Dr. Eric Richards – Pursuing Health

You should read this article’s follow up at the author’s site – http://autismroadtorecovery.blogspot.com/

This post is from a friend. She was in my typing class in some odd grade before boys new how to talk to girls, and girls spent more time looking pretty than working on typing. She became a good friend of my wife (then girlfriend of course) and they roomed together for a couple years at college. She has a daughter who she has worked hard to bring along the autism spectrum to a place of very functional autism right now. All three of her children have had sensory issues. She has battled hard for her kids. Really battled.

So as we are in our DETOX month, it is only appropriate to share her story (this post was published on her blog yesterday). Please read my follow up below.

The day the house went quiet

I have to say…this is hard for me to write. I am the type to focus on the “how to get better” and not on the “how did we get here?” But it is part of Marley’s story, albeit, the hardest part. Was it in my imagination? Was she really the sweet connected baby I remembered her to be? Did the vaccines take a toll on my baby? So just today, I finally pulled out the baby videos along side her vaccination schedule and all the doctor’s notes, sat down with a box of tissues and pressed play. I needed to know.

The beginning was wonderful. She was so cute and responsive. She made great eye contact. By 10 months old, she was starting to use words like bye bye. Then at 12mos, you can see a bit of a regression after her 12 month chicken pox and polio vaccines. But she bounced back. She is still looking at me when I call her. At 14 months old, I watched her play peek-a-boo with the cat through the window and laugh. I watched her have a pillow fight with daddy laughing when he called her name. She was mouthing every toy, but she was still talking. When she started walking at 16 months old, she was saying mama, dada, papa, bye bye, kitty and a few other words. She was late to walk because her left side was affected by her brain bleed. But she did it. She was determined. I looked down at the doctor’s notes at age 15 months. She got a clean bill of health. She was cognitively behind one month, but was catching up to her adjusted age. (She was a preemie.)

Then it happened. At 18 months old, she got an MMR and a DTaP. That is 3 live viruses and 3 dead ones. Apparently, her immune system couldn’t take it. It rocked her world. The home videos start to turn ugly. We take her to the beach. She cannot pull herself out of the water. We try for about 30 minutes but she just screams and heads back to the water. I keep watching. It seems the only things that can soothe her are music and Sesame Street on TV. She dances, but no longer dances FOR me. She dances because she is rocking to the music. She no longer looks at me when I call her name. The tantrums turn scary. They go on for an hour or longer sometimes. We even video taped one. It made me shake all over to hear those screams again.

Then there is the comment that will stay with me forever. Marley’s nana told me, “I used to come and stay at your house and listen to Marley babble in her crib for at least 30 minutes in the morning. Just playing. Just using her voice. Then it stopped. I didn’t hear her anymore”. That was like a knife to my heart. The very true realization that there was nothing. No noise. Just screams. My baby stopped talking. She stopped babbling. She stopped responding to me. She stopped looking at me. She was gone. It was like someone came and took her voice away one night as she slept. That was the day the house went quiet.

Our life was pretty ugly for a while. We endured out-of-body like tantrums. Earth scattering screams. Anything and nothing would set her off. She would hurt herself and others during these episodes. We took her in for an EEG to check for seizures. It came back clean but they said that doesn’t mean she is not having them. It just means they did not catch her in the midst of one. But the worst is when my rock of a husband finally caved. He cried. He NEVER cries. He was so afraid of Marley hurting herself. Then is when we started looking for help. REAL help. Not medication to drug her up. (Believe me, we were offered the open-ended Rx of Prozac for my 2 year old.) No….we needed REAL help. We needed to heal our baby. That is when our autism road to recovery began.

Chris was surfing the web and he turned to me and said, “I think I found something.” We watched a video of Dr. Bernie Rimland talking. He is the founder of DAN! Defeat Autism Now! It looked interesting and it was our best lead since we walked out the pediatric neurologist’s office just shaking our heads at the doctor’s condescending mannerisms and offering of Prozac to our 2 year old baby girl. We watched Dr. Rimland some more. This looked interesting. He was saying that our kids are SICK. That there are many approaches like diet and supplements that can help. Chris said “There is a conference in Boston coming up next month.” I remember saying “I don’t think we can afford for me to go.” And then my life partner said to me…”I don’t think we can afford for you NOT to go.” And boy was he right. That is why I married this man. When push comes to shove, he stands up for what is right…no matter the cost.

I did go to that conference in Boston in 2005. I met other moms with similar stories and learned their successes. I listened intently to the most cutting edge science coming out of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. And finally, I cried because I didn’t realize that her 10 loose bowel movements a day WAS NOT NORMAL. I cried because I had just watched my daughter slip away. And I cried because I was finally getting some answers. My daughter would start to get better. I just knew it.

Dr. Eric – I know most of you know that we don’t vaccinate. As a mater of fact, we simply don’t treat. I trust that our pursuit of health through chiropractic, diet, exercise, stress control, and sleep will allow us to thrive. And it has. Brooke at seven years old, has never had a drug of any kind in or on her body. This is not luck, nor chance. This is by effort and design. It is by God’s grace, and my willingness to part with the idea that treatment of a symptom makes sense at any level. Therefore, she has lived seven years, primarily symptom free.

Ansley – well, she broke her leg and has had four total doses of pain relief (3 were infant ibuprofen, one with a little more kick to it). But that has been it for her.

My point in sharing this, is that we don’t vaccinate and we don’t treat, but NOT out of fear. Many think that people are avoiding vaccines because of fear. Our choice to not vaccinate had nothing to do with fear. I did not read all the stories of autism and say, oh no. But rather, I looked the other way. I was interested in this CLAIM that disease has been eradicated through vaccination. And what I found, was that most infectious diseases were HEAVILY eradicated before the vaccine program had even begun. Including Polio!

My choice to not vaccinate was driven by a desire to not put a toxin in (and I don’t just mean mercury, formaldehyde alone is reason enough, not to mention aluminum… I gave up anti-perspirant because of aluminum, and I hate to smell!), and by a belief that the reward of the vaccine, was highly manufactured in the minds of the people, thanks to the marketing of the greatest manipulation played on man, that from the pharmaceutical companies. We have hosted professional vaccine educators over the years, and paid really good money to do so. It might be time to do it again.

Kelly is fortunate that she has done so much, and come so far. She understands toxins really well, and inflammation, and all of these things that I spend hours keeping up with and disseminating to you. Her children will benefit from all that she has to give. I hope that your children/grandchildren will too. Be well, be blessed! – Dr. E

So I was watching some TV the other night while folding and hanging clothes, and a commercial came on for Abilify.  I always perk my ears up for the drug commercials, as they provide great material to talk about in the office, and to write about if worthy.  I actually had to stop and make sure my wife hadn’t changed the channel to Saturday Night Live re-runs, as it sounded like this commercial must be a skit.  It wasn’t.

This is the list of what I heard…

Now you can call me crazy, but I will surely call you a risk taker if you would choose to use abilify after that commercial.  ”Oh, but Dr. Eric, you just don’t know how bad it was for me before abilify”.  To which I would have to say, you need to get into a support group, you need to surround yourself with people who want you to do better and who are willing to sacrifice for you.  And guess what, these people exist.  My office and my gym are full of them.

Seriously, I have never seen such a committed group to other people’s well being as the members at my gym.  No, it isn’t a “Christian CrossFit”, though there are many Christians in it, but Christian or not, people who are focused on their wellness in a CrossFit gym, tend to be focused on everyone else’s wellness too.  It is pretty crazy how hard they will work to help those around them get it.  And when I say get it, I mean get all sides of it.  My office, similar boat… once people are on board with life change, they want everyone to be on board with life change.

So if you don’t want to watch the commercial, let me give you the risks associated with this “anti-depressant add on”.  Yep, this drug is considered an add on to the antidepressant.  Basically saying, if you can’t feel less depressed from an anti-depressant, lets go ahead and add dosage, vs. rest on the idea that perhaps we cannot medicate everything away.

• call your doc if you have increased thoughts of suicide
• elderly patients have an increased risk of death or stroke (which means younger patients will likely suffer damage to arterial walls as well)
• high fever, stiff muscles, confusion = a life threatening condition might be present
• high blood sugar can result, and in extreme cases can lead to coma or death
• white blood cell decreases that can be serious (lead to death due to infection)
• seizures

So why struggle with depression when you could have all of this?

Abilify, Aripiprazole is designed to treat schizophrenia, but depression is commonly lumped in as a normal use, as well as to treat autism.  Problem is that most people who use it to treat disease, are not truly diseased, but suffer from acute episodes of depression from an event in life.  I would suggest that you actually let yourself feel your depression for an acute phase, as it will allow you to adapt and grow.  This is God’s method, otherwise anti-depressants would grow on trees.

Pubmed has a warning box that suggests that you should know that you need this drug, and it points out that a typical schizophrenia patient has hallucinations or delusions.  Not simply a lack of desire to go outside today.

I hate stepping on people’s toes, and getting them upset with me, I know this will upset some people, but I also know that it might just save a few too.  If you are a person who sits in agreement with this article, I would ask you to ask yourself, would you sit in agreement if your world collapsed around you?  How do you know?  I don’t write this from a smug standpoint.  I write this from a commitment to an ideal and a philosophy, which is why I know that if the worst possible things happened in my life, I would still hold fast to these statements.  I hope you can gain knowledge and insight that will help improve and safeguard your life.

Be well – Dr. E

If you read through enough of my writing you’ll see that I support a lifestyle diet with some grains, some milk product (but it should be raw from grass fed cows, and more specifically guernsey cows).  But this is only after you have done the healing diet for some time.  I like Paleo as a good lifestyle diet, so it removes the two from above.

Basically, I understand that grains and dairy and other inflammatory foods are not inflammatory if the gut mucosa is healthy.  The antibodies that reside within that mucosa are a protective coating and instead of the body responding with high inflammation, it responds with simple protection.  Most Americans have destroyed their mucosa through years of poor diet, and thus the inflammation factor is high (you can purchase the IF tracker app for your smart phone which will help you assess food for its inflammation factor).

So if you have healed your mucosa through a strict diet free of those foods (watch out for legumes as well, they have these nasty little inflammatory proteins too), then you can re-introduce these foods at moderation, and not just moderation of one branch of “lectin-rich” food, but you must moderate your total consumption.  This means that if i had a moderate amount of bread, with a moderate amount of grain fed dairy, and a moderate amount of beans all at the same time… well, I didn’t moderate at all!

So I made some lasagna last night with my wife, and wanted to share this “moderated” food plan.

The recipe is simple (they all are in my house because we rarely follow any type of recipe at all, just throw stuff together).  So in this one, we took a full head of cabbage that had already been cut down to half size (I do a lot of pre-chipping of salad greens and other salad additions, as we eat salads twice daily on most days).  Pull off leaves of the cabbage.  If they were full length, you would want to cut them back some, as they will get tough as they cook, so very hard to cut through.  Layer these on the bottom of the pan.

Brown some ground beef with seasonings of your choice.  I like some simple sea salt, pepper, oregano and garlic for this dish.   Layer the beef on the cabbage with a thin layer of tomato sauce (your choice here, if you buy a pre-jarred version from a health food store, you can do just fine… just keep it thin for the healing diet, as tomatoes are eaten in moderation).

This is where I went off reservation… I currently have some awesome Beyond Organic Grass Fed Raw Cheese, loaded with CLA and probiotics, this stuff is crazy good and healthy… therefore I did not want to waste it!  So we do keep some mozzarella in the house, and that is what I used.  Moderation on this type of cheese for sure.

Another layer of cabbage (second layer is shown above) beef (I used two pounds total, of course my beef is grass fed, I buy this in bulk from a local farm via my office <HealthSprout> co-op).  Some more sauce and viola!  I baked it for about 40 minutes at 400, covered it for most of that time with aluminum foil, which I am always very cautious to make sure that it doesn’t touch any of my food, I am not a fan of aluminum.  I also do not subscribe to any belief that by having aluminum over my food, that there is any transfer of the aluminum to my food.

This was a fantastic meal, all that I can add to it for the future, would be to incorporate more vegetables.  I simply ate a bunch of raw veges along with it, that is how we roll in my house.  But you might not be so inclined, in which case I would chop up some broccoli, spinach, kale, onions and mushrooms, and saute them with the beef.  Enjoy and God Bless!