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...

When time is of the essence All kinds of dysfunctions may appear in autistic brains, which in itself make it a highly complex condition. There is also the when and where aspects of these dysfunctions, which often gets overlooked, or lost in oversimplification. This then has to fit into the concept of critical periods, that I introduced in an earlier post.  Critical Periods in the Biology of Autism – Not to miss the Boat Critical periods are times during the brain’s development when it is particularly vulnerable to any disturbance, for example an excitatory/inhibitory imbalance. This then leads to another related concept which is that of sensitive periods; these are periods when the person should be responsive to particular therapy. Sensitive periods are very important to be understood by those planning clinical trials, because a therapy may indeed be effective only when given within a specific time window. During this time the person is sensitive to the therapy, but they will not ...

Do you tell it as it really is? Or sugar-coat it, to make it more appealing? It looks like in the English-speaking world we are more and more being driven by emotional political correctness, rather than calling things out as they actually are. Now this does not really matter if you are talking about relatively trivial subjects, which is what we deal with most of the time, but is a problem when dealing with a serious subject. When it comes to autism, giving the cold truth is quite upsetting to many people. Bryna Siegel, a Californian Psychologist working with autism for a few decades has been promoting her new book, The Politics of Autism, in various articles.                             https://thepoliticsofautism.com/ She tells a lot of home truths that many parents and professionals do not want to hear and people often react very emotionally and quite aggressively. I have found myself on more than one occasion givin...

This is another post that I had waiting for completion; it is not saying do not use pre/probiotics, it is just saying make sure you know what you are doing.   Plenty of people appear to be wasting their money on ineffective bacteria, some people are making themselves sick, but others get a genuine benefit worth paying for. The is no one-size fits all. Some bacteria are good for some people and bad for others. It gets more expensive the further you live from Switzerland, but with the right oral  bacteria you need a very modest amount. One of today’s studies shows that spending money on stool tests for bacteria to fine tune a therapy may be a waste of money, unless you do your homework first.   There is currently a lot written about the role of the gut microbiome on human health. Unfortunately, it tends to get simplified into just good bacteria and bad bacteria.   Advice like “take a good bacteria” is not very useful. The reality is that some people take a store-bought...