A Few of My Favorite Things

For some reason this time of year always reminds me of the song in The Sound of Music – My Favorite Things and when one of my girlfriends, whose son is also Autistic, asked me what my favorite supplements were, I just figured I had to write about them. So here goes:
I think my number one favorite and probably the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart is possibly one of the most basic. It is the GFCF diet. I absolutely love this diet. Not because it is easy, because if any of you have done the diet you know it isn’t, but because it was the first thing that brought us a glimpse of Matthew. This diet is the first thing I go to when I hear of an Autistic child that isn’t doing biomedical. “Have you tried the diet?” is the first thing I’ll ask the parents. The GFCF diet lifted the fog Matthew was living under and it was the first intervention which showed real promise for a brighter future for our whole family. I think for us the diet was very big. Maybe it isn’t for other families. But in my mind, and my heart, the diet will always be number one simply because it was the first thing we tried that really, really worked.
Secondly, I love probiotics. I don’t think I can actually get enough of them. After I spent some time learning about the bio-chemistry going on inside my son, I realized that probiotics rock and I need to be getting them into my whole family whenever possible. I love the ones we use as supplements but I am really starting to get into the naturally occurring probiotics. If you read one of my earlier posts you know that I am making my own sauerkraut, not because I’m sadistic (or is it masochistic?) but because I want to harvest as many good bacteria I can and homemade sauerkraut is a great way to do that. I am also looking into making my own coconut milk keffir. I’m planning to tackle that after the holidays. I don’t want too many fermenting things on the counter for Christmas! And I must say I am intrigued by the idea of kombucha. So when the new year hits you may just be hearing me say how much I love homemade coconut milk keffir and kombucha. One of the best things probiotics did for us, besides helping to straighten out Matthew’s GI issues was to also help him stop biting us. We believe he was biting because he had too much yeast in his system and after we introduced probiotics he completely stopped biting. The probiotics were not used to target the biting but it was a wonderful “side effect”!
I guess my next favorite supplement is Methyl B12 injections. Let me rephrase that, I love the results we see from the injections but I hate giving him the injections. At first we were doing really well. We gave him the shots in his sleep, but he is starting to get wise to that and it has become more difficult. We still do it while he is sleeping, and our new DAN! doctor has given us a more concentrated form of Methyl B12 so the injections are significantly smaller, so I’m hoping this gets better soon. But the results have been amazing. Matthew started to, well, just make more sense when he spoke. When you start talking about cognition and processing it becomes much harder to define what we are seeing. I don’t have all the technical words so I have a much harder time giving a clear picture of the changes we are seeing in Matthew. But it is very obvious to us that he is understanding, processing and expressing much more since the shots.
In combination with the shots we have added zinc and Polyenylphosphatidylcholine (brand name Phoschol). These two supplements together have really taken Matthew to the next level. As I said above, when you start taking about cognition and processing it gets rather fuzzy if you don’t know the subtleties and distinctions, which unfortunately I don’t, but we are clearly seeing changes for the better. Matthew’s memory seems to be improving. He speaks in longer sentences that are more “on topic”, and he seems more engaged in most activities. He is pretending more, something he almost never did. His expressive language has blossomed, and I think his receptive has gotten better also. These two supplements may be rapidly moving to the top for me, because we are seeing such huge improvements in him. Today he was at his school’s holiday party and a special education teacher that knew him a year ago when he was at his first special ed pre-school could not believe he was the same child. She pulled me aside and told me that when she first walked into the room, she thought he was a peer! She thought he was a peer!!!!!!! If you don’t know what that means, she thought that Matthew did not have any special needs but that he was in the school as a normally developing peer that would help the other children with special needs to model correct behavior. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. All I could do was throw a big “Thank You!” up to God one more time. I like to thank Him at at least once a day, because I think His hand is guiding us. I’m pretty sure He is the one opening the right doors for us, sending us the right messages, people, help, everything.
Anyway, right now these are a few of my favorite things (in the realm of supplements). I will add one more, DMG. I wasn’t so sure of DMG. It didn’t seem to make much difference and Matthew hated the taste of the liquid. So our DAN! doctor told us to do a challenge and remove it from his supplements. I really can’t explain what happened, but Matthew just got very different. It became apparent to us that DMG was making a big difference in him. We put him back on the DMG and again our little boy started to emerge again. I won’t be taking him off DMG again, any time soon.
Well, I’d like to leave you with this: My wish this year is that all of our children return to us. That we are healthy and happy in the New Year. And that our families be whole. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I believe the best is yet to come.