I recently became aware of a number of fascinating online lectures that have been made available for free online.  These are from the 2012 AutismOne/Generation Rescue Conference.  Just look at the list of topics – they’re all so fascinating that I want to listen to them all!  Not that I have the time to do that, but I wish I did!

This year they had a track for T21, since 10% of those with T21 have autism as well.  The T21 talks are listed at the bottom of the page of recordings, just scroll down if you’re interested.  I’ve only listened to three of the T21 lectures, but I appreciated them all.  I’ve spent a number of hours learning about the biochemistry of T21, and I was very impressed at Dr. Anju Usman‘s talk, in which a number of these points were very simply and succinctly explained.

What I love about things like this is that there is so much known about what is going on with these diagnoses, and there are people who are taking action based on that information.  I just love this kind of information.  You won’t hear it from your doctor.  You won’t hear it from most people around you.  I’m learning to keep quiet with medical professionals because if I even mention anything slightly non-mainstream that I’m doing for Yirmiyahu (eg the pediatrician didn’t like that I give him a special vitamin supplement formulated for those with T21 that includes iron – she would prefer that I only give him the iron supplement that they recommend to all babies, the physical therapist didn’t like that we made an appointment at the Feuerstein Institute for an evaluation- and to me these hardly touch an alternative approach), I’m spoken to in a way that I find disempowering and unsupportive.

But there is a lot – a whole lot – that we can do to help our children outside of the standard recommendations given.  There is so much information here that will be of value to any parent, regardless of if they have any kind of diagnosis or not – for example, I’d been thinking about what I can do to rebuild ds13’s digestive system, which has necessarily taken a hit as a result of the high dosage of antibiotics he’s been given to treat the hip infection.  Then I saw Biofilm, Bugs and Bowels: Rebalancing Your Child’s Gut, and watching this reinspired me to get back to making fermented vegetables on a regular basis, something I’ve been wanting to do but haven’t had enough motivation to push to the top of the list.  The curried sauerkraut is now in two jars on the counter.  🙂

There are tracks about: nutrition, biomedical research and treatments, gastrointestinal, chiropractic, vaccines, education, therapies…there’s so much good information out there, and even if we learn just a tiny bit, that tiny bit when applied will help our families.

Avivah