FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER
Sacramento, California http://www.feat.org
November 15, 2001
News Morgue Search www.feat.org/search/news.asp
·
Depressed? Autistic? Eat Some Sushi
·
Sending Off An Autistic Child’s Stools For Analysis. .
.
·
November Calendar Supplement - Additions &
Corrections
·
Letters to FEAT Newsletter over Dr. Siegel
[From Reuters.] http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/RTGAMArticleHTMLTemplate/D/20011115/we
di t1511? <-- address ends here.
Stockholm — Remember your mother telling you: “Eat your
fish. It’s good for your brain.” She may have been right.
Scientist think they have evidence that fish oil could
cure mental disorders such as depression and dyslexia — conditions increasingly
common in the Western world.
“This really does represent a breakthrough in the managing
of individual depressions,” Alexandra Richardson, senior neuroscience research fellow
at the University of Oxford, told a seminar about depression in Stockholm
Thursday. “If the brain does not have the right fats, it will not be working
right.”
The right fats to beat the blues are large amounts of
omega-3 fatty acids, found in oily fish such as salmon and mackerel.
Dr. Richardson’s research found that the lack of these
fats — which are needed for the normal development and functioning of brain
cells —causes depression, autism, dyslexia and ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder) in some people.
Depression became increasingly common in the 20th
century, and one in four people will suffer from a mental or neurological
disorder during their lifetime, according to World Health Organization data.
High levels of stress, alcohol, nicotine and caffeine
consumption can further decrease the levels of fatty acids, aggravating or even
creating mental disorders, Richardson said.
She believes there is a link between the dramatic increase
of depression and changing eating patterns in the West.
“We really seem to be looking at a crisis here and it’s
all in the diet,” she said.
In countries where people eat less fish, the increase in
the incidence of depression is higher than in, for instance, Japan, where fish consumption
remains high, Dr. Richardson said.
She said everyone could benefit from increasing their
intake of omega-3 fatty acids.
“There is little to lose,” she said. “There are hardly any
negative side-effects, only nice cosmetic ones such as nice shiny hair, strong nails
and healthy looking skin.”
* * *
Sending Off An Autistic Child’s Stools For Analysis. . .
. .is an interesting idea. Until you come to collect the
samples
[By Charlotte Moore, Mind the Gap, Guardian, UK.]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4298449,00.html
“Have you had their stools analysed?” asked another mother
during one of the many note-comparing conversations in which the parents of
autistic children indulge with a kind of gloomy pride.
No, I hadn’t, and I didn’t fancy it much. I’d had their
urine analysed, removed gluten and casein from Sam’s diet, treated them for thrush,
injected Sam with secretin, put them through auditory integration training, but
so far I’d avoided this one. I knew what would happen.
First,
I’d reject stool sampling as not practicable, then I’d
push the idea to the back of my mind, then I’d allow myself to listen to the
arguments, and finally I would - as it were - bite the bullet.
With a heavy heart I took the number of the dietician who
reads entrails - or rather, the contents of entrails - and, yes, eventually I rang
her. She was reassuring: intelligent, concerned. Stools analysis, she explained,
can reveal the presence of harmful parasites. It’s not an allergy test, but it
shows up deficiencies or intolerances. “Just collect three samples and pop them
into containers.”
That shouldn’t be difficult, I thought, since there hasn’t
been an inch of floor space uncrapped on in my house in the past 11 years. I
sent off a hefty cheque, and received a box full of pots and scoops. The samples,
said the accompanying literature, should be collected on three consecutive days.
George only goes about twice a week. I would have to ignore this instruction.
“The sample must be uncontaminated by urine.” How could
this be achieved? Autistic children won’t oblige with the little vessels
provided. In the matter of defecation,
George and Sam have always been free spirits.
The days of Turner-Prize-winning displays on walls and windows are
(touch wood) over, but performing to order is not within their repertoire.
Months of teaching Sam not to poo in the bath had to be
undone. Bathwater, I reckoned, must be
less contaminating than urine, so Sam’s bath was cleared of boats, penguins,
clockwork frogs and the like, and I hovered in my plastic gloves, scoop poised.
I had to act fast to prevent the precious morsels from disintegrating.
George, a child of nature, prefers to do it in the garden.
I had discouraged this, but now I was shooing him out in all weathers. At last,
a substantial prize lay steaming on the grass. Out I hurried. George was nowhere
in sight. As I shovelled, it crossed my mind that this might not be his own
production, but that of a fox or badger. I looked forward to the laboratory
report: “We recommend that you no longer feed your son on slugs, earthworms and
old crisp packets.”
Three plastic tubes per day, each to be labelled with the
date and hour of collection. You mix the stuff with special liquid until it
looks like pea soup, then you stopper it and mail it to the appealingly named Great
Smokies Diagnostic Laboratory. I was called by a lab worker. “Could you give me
the date of collection?” “I filled out the labels,” I tersely replied. “Unfortunately,
there has been leakage in transit. The labelling is obscured.” My heart went
out to the poor woman. When she was at primary school and the other girls
wanted to be air hostesses or ballerinas, did she say, “When I grow up I’d like
to open leaky parcels of other people’s shit?”
Great Smokies sent long and fascinating reports. Both boys
were rampant with bad bacteria - pseudomonas, citrobacter freundii, giardia lamblia
cysts. Their gut flora resembled my flowerbeds after next door’s sheep have
broken in. The dietician recommended supplements and antidotes; six different
potions, totalling 19 daily doses. All that remained was for me to insert these
potions into the boys.
I mixed them into their drinks. They spat, and threw their
beakers away. I stirred them into icing sugar. They abandoned it after a couple
of licks. “Mix them with ketchup,” suggested the dietician. “That disguises most
tastes.”
Tastes, maybe, but not colours. The ketchup turned pale
orange. The boys
smelt a rat - or something worse. These supplements are
disgusting. After
a
few more tries - spoonfuls of honey, freezing it into ice
lollies, baking
it
into gingerbread like marijuana - I gave up. I have a vivid
apprehension
of
the menagerie of undesirables rampaging through my sons’
bowels, and a box
of expensive supplements sitting in silent reproach. Oh, and
my bank
balance
developed a leaky gut. Any cures for that?Guardian Unlimited
© Guardian
Newspapers Limited 2001
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* * *
November Events Calendar Supplement - Additions and
Corrections
Deadline for DECEMBER (plus) Calendar of Events is
NOVEMBER 28.
Calendar Guidelines For Submissions:
1. Send all submissions
in E-Mail format to Events@Feat.org
2. Please only include
the following as briefly as possible:
Name of Event
Main Speakers and Topics of Event
Date of Event
City, State, and Location of Event
Contact information to learn more about event
3. Please Do Not Send
Files Or Brochure Attachments
Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE)
Parent Meeting to discuss the delivery of special
education services, IEP’s, Extended School Year, and other topics.
November 26, 2001
Chicago, IL Grundy
County Special Education Cooperative
RBrown@isbe.net
217-524-4096
Teaching Communication Skills to Children with Autism and
other Developmental Delays.
Dr. Vince Carbone
November 26-27, 2001
Portland, OR
http://feator.org/carbone
feator@agora.rdrop.com 503-282-3328
MARC November Meeting
(Maryland Autism Recovery Coalition)
Dr. Arnold Brenner will present information on the
Biological Treatment of Autism using the DAN protocol.
November 29, 2001
Rockville, MD Broome
Building
Cyndi 301-216-0375
301-871-7527
Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD)
Topics will include Autism and Diagnosis by Doreen Granpeesheh,
PhD, as well as presentations discussing ABA, DTT, Visual Alternatives, and more....
November 30, 2001
San Diego, CA
858-278-6603
First Annual Conference on Applied Neurobiology
Presented by the American Academy of Neural Therapy
November 30, 2001
Seattle, WA
425-462-1777 www.neuraltherapy.com
Floor Time Workshop
Featuring Serena Wieder, PhD
December 5, 2001
Bloomington, MN
Radisson Hotel South
651-647-1083 mpowell@goldengate.net
Visual Strategies for Improving Communication and Behavior
Linda Hodgdon, M.Ed., CCC-SLP
December 6-7, 2001
Richmond, VA Sheraton
Park South Hotel
804-828-8151 www.soe.vcu.edu/ttac/
* * *
How is it that Bryna Siegel “stabbed the child and parents
in the back” by testifying he no longer needed ABA? (FEAT Newsletter Letters http://www.feat.org/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0111&L=FEATNEWS&P=R11347)
Just because a person presents a position that is counter to what you believe does
not make it wrong. To suggest that it
is out of a desire for money is ridiculous.
The letter writer appears to indicate that there would never be situation
that a child would no longer need ABA.
Her opinions are extreme, biased, and exceptionally unjustified.
* *
[The following two letters are in response to a letter by
Dr. Bryna Siegel which appeared in the FEAT Daily Newsletter last Tuesday (http://www.feat.org/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0111&L=FEATNEWS&P=R10012)
As she has done before, Bryna Siegel attempts to deflect
attention from the basic facts – that the conclusions she claims to draw from
her earlier her research have already been discredited in print – by a series of
irrelevancies. While she says that the charges concerning her 1998 article are
“untrue,” she does not even try to answer any of them. To help focus attention
on the realities of the matter, what follows is a short description of the
events surrounding her article, followed by a series of questions which I
challenge her to publicly answer with a simple “yes” or “no.”
For those who do not wish to read all the detail, the most
basic points are as follows:
1) Siegel has claimed
in print that her research shows that most children do not benefit from a
prolonged period of intensive therapy, but data included in an early draft of
this article actually show exactly the opposite: a strong and statistically
significant positive relationship between treatment length and the gains of the
children involved. This data is mysteriously missing from the final draft
of the article. Her own co-author has written that their
data showed this, and has said it is “unclear” to him why that finding was
omitted from the final version of the article.
2) Siegel also claims
that this article casts doubt on the relationship between number of hours per
week of treatment and positive results because she failed to find such a
relationship. However, she ignores the
fact that the children who received more hours per week on average received
considerably fewer weeks of therapy; this completely invalidates any such
inference. Again, the data necessary to
show this were in an early draft but deleted later on.
3) In addition, the
two groups Siegel compares in order to claim that the number of hours per week
did not matter are so miniscule that finding any statistically significant
relationship would have been very surprising; failing to find one is only to be
expected. The groups were also non-comparable
in a variety of ways (such as IQ at the beginning of the study and length of
time between pre-treatment and post-treatment testing) which biased the
comparison against the children receiving more hours per week. All of these problems should have made the group that received more
hours per week do worse, but in fact it still did somewhat better on average: a
fact that she omits and which contradicts her claim that her research casts
doubt on the relationship between the number of hours of therapy and its
efficacy.
+ [Letter continues at the web address below.]
http://www.angelfire.com/on/FEATNews/Ken_Pomeranz_Siegel.htm
Response by Maureen Graves:
Dr. Siegel calls me personally a “loose cannon” who has
been “threatening” her for years and suggests I may be “mad” because data do
not support the notion that all children need early intensive behavioral
intervention. In fact, I agree that
children’s needs as well as the quality of available home and school options
vary widely, and have assisted in securing a wide variety of services. Most of my clients and I would be very happy
if it were not necessary to arrange, fight for, and live with intensive in-home
programs. If there were research
indicating that these programs made no difference, I would want to know that.
While I have very frequently seen clients go from being
nonverbal during years of special education to beginning to talk soon after
starting intensive applied behavior analysis, I rely on research rather than
such “anecdotal” or “clinical” experiences.
I expect research to be done honestly
and with acceptable statistical techniques.
All reputable research has concluded that ABA programs are very helpful,
and indeed, the pattern has been that the more intensive programs are and the
longer they last, the better the results are.
See S.R. Anderson et al., “Intensive Home-based Early Intervention with
Autistic Children” (1987); Jay Birnbrauer & David Leach, “The Murdoch Early
Intervention Program After 2 Years” (1993);
Geraldine Dawson & Julie Osterling, “Early
Intervention in Autism,” in The Effectiveness of Early Intervention (1997);
Sandra Harris et al., “Changes in Cognitive and Language Functioning of
Preschool Children with Autism” (1991); Ivar Lovaas, “Behavioral Treatment and
Normal Educational and Intellectual Functioning in Young Autistic Children”
(1987); John McEachin, Tristam Smith & Ivar Lovaas, “Long-Term Outcome for
Children with Autism Who Received Early Intensive Behavioral Treatment” (1993);
Gregory Olley, Frank Robbins & Marlene Morelli-Robins, “Current Practices
in Early Intervention for Children with Autism” (1993); Sally Rogers, “Brief
Report: Early Intervention in Autism” (1996); Ruth Simeonsson, Gregory Olley
& Susan Rosenthal, “Early Intervention for Children with Autism”
(1987). Indeed, Siegel’s own initial
work contains one strong and statistically significant association – between
treatment length and outcomes.
As for the suggestion that my criticisms are “divisive”
and undermine parent confidence in professionals, I am afraid that this is
true, and unfortunately that this is necessary. As funding flows to autism research—through the hard work and
strong advocacy of parents and professionals in the field—it is crucial that
this money be spent on things that are likely to produce good results, and not
on things that are sure to produce bad ones.
The problems with Siegel’s work have been evident for years. Nonetheless, her work made it through JADD’s
internal process, and only with extreme persistence were refutations published
– in the letters column. + [Letter
continues at the web address below.]
http://www.angelfire.com/on/FEATNews/Maureen_Graves_Siegel.htm
Lenny Schafer, Editor Catherine Johnson PhD
Ron Sleith Kay Stammers
Editor@feat.org Edward Decelie CALENDAR: Michelle Guppy
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