The Cost of Biochemical Intervention

I remember the day that I first picked up "Changing the World of Autism" By Dr. Bryan Jepson, and the way that it made me feel. I ate that book up, and I felt it was a gift from my kind Heavenly Father to help us help Eli. And those feelings of gratitude and conviction were what we needed, because we found that biochemical intervention is taxing on parents on many levels, and just let me say that we were not well off. We were still getting Daddy through college at the time we started the program.

Just afew short years later, our lives are so different. Meltdowns are an extremely rare thing, and our boy talks in a communicative way. And man, can he read. I am positive I could not read that well until late first grade, and he is still in kindergarten. We have been blessed with a teaching job for Eli's Daddy, and we are looking into buying our first little home. This purchase is a huge step for us, and so I have been reviewing our expenses, and where does our money go to. Our grocery budget is $150-$200 dollars a month more than we would otherwise spend if not doing special medical diets. I have a credit card that I put Eli's supplements on, and I hate seeing the balance occasionally go up some months rather than go down. However, when I review this part of our spending, I realize that we have always been blessed to be able to make it through, and there is no going back. He is so much more well and so much happier now.

All these thoughts really take me back to when I read "Mother Warriors" by Jenny McCarthy. It was on sale for $4 and we were curious, so we bought it. My husband said all it did for him was make him sad. It had some value for me as I saw the practical side of other parent's struggle to implement biochemical intervention, and their successes. The part of the book that really blew us away was the part that explained the average cost of raising a child with autism. Let's just say that the sum she offered as "average" was afew times our annual income.

So just let me say, you can do this on a modest income. We do.

Just as a side note, another cost of biochemical intervention is being weird. Yeah, basically to the medical community in general, I am a weird, misguided parent. I have already been lectured by a dentist about how 'it is better to err on the side of caution' when it comes to the decision of giving my son his artificial fluoride. And just recently I was given a "news flash" at a pregnancy check up about how 'in those recent news stories the research was fraud and vaccines really don't cause ADD and other things.' Well, I don't know about all of that, but seriously all I said was that I didn't want to give my child hep B at birth. Sheesh.

Vaccines

I have blogged on this topic before back in July, but I didn't feel like I had good resources for new parents who had concerns about vaccinations.

I have a new niece and my sister has asked me for an alternative vaccine schedule. My first response was, "There is no alternative schedule, because the American Pediatrics Association does not recognize that there is a connection between vaccines and autism because the CDC denies that there is a relationship!" Ok, so I am alittle bit passionate about this.

After deciding to take a look anyway and see what I could find, I DID find some resources for my sister. Here they are.

This one was given to me by my son's DAN! doctor: A User-Friendly Vaccine Schedule

This one I found on Ginger's blog: Generation Rescue's Vaccine Page

And lastly I'd like to share Ginger's blog. She is not a medical professional, but an autism mom who writes about the current controversy surrounding this subject as it relates to autism: Adventures in Autism

Hepatitis B Vaccine

My sister sent this link my way. Especially with my family's history of autism, I wish I would have known this four and a half years ago. Every medical intervention costs the body something, even if that something is meant to prevent. This article also states the rate of autism as 1 in 63. Astounding.

Hepatitis B Vaccine Triples the Risk of Autism in Infant Boys