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Old 11-04-2016, 12:08 PM
deltaforce deltaforce is offline
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 12
10 yr Member
deltaforce deltaforce is offline
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 12
10 yr Member
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I don't know if you are frequent on this board anymore, but I will leave it here in case you come back.

My son is 8, Dx with ASD at age 2, non-verbal until age ~5. I agree with above posters, you will need behavioral therapies. The school district will do evaluations and recommend services depending on how the evaluation comes through. The parents need to follow the ideas given by the therapists (esp. ABA) to get the most benefits.
That being said, IMO, just therapies are not enough. I noticed that extensive ABA leads to children being robotic. My son would even ask my permission to drink water. I didn't like it. He got so used to someone directing him that he would not do anything by himself. I stopped his ABA once he aged out of Early Intervention. The school district put him in a self-contained classroom with kids similar to his functioning level.

During this period, I did extensive research on Pubmed and noticed that there are known biochemical abnormalities in the kids with autism. If you address those biochemical abnormalities, you may get some mileage, depending on the child's issues. There is no yardstick for it and so it becomes really difficult to measure the benefit of any intervention.

Some scientists come into my mind. If you read their research, you will get some ideas. I will list some of them below.
- Derrick McFabe
- Martha Herbert
- Richard Frye
- Suzanne Goh
- Harumi Jyonouchi
- James Adams (Autism/Asperger's Research Program)
- Jill James
- Daniel Rossignol
etc.

There are actually many many more researchers but these are the researchers that are working on direct implementation than the theory (of autism) itself. You can take cues from their publications and dive in further to do research that may be relevant with your grandson. Many of them also have YouTube videos that you can check it out.

Then, there is Autism Research Institute Youtube channel. These talks are not very easy to understand as it is really hardcore research, but worth the time, if you can understand.

Finally, there is TACA (Talk About Curing Autism (TACA)). Look for your local chapter to talk to the fellow parents. Curing is a very strong work, IMO but from what I know, they are doing some good work. Mainstream medicine does not really 'approve' TACA's ideas, but the benefit one gets out of mainstream medicine isn't stellar either. So I do not get into those arguments but I look for what is useful for my son and talk to the physicians we are working with.
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"Thanks for this!" says:
Dmom3005 (11-08-2016)