CuringAutismBlog

Well, Mike has been doing pretty well the past month, compared to how he was without the nutritional supplements, say last summer. He is working on managing his anger, in particular. He does get pretty wild after eating sugar, and he still has a lot of trouble going to sleep at night.

To address that, I decided to try to wean him off his Cymbalta, an antidepressant he is taking which has insomnia as a fairly common side effect. We are down from 50 to 30 mg per day now, and have been at that level for about 2 1/2 weeks. His behavior is a bit unstable, and I think this must be why. It just takes a while for the little neuro receptors to adjust to the lower levels of brain chemicals. But I am hoping and expecting that they will adjust, because he is getting so much nutritional supplementation that should be making all his methylation and other cycles work very well.

These cycles, by the way, are what the mitochondria are doing in each cell of the body. They are like little factories that take some of this and some of that, and make some of the other thing. Then they use that up making a third compound, and so on, until they are back to square one. So they need a lot of factory inputs, so to speak.

I am planning some summer camps for him that assume he will behave in a normal fashion. We will see. He is actually very good if hyperfocusing, but if a subject loses his attention, he can act like a six-year-old. So the key is to find camps where he loves the subject. I hope I have done so: one will teach him singing lessons, and another will let him pal around with animals.

Phyllis