Update on Joshua after 6 months of chelation
It has been almost 6 months since we started chelating Josh and only a couple of months since you posted his story. Since then, I have been contacted by people from around the world. He continues to make rapid progress. Most recently, his language and comprehension skills have taken off dramatically. I am able to have conversations with him now. I had a great conversation with him on the phone today.
He asks questions constantly, and he has a VERY active imagination. I would say that he has lost between 70-80% of his ?autistic? symptoms in less than 6 months of chelation. He is now just over 3 1/2. I am guessing that at this rate, he will be fully recovered within 6 months to 1 year, and by Kindergarten two years from now, he will be well ahead of his peers because of his fascination with letters and numbers at such an early age. He has come a long way in a short time, but still has a little way to go. We have the occasional regression, but these episodes are getting fewer and farther between. He still exhibits some symptoms (mostly yeast or Measles related) but for the most part, he seems very typical of how a 3 ½ year old should act. I guess to describe it, it is a lot like losing weight and getting those last 10 pounds to come off ? They are the hardest ones to lose.
He continued to practice football with his older brother?s flag football team until the end of the season. He did not really get the full concept of football, but neither did I when I was his age! He had a blast, and I got some great video of it. The coaches and other kids were great with him.
Now, most people cannot tell he even has a problem. We ran into a couple at a restaurant that had a 9 yr old autistic child, and we started talking to them. We talked a little about the biomedical approach to treating autism, and they were very interested. The father, who I had been talking to for several minutes, asked me how I knew so much about chelation, and I pointed to my son and told him that he was diagnosed as ?autistic?. He could not believe it. If you are a parent of one of these kids, you can usually pick them out in a crowd. He told me that he was watching my kids play the video games there, and he had no idea. Six months ago it would have been obvious to him that Joshua had a problem.
We now play board games and other types of indoor/outdoor games together and he is starting to develop a sense of humor (i.e. ? he will hand me the spinner for the game we are playing and pull it away at the last minute and start laughing.) He now understands games, turn taking, winning, sharing, and different feelings and emotions.
He is becoming more coordinated, and can do things that he was never able to do before (ride a big wheel, etc.) He has taken a more active interest in using the potty which he had no interest in before.
He now plays with his brother and the neighborhood kids all of the time, and he asks about being able to play with them if he sees them outside.
His pre-school just called us to schedule an IEP meeting. We were previously not scheduled to have a meeting until next year. Apparently, he has reached all of his goals for the year after only a few months!
His speech therapist is so amazed at the progress that Joshua has made in such a short period of time, she has started to raise money for DAN! research on her own. She is donating the money to Generation Rescue. She has taken a big interest in what we are doing, because we are the only parents that she has worked with that are treating their son for toxic metal poisoning, and Joshua has in her words, recovered faster than any child that she has worked with since 1988.
My wife recently ran into a woman that stopped her in my son?s preschool parking lot and asked if she was Joshua?s mother. She said that she was part of one of the two teams that first evaluated Joshua almost a year ago, and at the time considered him to be extremely low functioning. She said that she had a daughter in his preschool class and recognized him. She could not believe it was the same child, and the way he was interacting with the other kids. She talked with my wife and from what I understand has made an appointment with a DAN! doctor. Ironically, she works for one of the places that warned us to beware of ?fad treatments?!
That is all for now, there is probably more, but I will save that for another time. I can say that I am glad that we went with the TD DMSA from the Lee Silsby Pharmacy. I think that since he showed signs of being extremely lead toxic as well, we got lucky in picking the right chelator the first time.