From: NANCALE@aol.com
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 7:42 PM
To: debbie.rhode@adcieo.com
Subject: Answers and Support #7 Recovery Story







Joshua's Story

This is a story about our journey through Autism and our recovery. I'm writing this so other parents know that they are not wasting their time and money pursuing the biomedical alternatives and ridding their children of Mercury poisoning. I am going to spend some time in this story discussing
vaccinations and how I feel they caused our sons Autism. I don't know that every case of Autism is vaccine related, although I highly suspect it especially since the number of cases has steadily risen from 1 in 10,000 in the 70s to 1 in 150 in the 2000s. This is in direct correlation with the
addition of up to 27 vaccines, many of which contain Mercury, being added to the required vaccine roster for babies in the United States.

It is especially curious that the symptoms of Autism match exactly to the symptoms of Mercury poisoning and that before the addition of Thimerosal, Autism was unheard of. There was a similar phenomenon in the 30's called 'Pinks Disease' which exactly matched what we call Autism today. Researchers realized Pinks Disease was directly related to a mercury laced teething powder. Pinks Disease was never seen again after they recalled the teething powder, until Autism came around. It is also interesting that it was easy enough to recall the teething powder manufactured by a small company, but it doesn't seem possible to eliminate thimerosal used with our government's
approval.

The following is our story:

Joshua was born November 23, 2002. He was a healthy baby and made all of his normal milestones. When Josh was 1, he had an Upper Respiratory Infection and was on Augmentin. During this time period, he was due for four immunizations, so we brought him in to the doctor to have those done.  I
will never forget the day; my husband and I argued in front of the doctor, as he didn't think Josh should get four shots in one day and certainly didn't think he should while he is still not healthy. I was angry at my husband because I said we needed to trust our doctor and if he felt it was okay to immunize Josh while he is sick and he thought four immunizations in one day is safe, we needed to believe that and follow his direction.

Unfortunately, I won this argument and Josh did have those four immunizations. I believe they were HIB, Hep B, Prevnar, and DTAP. I now know Prevnar has a history of 'strange' reactions within the VAERS database. This is the database maintained by the CDC documenting adverse reactions to
vaccines.  I also know vaccines have thimerosal in them. This is a toxic chemical used to preserve the vaccines. It contains methyl mercury. This substance has to be disposed of utilizing hazardous materials protocol. It is so toxic that back in the late 90s, a female researcher trying to
disprove its' toxicity died from exposure.

ABOUT CHILDHOOD VACCINES:

Our children now receive 27 vaccines, as mandated by CDC by the time they are 24 mos. Old.  Thimerosal is not legal in several states within the United States, but still legal in our state of residency, Florida. The CDC claims all vaccines as of the early 2000s are Thimerosal free, what they are not telling the public is that they are still using the thimerosal laced inventory. This only means vaccines manufactured after the early 2000s are thimerosal free and not that they are not using the stock they have which does have much over what is considered safe by the EPA. In addition, the
thimerosal free vaccines do still contain thimerosal in trace amounts.

Thimerosal was never tested by the FDA. It was grandfathered in as a vaccine ingredient. It is all over the news that pregnant woman should not eat tuna for fear of mercury toxicity and the irony is, doctors in the US are injecting our kids with a much higher level of the toxic substance than they
would get in tuna. Another irony is that the flu shot, which pediatricians recommend for babies and Obstetricians recommend for pregnant mothers also has thimerosal in it.

Our story continues:

Immediately after these vaccinations, Josh seemed tired and not quite himself. In the six months that followed, we watched our happy child turn into someone we didn't recognize. He slowly stopped interacting with us and looking at us. He began pulling us around the house to show us what he
wanted instead of trying to tell us or pointing. He developed strange movements. We now know them as rocking and flapping. He would cry all of the time and we could never figure out what he wanted. He seemed only happy or content if one of his videos was on TV. He got to the point where he would
just lay in front of the TV screaming all of the time waiting for a video and he stopped calling us mommy and daddy. He completely lost interest in the world outside his videos. We could no longer take him anywhere. Every place we went, there was a scene as Josh would tantrum for no reasons we
could figure out.

The Diagnosis:

Josh was now 18 mos. Old and had lost all of his language, eye contact, and social skills. He no longer cared if we were around or wanted anything to do with us. Since Josh is our second child, we knew this was not normal development and we'd heard of Autism and began to look into that
possibility.

Joshua went to the Dan Marino Center in November 2004. I will forever remember the vision of him screaming on the floor biting himself the entire hour the doctor was examining him. We were told Josh may never talk and most definitely needed help his entire life. We were encouraged to start speech
therapy. We left the office with the realization that our baby was now moderate to severely autistic.

The Fight Begins:

My husband and I knew he wasn't born like this so we began looking into what may have caused this. Josh had a full neurological workup at the Dan Marino center and everything was normal. There was no easily detectable reason he slipped into his own world.  In our research, we read about the connection between the vaccines and mercury poisoning. We deduced this was the answer.
Since Josh was born normal and only severely regressed after vaccinations and the symptoms related to the mercury within the vaccines matched exactly what the doctors were telling us is Autism, we knew this is what he had.

Now that we realized this was really Mercury poisoning, we needed to know what to do. We began scouring the internet. We would only look at websites that talked about recovery and Autism, as we believed Josh could be cured; we would only look at information geared toward a cure. The first website I really liked was the Autism Recovery Network website. I contacted the author
of the site and she was kind enough to spend a few hours on the phone with me telling me about the DAN! Protocol.  I took notes all during this call and decided we had to follow this protocol to rid Josh of the Mercury in his brain and hopefully we could do this in time to get him back into our world.

The first step in the protocol involved diet. We needed to stop feeding Josh gluten, casein, and soy. I looked on the internet for this type of diet and was fortunate enough to find someone local who knew about the diet.  It was a rainy Monday night around 8:30 PM when we decided we had to do this diet
with Josh. I called the number on this gfcfdiet.com website and I drove to Karen's house that evening approximately 8:45. I talked to her until about 9:30 and then raced to Whole Foods to begin Josh's new diet immediately.

Healing Starts:

Two days into the diet, Josh was 'more with us'. For the first time in almost 10 mos.; when he woke up in the morning, he didn't just lay there, he called 'mommy'. We knew this was the right thing to do to help Josh. We were excited.

We started seeing Dr. David Berger in Tampa and we learned all about what Mercury poisoning does to a person's stomach and chemistry. We found out Josh had yeast/bacteria issues and he was deficient in some vitamins/minerals, as well as severely deficient of Glutathione. Glutathione is in our cells and it helps our bodies detoxify anything we are exposed to like lead in pest control products or thimerosal in vaccines. This was starting to come together now. This is why Josh had such a hard time with
the vaccines when other children do not go into Autism after their toxic exposure from vaccines.

When Josh's body was strong enough and balanced enough, Dr. Berger had us do a chelation challenge with Josh to see if he was heavy metal poisoned. This is where you give a chelating medication and then collect a specimen to determine if the chelating medication pulled any heavy metals out and if your child has heavy metal toxicity.

Lead, Antimony, and Aluminum were all highly elevated and Mercury was detected. Based on those results, Dr. Berger put us on a regimen of chelation with DMPS suppositories. After some time, we switched to IV DMPS, in attempt to pull even more metals out of Josh's body. Dr. Berger felt safe
with this as Josh was tolerating the suppository form of the medication for several weeks with no issues. We eventually added vitamin C, and glutathione to Josh's IV's. We did this for approximately a year, weekly. In that time, we pulled extremely elevated levels of Mercury.  We stopped the IV's when the challenges were not pulling anything anymore, and coincidentally, we were not really seeing anymore symptoms of autism.

Over the course of the 18 mos. of doing the biomedical protocol, we had mixed feelings. 18 months is a long time to 'trust' a doctor that the process is working when your not seeing huge results everyday, but we were seeing subtle results over the course of the months that would pass. We
would be at a party and Josh would be running around with the other children and we'd realize, we didn't have to leave or we would go swimming and Josh would understand what it meant to drown and we didn't have to worry as much.

I remember a big change was when I realized Josh understood about 'stranger danger' and I realized I could trust him to walk with me.  Over the time of the treatment, our lives got easier and we could do 'normal' things again. Josh had an awakening over this course of treatment. He began talking in
sentences, slowly at first. Before we realized it, he was fully conversational, telling us what toys we had to buy him.

Happy Ending:

Josh did attend the speech delayed program this past year at our local public school, however his teacher called me and asked me not to send him over the summer. She said "he is indistinguishable from other three year olds and should go to a normal pre-school over the summer". Josh has been at
'Growing Tree Learning Center' here in our hometown of Oviedo, FL since the end of May. We did not tell them of his history with autism when we enrolled him. I did tell them several weeks into his time there. The teachers said 'they would never in a million years' suspect he had those issues. They went
on to say, 'he is as normal as they come' to them. In addition, we took Josh to a specialist who administers the ADOS test, a diagnostic test to see where on the spectrum a child may fall. At the end of the two hour evaluation, she looked at my husband and I and said, "there is no way this
kid is even close to the spectrum". She asked if we would send some video to her and tell our story. She wants to use it to convince other doctors of the biomedical protocol and its results.

I wrote this story so all parents struggling with this protocol and all of the money and time involved would know not to give up. There is hope out there and Autism can be cured. We went from severely to moderately Autistic in November 2004 to 'nowhere near the spectrum' in June 2006. What all did
we do? Here is how our timeline went:

*    Started GF/CF/SF diet October 2004 - still on diet as of June 06,
however added back in Soy with no adverse reactions.
*    Official Autism diagnosis November 2004


  Started DAN! Biomedical protocol December 2004 -

still on supplements/MB12 injections/glutathione lotion/Valtrex/Nystatin as of June 06
                        
Josh participated in IV chelation approx. 2/05 - 2/06

*    Participated in 'traditional' therapy (15 hours a week divided by 9 hours ABA/3 hours speech/3 hours OT) January 05 - November 05

*    December 05- May 06 started speech delayed pre-school in public school system

*    June 06 - in regular pre-school program

*    Official Autism diagnosis REMOVED June 2006

I would be happy to talk with any parents about our results with Josh. You can contact me at lbfl1971@yahoo.com.

Thanks,
Lisa

Lisa


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