Prescription for Success?

Linda made a comment this morning that somewhat shocked me: "For the last few months, Liv has been off of all prescription medications she'd been on since 2004"! We have fought to loosen bowels then fought to solidify them; fought with reflux, vomiting, inflammation as well as pain and supposed allergies. She's been on Xantac, Singulair, Miralax, then Sulfasalizine, Pentasa, Prilosec (note: correct spellings on pharmaceutically-invented names has never been my forte nor priority). We have run the gamut to try and help her with her gastrointestinal issues

Today, she has had far fewer night wakings, better moods, quicker cognitive processing time. Most of her bowel movements have been regular; if temporarily blocked, instead of a 'prescription', we are instead using slightly larger doses of magnesium than her normal daily dose and she is clearing up.

Yea, I could attribute all of this improvement to growing out of the 'gut' phase; yea yea 'no epidemiological study has found a connection togatroinblahblahblah'. As always, my problem with epidemiological studies of autism is using the whole of the group to study and dispute specific issues. If entire set A is not caused by or have symptoms of thing B then the broad relationship is disproven, but the specific issue for specific subsets remain. Kinda like trying to find out what causes cancer by looking at the whole 'cancer' group. Autism is complex (IMHO, of course) and no simple solution nor symptoms exist. It could also be that the stress of being non-communicative is causing some GI issues. Anything except what we are doing could be the thing that could be helping her.

In other words, my belief in the vitamins/minerals helping her GI issues (according to some people) I am the same as a baseball player with a hitting streak with very dirty and smelly socks because I have not changed them for fear of breaking the luck. Problem I see is that much of what we are doing is not irrational bead-counting, it's common sense nutrition. It's more like the extra batting practice or a new stance in the batters box, more science than superstition. Ooooh, baseball's coming soon! Not a fan per se; more a fan of the IDEA of baseball, a la Field of Dreams, the Natural or Bull Durham.

I won't get into conspiracy theories that state that big pharma will bury 'home remedies' in order to push their own, study-backed, and infinitely more profitable versions of 'cures'. Nor will I rail further on the hypocrisy of for-profit companies controlling what and how 'cures' are brought forth and are judged more on how much they will make than how much they will help. Sorry... I got into it and railed...

I guess the difference in our maturity in this quest to help Liv is just that. We are no longer trying or doing things to 'cure' her of autism. We are doing things to help her mood, to better concentrate, to make her feel more comfortable so she can help herself.

Trying existing pharmacologicals, natural or otherwise, to solve problems either not covered by specific prescriptions/therapies or inadequately covered by them. That's how I would define our involvement in biomedical interventions at this point. I'm surprised how many of those you would not suspect, are really closet 'biomed' parents as well.