by Marcia Hinds – Megan and Ryan’s Mom
www.autism-and-treatment.com
It is important to remember you can’t believe all you are told about autism. That is especially true when it comes to knowing that autism is medical and TREATABLE! Almost all kids improve when the multiple problems with their immune systems can be corrected. Children are recovering from autism and yet most mainstream doctors and the general public don’t realize that this is even possible. And full recovery is usually accomplished by parents who were too stupid to know that it was supposed to be impossible.
My son is now an aerospace engineer and does all the things the “experts” said could never happen. But this never would have happened, if we had only used a one-pronged approach to treating his condition. That would have not been been enough. Medical, behavioral, and educational interventions were important to making his recovery a reality.
It shouldn’t take this many people working this hard to help one little kid to recover. But unfortunately it did. Behavioral programs do not work as well or as fast without the medical component. Parents, doctors, behaviorists, and educators each have an important piece of the autism puzzle. If it was possible to wave a magic wand and make all our children’s medical problems disappear, we still wouldn’t see a typical kid. Once kids start to heal, they still need to be taught all they missed when they were still too ill to learn. You could compare what we did to help Ryan recover to the comprehensive therapy a stroke victim needs.
It also takes luck and timing for everything to work. Even our multiple interventions weren’t the only thing involved. You must do the right thing at the right time. I believe that is why more kids don’t recover. Getting them better is not easy and takes so many things working in harmony for it to happen. And remember equal effort does not mean equal outcome! That’s the part that I find the hardest about all this! Parents who worked as hard as we did, yet didn’t have the same results.
At first our kids don’t learn like other children so they must be systematically taught all they don’t know. This can be accomplished with various rehabilitation programs. For Ryan, we used our own modified version of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) but other programs can work just as well. We didn’t hire an expensive agency to do this for us. I wanted to, but it wasn’t possible.
I would have paid any amount of money for some respite from the exhausting and full-time job of teaching Ryan everything. I desperately wanted anyone else to do this for me. Fortunately for Ryan, there was no one in Minnesota to provide ABA when we needed it. We had no choice but to learn these methods and do them ourselves. Without knowing it at the time, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The fact that our family became proficient using ABA was one of the major factors that helped Ryan recover. He was always learning because we were always teaching him throughout his day.
There is more than one way to get this done. This grueling work angered me as much as anything else associated with autism. Why did I have to teach Ryan what other kids just knew? It was difficult to see children doing all the things Ryan couldn’t without hours of instruction. My friends that were parents of typical children had no idea how lucky they were. But after a while our children start to learn like typical children. So hang in there and realize although this isn’t an easy fix, recovery is possible!
NOTE FROM MARCIA HINDS – Megan and Ryan’s mom:
Ryan became an aerospace engineer, because he received proper medical treatment combined with behavioral, and educational interventions. To preview my book, “I Know You’re In There – winning our war against autism”go to Amazon or my website www.autism-and-treatment.com
Contact info for Marcia:
Phone: 805 796-8213 Email: For help finding a doctor marcia@autismandtreatment.com
There is more info to help on my website.
