PLT Test Blog

Asperger with his Little Professors This blog is focused more on severe autism, but today it is turn for the Aspies.   The post does rather ramble, because I included some old unused material on micro-dose LSD that may be Aspie-relevant. Most people diagnosed with autism these days do not have severe autism and so their ideal medical therapy may be very different to the Polypill, I developed for my son. For a young Aspie he might just need a single intervention like Sertraline (Zoloft) and nothing else, or perhaps Amantadine. There is more than twenty years of experience medically treating people with Asperger’s, but it very much remains a case of trial and error to find what works. It does look like most translational research in autism is now focused on those without problems with speech or cognition. That is good news for people with Asperger’s, not so good for the other end of the spectrum. The paper below is 20 years old, but the medical treatment has not become out of date. G...

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...

When it comes to understanding history, it usually pays to dig deep for the facts and then make your own interpretation. This is particularly true when the subject is complex and since most authors naturally have their own bias. Kanner's subject #1, 72 years later So I would not read books like Neurotribes, by Silberman, or In a Different Key (Donvan/ Zucker), just reading comments by Silberman is enough to show his level of knowledge.  The now awarding winning Silberman says that since, after all these years, science has not found a cure for schizophrenia, it should not bother for autism.  That would mean that since no cure has been found for HIV, we should not try and find a cure for the Ebola virus either. Great progress has been made with both viruses. Donvan/Zucker did achieve something useful; they tracked down Kanner’s Subject # 1. This is interesting because you can read, first hand, Kanner’s case report from 1943 and then see how things turned out 73 years later. The ...