I went to the Defeat Autism Now! Conference this past weekend.  While I enjoyed several talks, especially Dr. Welch’s talk on secretin and oxytocin and Dr. Rossignol’s talk on treatments and evidence-based medicine, the highlight for me was Dr. Jeremy Nicholson’s talk on the link between bad gut flora and autism.  My personal opinion is that ultimately, this will be found to be the cause of the current epidemic.  All the things we talk about as possible causes, low glutathione levels, poor detoxification, heavy metals, antibiotics, immune system abnormalities, etc., all nicely mesh with this concept.

The thing is, too, from a purely anecdotal stand point – based upon nothing but my observations of my own son, my friends’ and clients’ children – everything fits.  We clean up the gut flora, we improve the children, globally.

I had another kick in the pants from Alex’s gut bugs recently.  As I noted in a recent post, Alex’s dermotillomania (compulsive skin scratching and picking) flared up horribly around the start of the year.  For many years now he’s picked the skin off his fingers, but by February he was gouging his own skin off – his back and chest looked like he’d been lashed, and his ears looked like they’d been through a meat grinder.  I tried the standard treatment for dermotillomania – Prozac – and it did absolutely nothing.  In fact, it might have made things worse.