Page 38 - What Doctors Don't Tell You - AU-NZ (February-March 2020)

EPORT
“Try to parent that!” jokes Karen. “You
sort of go through this relief now that you
have an answer. And then you have grief. – after 14 years
And then it’s, ‘Okay, now what do I do?’”
It was a behavioral therapist who kicked
her fully into taking action on her own.
“After several sessions, the woman took
me aside and said, ‘You really need to drug
him. If you don’t drug him, you will really
be doing him a disservice and making life
really hard for him.’
“I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘I am not
going to drug my child!’ With my holistic Jacob is fully
background working with the brain and
my craniosacral background, I knew the recovered and
brain can feel its way back if you can just get
whatever is in its way out of the way. So, I
went to work.” away at college
Today—after 14 years of Karen’s intense
research into the many causes and triggers of
autism, developing treatment
protocols and working with her
son on her own— Jacob is fully
recovered and away at college.
“I was so determined to
figure out what was going on
and to help him get better. I’m
just sorry it took so much time
researching, going through
all of the trial and error trying
foods and supplements.—
they’re expensive and then
you have to try them for a
decent length of time, a couple
of months or so to see if it’s
going to do anything, and then
continuing research, reading
countless books.
“I spent $150,000 and
thousands and thousands of
hours researching. But it was
worth it, because not only have I recovered my son, it
has put me in a position to help others.”
Know what you’re dealing with
The prevalence of autism is rapidly escalating, and
it’s more common in boys than girls by a ratio of
approximately five to one.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) currently estimates that one out of every 68
children in the US is on the autism spectrum, a figure
that’s up 30 percent from 2008 and up more than 200
percent since the year 2000.
ASD is characterised by a range of deficits in social
communication and interaction, repetitive patterns of
limited behavior and interest, frequent oppositional
behavior and emotional dysregulation along with a
wide range of other physical and health issues. Until
about15yearsago,itwasregularlymisdiagnosedand
38 WDDTY | ISSUE 04 | FEB/MAR 2020
Today misunderstood. To this day, the root cause
of the majority of autism cases has defied
understanding.
For years it was thought to be primarily a
genetic disorder passed on by the parents,
of intense but today chromosomal testing reveals that
approximately 80 percent of children with
research– ASD have a normal genome.
A growing number of brain studies
show high levels of neuroinflammation
Karen’s son and neuronal damage in people with ASD,
indicating that something else is going on
besides inheritance and developmental
mishaps.
It was this “something else”—getting to
the root causes of her son’s autism—that
drove Karen.
She refused to accept simple answers or
“We just don’t know.” She also refused to lay
the blame solely on Jacob’s fateful HepB shot
in 2005. That it played a role in triggering in
her son’s autism, she has no doubt. But common sense
and years working as an alternative health therapist
told her the dynamics at play were much more
complex than that.
Diet was the first thing she zeroed in on (see box,
page 39). Diet had been a large part of the Defeat
Autism Now (DAN) protocol, founded in 1995,
which promoted the view that autism is a disorder
characterized by a lowered immune response caused
by a combination of certain foods, most importantly
gluten from grains and casein from dairy products, as
well as external toxins (especially from vaccines).
Although the protocol was discontinued in 2011,
Karen discovered that diet was indeed a vital key—and
not just the elimination of gluten and casein.
Through a process of trial and error, she learned she
had to also eliminate sugar, processed carbohydrates,
food dyes, MSG and aspartame.
“It was hard changing his diet when we started
because kids become very addicted to the opiates that
Karen Thomas with her son,
are created in the body from eating gluten and casein,”
Jacob, in Maui, Hawaii
she says. (Wheat and dairy break down into peptides
called gluten exorphins and casomorphins, which
mimic opiate drugs, attaching to the same receptor
sites in the brain.)
Cutting out refined sugars wasn’t easy either, because
the Candida in Jacob’s gut created wild cravings for a
sugar fix. But slowly his gut health improved, and the
cravings died along with the Candida.
Karen also put him on a regime of prebiotics and
probiotics. “Gut health is vital,” she says. “The gut
controls the brain and houses 80 percent of the immune
system, so you have to work with the gut and support
the organs of detoxification and the lymphatic system,
because these kids have really poor detoxification.”
Like so many parents of children with autism,
Karen vividly recalls the first benchmark moment
of changeasshegotJacob’sdietandguthealth under
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