Treating Autism

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. David Hill and today we're going to be talking about treating autism. Autism spectrum disorders cover a wide variety of behaviors and these behaviors are being tracked in more and more different actual underlying conditions. But the behaviors involve generally difficulty in understanding in communicating with people around the effected child and also difficulty dealing with sensory inputs of all sorts within the environment. These problems can be profound and so people have gone to rather desperate measures to try to treat them. Treatment is also often very, very challenging and so finding successful treatment has been difficult. There are two types of treatment that actually have been studied well enough to say that they work reasonably well for improving the skills of autistic children. The one that's had the most good research behind it is called applied behavior analysis. This a technique where especially trained behaviorists try to see what behaviors are functional and less functional for a child with autism and then rearrange the environment to help the child do the behaviors that work better. Another decently studied modality is called structured teaching. This underlies the famous "teach" program. And this involves using structure and a highly directional environment to try and help the autistic child to gain skills. Now there are all sorts of behavioral approaches to treating autism that are being tried. We're collecting data all the time and some of those may pop into the top tier of useful therapies as well as we learn more about them but for the moment, the literature still just has a lot of data that we have to gather. Now this is outside of things like speech therapy and occupational therapy which can be very helpful in helping autistic children cope with their environment. I'd like to talk for a moment on some of the unvalidated and potentially dangerous therapies. Any time traditional medicine doesn't seem to be terribly successful, all sorts of people pop up with all sorts of ideas about what they can do instead. It's important to understand that none of these ideas has been well tested scientifically and while some of them only harm you in the wallet, some are potentially deadly. The most important thing I can say about these is autism is not a form of heavy metal poisoning. There are labs all over the country, many of them uncertified, which do all sorts of screens that report to show heavy metal, but when those are sent to real reference labs and checked using the best possible means, it's clear that heavy metal and autism are not related. That doesn't mean that heavy metal poisoning is a good thing. There are all sorts of bad heavy metal poisoning, but it does not cause autism. Do not let anyone chelate your child. The few deaths that we have seen from autism therapies have been associated chelation. That is dangerous. It has never been shown to help a child with autism and if somebody's wanting to do it, you can bet that they probably don't have a very good understanding of the useful therapies of autism. There are other therapies such as purgatives trying to clean out the body of yeast, a gluten-free diet, these things are all very popular on the Internet and alternative sites and clinics, however none of them has the weight of good science behind it, and why make your child suffer for something that hasn't been proven to help? So remember, when looking for an autism therapy, find something that has really good solid science behind it, either applied behavioral analysis or structured teaching and work with a well established autism clinic to make sure your child gets good care. Talking about treatment for autism, I'm Dr. David Hill."