Here our amazing doctor, Dr. John Green, discusses his approach to caring for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Although, it could be argued that this is the approach all parents should take for all children. Watch below or read the transcript if you prefer!
Below you'll find the transcript of Dr. Green discussing caring for children with Autism.
"Hello I'm John Green and the medical director of The Evergreen Center. I'm here to welcome you and introduce you to our philosophy and describe our mission in healing.
You're probably here because you have a child and are most likely having some struggles with your child and looking for answers, looking for, "How can I help my child?"
And there is so much information, some good, some uncertain about what you could do or should do to help heal your child with special needs.
We believe that each child is an individual, a person, and our mission is to help you to help your child to become comfortable in his world: happy, balanced, and healthy.
Rather than treating Autism, ADD, ODD, OCD, diagnoses, we believe you need to look at your child as an individual and work towards healing the imbalances, the overloads, the deficiencies, the stresses that cause him or her to be symptomatic.
And we also believe that the majority of the symptoms that we see in children result from their effort to make sense of the world, to cope with frustration and pain and imbalance and being misunderstood, struggling to meet their needs, exhaustion..
So our work is to collaborate with you, you parents as healers and as teachers. You know your child. We're here as a guide and as a mentor, but as a fellow student, as part of your team to learn all we can about what's causing your child's distress and your distress as you seek to unravel the mysteries of illness.
So our job is to help you gather information that can lead you to good decision making about treatments to implement, interventions, and to evaluate and effectively ascertain whether you've done something useful.
Part of our teaching is that you need to be not too attached to any of your beliefs and hypotheses, nor of mine which I may suggest, but to test those by the hard real test of application in daily life and see if you can make your child feel better. Help remove an obstacle that stands in his or her way of learning or sleeping or communicating or nourishing himself and so on.
We see also that the health problems in children are many interconnected cycles that reinforce and perpetuate each other. For example a large percentage of children on the autistic spectrum have intestinal and immune issues. The majority of these children are carboholics, they love carbohydrates and are difficult to feed because of their addictions.
We don't know why they make these choices but we see these choices frequently cause problems and perpetuate problems. So carbohydrates are difficult to digest especially starches, and the undigested starches stimulate problems in the lower gut, fermentation that may cause pain and spasms and overgrowth of undesirable bacteria and potentially yeasts. These organisms cause further gut damage which makes it difficult for a child to nourish himself to feed his immune system and his brain and so on, and seem to feed into the addictions. Also the addictions may be partly derived from allergies which can develop because of damage to the gut lining, increased permeability, or leaky gut and the cycle goes on.
Another aspect is overload of the liver. The liver, as the sentinel of what comes out of the gut, can be flooded with toxins from foods and bacteria and yeast and be impaired in its' ability to defend the brain and the rest of the body from environmental toxins. And so the cycle goes around. Detoxification is impaired, nutrition is impaired. Assimilation is impaired, the immune system is challenged by overgrowth of threatening organisms and often there's constipation or diarrhea.
So again the detox system is not doing as well as it would if the gut was eliminating readily, daily as it's meant to be. By working to identify an offending substance in the diet or in the bowel for example and then moving that out, clearing it, treating it, removing it if it's a food, you can begin to hand back the natural control that the body has and the natural wisdom that it has about caring for itself.
There are many other examples of these kinds of cycles that perpetuate themselves and keep children sick. So we say we're not aiming to treat Autism or ADD because these are descriptive concepts that are ICD 9 codes.
There are no such logic classifications for research purposes and for identifying medications that might be used, but really you have a child, a person in front of you, who is struggling, suffering and whose symptoms may be called Autism.
But really what we want to do is help her to become healthy, comfortable, balanced, help her reduce the overloads in her system and repair the deficiencies, replace the nutritional deficiencies, restore immune vigor, health. And then her own body wisdom can begin to reverse the symptoms of Autism and can participate in therapies and then life itself as a therapy. And really many, many children who we see recover their ability to communicate and to interact in the world as if they had recovered from Autism.
We look forward to helping you in any ways that we may and invite you to contact us with your questions, ideas, concerns and we'll look forward to working with you. May your journey be a healing journey with your child and your family."
I hope you enjoyed watching Dr. Green discuss caring for children with Autism. To contact Dr. Green and see his website, you can click here.
To learn about Dr. Green's Autism Prevention Project click here.
