PLT Test Blog

This blog mainly concerns personalized medicine, which is a therapy targeted to a specific person, or sub-group.   Personalized medicine can include drugs, OTC supplements, diets and, importantly, non-drug medical therapies like vagal nerve stimulation.   Some non-drug medical therapies were covered in previous posts and others will be covered in future posts. The other part of the bigger puzzle can be called personalized education; anything from ABA to music therapy to what you do at school. Eleven years ago, when starting with our first ABA consultant, just about his first question was “are you following any special diets or biomedical therapies”. He was clearly against such therapies, seeing them as a big distraction from the all-important ABA and Verbal Behavior (VB).   He did indeed have a point, you do have to focus your attention on multiple tasks and avoid being obsessed with vaccines, gluten or candida, as some people appear to be. ABA does have its limits, as ou...

Today’s post is all about one of the potential medical, but non-drug, interventions for autism. The others tend to involve electrical/magnetic stimulation of one kind or another. Low level laser therapy (LLLT) was developed more than fifty years ago in Russia. Today in Western countries LLLT is often regarded as alternative medicine or just quackery.   There are some FDA approved devices.   In Russia and some East European countries LLLT is part of mainstream medicine. Two people forwarded me a recent study that was carried out in Havana by a team from Cuba and Israel. There are only 11 million Cubans, but there are a lot of Cuban doctors.   They have developed interesting drugs, some related to cancer, that are now being taken up by Western medicine.   Cuba actually leases out doctors to work in more than 50 developing countries around the world. The results of the study are indeed interesting and there is a long list of possible mechanisms that may be involved. The...

For people born around the year 2000, or before, and diagnosed before 4 years old, having autism very often meant being non-verbal. By my earlier estimations, about 0.3% of children are still non-verbal when their peers are already chatting away. Of that 0.3% some will spontaneously develop speech, some develop speech due to intensive intervention either by parents or therapists and some never develop speech. Being non-verbal does not mean you cannot communicate; you can use sign language, you can write/type, you can use pictures (Picture Exchange Communication System – PECS) or you can use an augmentative communication device. Such devices used to cost a fortune, but now they are just apps you can install on a tablet computer or smartphone. These apps exist in numerous languages not just English, Spanish, German and French. In 2007 we used PECS and started to use a special touch screen connected to a PC. Using special software, Monty could show that his vocabulary was much more extens...