes bothering you from the outside and you may come near.

An autistic feels his entire nervous system all the time, mostly because of the pain. The pain in the guts and inflammatory brain pains are simultaneous. The brain feels jammed with accessing the memory a tantalising inch away. You feel your entire memory may be wiped out at any moment and the brain may just flicker out and die leaving you a total blank.

The soles become extremely sensitive and painful, hence the tendency to walk on the toes. This sort of stretching also relieves the neuro-muscular pain for some time. The head banging, moving around in circles, is due to the awesome intestinal colic that is madding. Sometimes this colic appears in the solar plexus region forcing you to bend double.

You are past caring leading to the fearless state that autistic's exhibit. What could be worse than this, is the underlying thought. People, even God, say there is a limit to pain. Try telling that to an autistic. Never ending pain is the only thing that is constant in his life.

The guts loose the ability to retain stools. All emotions are reflected in the guts leading to a further deterrioration of the situation. Even a slight anxiety necessitates a rush to the toilet.

You feel tired and exhausted all the time. Even sleep exhausts. You desparately try to escape the hell hole that is life but you do not know how.

It is very difficult to tackle even ordinary situations. You get used to a certain pattern with great difficulty and when things change, ever more subtly, you panic at the thought of having to re-adjust once again. Change is anathema to the autistic. Even the thought of being cured may be daunting for a cure may mean a different world, a world about which you have no idea.

Your moods, your symptoms, your fears change all the time.Each day is new and brings a fresh set of problems. If change is what you hate, change is what you get. This is an irrefutable law of life and autistics cannot escape it.

You do not want to face the world outside. It is full of unexpected tricks and turns. Coupled with an affected gut, the situation makes even the thought of travel break into a cold sweat. At times of stress such as these the memory may suffer a total blackout. On two occasions I have alighted at a station with no idea of who I am and what I was doing there. A very frightening situation, I can assure you. Meeting strangers is difficult because you don't have them mapped out in your brain.

The depression never lifts. You often feel like retiring to a corner of a dark room and curling up. The external world being so frightening, the autistic creates a world within and is happy there.

The worst thing is, you know. You know your difficulties, you know your shortcomings, and in my case, I know what caused it. You also know that you are not supposed to be like this. That you ought to be normal. That you ARE normal but this malfunctioning body and brain comes in between. When this feeling becomes overwhelming you snap. You go crazy. You scream, you cry, you hurt others, you run away. You are termed a schizophrenic.

You are not free of pain even in your sleep. You dream of even greater pain. You dream of not being able to do what others do sans a thought. You dream of facing exams without a shred of memory in your brain. You dream of doing the wrong thing even as you know what is right. Your dreams are full of anxiety. Such dreams rob you of the much required rest and you get up feeling frightened and totally exhausted.

Oh, how wonderful it would be to simply vanish and not exist. There would be less trouble for yourself, your care givers, and the world in general. The autistic is only too acutely aware that he is a burden unto others. The problem is accentuated by a tremendous sense of duty, a great desire to care for others, a love for work, a struggle to be perfect. The intense battle that rages relentlessly within is often lost in the expressionless face of the autistic.

This is a peep into the world of autism. This is the autism that only the sufferer knows. This is the "new autism" that Dr Bryan speaks of, the latest gift of medical science to the world's children, and some adults.

God bless them, even though they know what they are doing.

Regards,

Jagannath.

Deseret Morning News, Friday, July 27, 2007 Author focuses on 'new autism' By Elaine Jarvik

Deseret Morning News

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,695195442,00.html

Here's what Dr. Bryan Jepson thought he knew about autism six years ago: that it was a rare, genetic, developmental, untreatable brain disorder. But that's the "old autism," he says.

Bryan Jepson

Jepson, who graduated from the University of Utah School of Medicine in 1995, says what he knew about autism then he mostly learned from the movie "Rain Man." Later, in 2001, his lovable, happy 18-month-old baby began to change — to "fade away," as Jepson puts it. The toddler no longer wanted to be read to, wouldn't look his parents in the eye and liked to spin in circles in the middle of the floor.

A child psychiatrist told Jepson and his wife, Laurie, "Prepare yourself for the time when Aaron will need to be institutionalized. Forget experimental therapies."

Instead, Laurie Jepson took to the Internet. And before long, her husband — who categorizes himself as a "mainstream" physician — was deep in medical literature about the biochemistry of autism. Soon he was convinced that autism is a complex metabolic disease that has as much to do with the gut as it does with the brain.

Bryan Jepson, who is now director of medical services at Thoughtful House Center for Children in Austin, Texas, is back in Utah this week to talk about his new book, "Changing the Course of Autism: A Scientific Approach for Parents and Physicians." On Saturday, he will speak at a free workshop sponsored by Porter's Hope, a Utah-based company that assists the families of children diagnosed with autism.

"All of a sudden, there's an explosion of autistic kids," Jepson says. As recently as 1980, autism was rare, with a rate of about 1 in 5,000. Now, he says, it's 1 in 160.

It's an epidemic, he says, "and there's no such thing as a genetic epidemic."

At the same time, the "new autism" is less likely to show up within the first six months or year of a baby's life, and is much more likely to be "regressive," showing up at 18 months to 3 years to rob the child of previous skills — sometimes almost overnight, sometimes as a gradual decline.

There's a genetic susceptibility for autism. But something else has to explain the sudden rise in numbers — and it's not simply a matter of better diagnosis or a broader definition of what autism means, he says.

The answer appears to have something to do with the increased toxicity of the environment, he says, from food additives to vaccines and antibiotics. Children who are born with a genetic susceptibility for autism have trouble detoxifying, he says.

The increase in other chronic diseases such as asthma is evidence that autistic children may also be proof of what's to come, he says. "It's kind of like the canary in the coal mine."

Already, he says, the treatments he uses have helped children with attention-deficit hyperactive disorder, or ADHD, as well as autism. He believes that eventually the knowledge of how autism works will affect our understanding of conditions such as chronic fatigue, dementia and Parkinson's.

Jepson's book is a review of scientific studies conducted by the Autism Research Institute, whose founder, Bernard Rimland, was "the first to put the puzzle pieces together," Jepson says. The book also examines studies done by independent scientists.

Many primary-care physicians and pediatricians are not up-to-date on the latest research, he says, "and it's hard to do autism in the 15 minutes" allocated for many doctor visits. Jepson, who founded the Children's Biomedical Center of Utah before moving in 2006 to Texas, says he knows of only two Utah doctors who are currently treating autism as a medical disease rather than a behavioral disorder.

Calling autism a behavioral disorder, says Jepson, is like calling a tumor a headache. Instead, he says, autism is just one symptom of a disease process that affects the digestive, immune and neurological systems.

The majority of children with autism have gastrointestinal problems, sometimes causing severe pain. Their tantrums and head banging may be a manifestation of pain they can't articulate, Jepson says. If the gut disease is treated — with diet, nutritional supplements and medication — that behavior goes away.

"Your gut is an immune organ, and it can trigger inflammation elsewhere in the body, including the brain," he explains. "And it's a big source of your metabolism. If it's not working right, you're not getting the appropriate amount of nutrients from your food, and you're not preventing toxic exposures as you otherwise would."

The sooner children are put on aggressive gastrointestinal-immune-detoxification treatment, the more likely they are to recover, he says. There's still no cure, he says, but the vast majority improve. The Jepsons' son has gone from "pretty severe to pretty moderate."

E-mail: jarvik

What if a “dirty bomb” exploded over a large segment of U.S.population that simultaneously exposed citizens to Hepatitis B,Hepatitis A, tetanus, pertussis, diphtheria, three strains of polio viruses, three strains of influenza, measles, mumps, and rubella viruses, two types of meningitis, four strains of herpes viruses, the chickenpox virus, 7 strains of Streptococcus bacteria, and four strains of rotavirus.

• We would declare a national emergency.• It would be an “extreme act of BIOTERRORISM• The public outcry would be immense and our government would react accordingly.

And yet, those are the very organisms we inject into our babies and our small children in multiple doses, with immature, underdeveloped immunesystems, many at the same time with vaccines.

But instead of bioterrorism, we call it “protection.” Reflect on that irony.- Dr Sheri Tenpenny, MD

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