Anyone with an interest in medicine, or who has a child with Autism or other developmental condition, will have probably heard about Andrew Wakefield. He’s the British medical doctor who published a study linking the Mumps, Measles, Rubella (MMR) vaccine to onset of Autism. In the last decade since the publication of his study, Dr Wakefield has been hailed as a villain and as a hero, he is both persecuted and revered and although about to get struck of as a medical doctor, he has unending research opportunities available to him in the USA.
Everyone has their side and their fierce opinion. It’s a scandal, it’s huge and it’s being done in the name of politics, money and prestige. The one group of people it’s actually forgetting, are those most vulnerable, the children with Autism. And one factor highlighted by Dr Wakefield and now being totally ignored, is that vaccine or not, the high majority of children with Autism or other neurological/psychological disorders (ADHD, OCD, bi-polar, dyslexia, schizophrenia etc) have digestive problems, some mild, some severe, some so severe that their intestines are similar to that of ulcerative colitis.
So why hasn’t this been the focus of the furore? Why isn’t the medical establishment working day and night and throwing money behind finding out why it is that those on the Autistic spectrum have these digestive problems???
It is probably because doctors are too scared to investigate, and rightly so. Who else wants the same treatment as Andrew Wakefield? Or is it because if looked into closely, results will show that pharmaceutical drugs annihilate the digestive system, and that these drugs are actually the root cause of numerous modern day physical and mental health problems (if the medical world can’t use drugs, how else will it function!)? Or is it because a medical doctor’s training doesn’t incorporate the link between the gut and neurological function? Although why not when we all know a few glasses of wine go into our stomach and soon after our head goes woozy, when we have over a 100 billion nerve cells in our gut alone and when our digestive system has been referred to by many wise medical professionals throughout history as ‘the second brain’, is beyond me.
So, my passion as a Nutritional Therapist – healing the gut to heal mental or physiological health conditions. If we heal the gut of an Autistic or schizophrenic or ADHD or dyslexic child, will the symptoms disappear? It has happened, often. And I believe that there is not a single person on the Autistic spectrum who cannot be helped through the process of digestive healing. Take Dr Natasha Campbell McBride for example, a Neurologist, but probably more importantly a mother. A mother of a child diagnosed with severe Autism aged 3. She noticed the link between his symptoms and digestive tract, so went on to study nutrition in the hope of helping her son when no other means could. Her son is now in his teens and has no Autistic symptoms. She found the link between nutrition, digestion and psychological dysfunction and she fixed it. She has since worked with thousands of people on the Autistic spectrum, using nutrition alone and has written an amazing book called Gut and Psychology Syndrome. For a small excerpt from it, go to: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26552320/Gut-and-Psychology-Syndrome-GAP-Syndrome-Or
Emma Leavens, RCN, Dip. CNM 