PLT Test Blog

  Today’s post contains three autism videos.   I was asked to give a presentation about treating autism with off-label drugs.   This turned out to be quite easy to write, but it kept getting longer and longer.   I think most people would need to watch it in two sittings and you do need to have a deep interest in the subject.   I could have gone on for hours longer, there is much more to tell.   Click on the settings to watch in HD, then you can read the slides clearly.   In the lower right corner of YouTube, click on the white cog shape, select quality and then HD.   I also include two very good videos by Tony Attwood, which are much lighter going, but really explain why Asperger’s and Autism are better understood when considered separately, albeit that they really are part of the same spectrum.  They should be required viewing by anyone new to the subject of autism, parents in particular.       Personalized Medicine to t...

Image ©  Acabashi ; Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0  Source:  Wikimedia Commons I have learnt a great deal since I started to research autism treatment in 2012 and publish my notes in this blog from 2013. Prior to 2012 I had assumed that autism was not medically treatable and that there was no evidence to the contrary, so anyone claiming to treat autism must be a quack.  You are supposed to "trust your doctor" and I come from a family full of them.  It turns out that almost all treatments for conditions of the brain, ranging from depression to Multiple Sclerosis to dementia are only very partially effective, but in most cases they are better than nothing. Apply these expectations to treating autism and then read the medical research and clinical trials; you will see that autism is indeed as treatable.   It turns out that many people have found effective medical therapies for their autism. But autism is not viewed as a public health emergency, like H...

The idea behind personalized medicine is the realization that humans are all slightly different and that some of the diseases they suffer, like autism, are also all slightly different.   In order to treat them optimally, you would need to use drugs and dosages customized to each person. Here below are three slides used to illustrate Personalized Medicine in cancer care.  Instead of treating “cancer”, four sub-types are identified and then treated using four different drugs.  Each person only receiving the effective drug. Source: http://scitechconnect.elsevier.com/personalized-cancer-medicine-will-time-now / Autism is not cancer, but understanding cancer gives you a much better concept of what can underlie a highly complex disease like autism.  You need to consider multiple hits as in cancer, which is very similar to Russian Roulette. The thing that does not seem to exist in cancer is the "double tap", when in a minority of cases, a moderate case sudden changes to a s...