Posted on 04/19/2015 9:59:46 AM PDT by EBH
One day in March 2010, Isak McCune started clearing his throat with a forceful, violent sound. The New Hampshire toddler was 3, with a Beatles mop of blonde hair and a cuddly, loving personality. His parents had no idea where the guttural tic came from. They figured it was springtime allergies.
Soon after, Isak began to scream as if in pain and grunt at his parents and peers. When he wasn’t throwing hours-long tantrums, he stared vacantly into space. By the time he was 5, he was plagued by insistent, terrifying thoughts of death. “He would smash his head into windows and glass whenever the word ‘dead’ came into his head. He was trying to drown out the thoughts,” says his mother, Robin McCune, a baker in Goffstown, a small town outside Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city.
Isak’s parents took him to pediatricians, therapy appointments, and psychiatrists. He was diagnosed with a host of disorders: sensory processing disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). At 5, he spent a year on Prozac, “and seemed to get worse on it,” says Robin McCune.
The McCunes tried to make peace with the idea that their son might never come back. In kindergarten, he grunted and screamed, frightening his teachers and classmates. “He started hearing voices, thought he saw things, he couldn’t go to the bathroom alone,” Robin McCune says. “His fear was immense and paralyzing.”
As his behaviors worsened, both parents prepared themselves for the possibility that he’d have to be home-schooled or even institutionalized. Searching for some explanation, they came across a controversial diagnosis called pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococci, or PANDAS. First proposed in 1998, PANDAS linked the sudden onset of psychiatric symptoms like Isak’s to strep infections.
(Excerpt) Read more at nautil.us ...
Maybe needs an exorcism.
I have two children (now grown) with mental disorders so I’m fascinated by this. I’m currently reading The Brain That Changes Itself. Plasticity seems to be the buzzword.
I’ve considered that as I was going to mass this morning our archbishop was talking to a psychologists about behavior disorders.
I caught insanity from my kids. I became a normal person again the day they moved out! ;)
Good read. A terrifying ordeal for any parent to have to deal with.
Definitely interesting read.
My take on it?
Decline of basic ‘doctoring’ in medical professionals.
4 years to diagnosis is not something to boast about.
Note how doctors’ names are conveniently omitted from the article, as is any specificity to the treatments and range of doctors over that 4 years.
I find that decidedly convenient. It is also the part of the story of which I am most interested.
Sounds like a frequents the religious or civil war threads here at FR.
Interesting read.
Inflammation is becoming more commonly identified in a number of physical disorders and diseases.
ROFLMAO.
Have you been reading the other thread in which I’ve been a target this morning???
“Yes, you can catch insanity”
Explains Congress perfectly.
The basis for all disease are two things: irritation, followed by inflammation
=disease.
A friend of mine was found recently to have a very rare type of cancer. Apparently this particular ailment was completely unknown about twenty years ago and the tumors were treated with chemotherapy and/or radiation.
Since these rare tumors don't respond to chemo or radiation, this meant that the patient would suffer unchecked progression of the disease and, just as important, the chemo treatments were thought to be less effective than they really are.
Once the distinction between my friend's ailment and other diseases was recognized, specific treatments were developed and it became possible to fine tune chemotherapy for cancers which do respond to it.
N.H. Families Fight For Rare Diagnosis Linking Strep To Kids’ OCD
http://nhpr.org/post/nh-families-fight-rare-diagnosis-linking-strep-kids-ocd
There’s a video of this poor child at the link too.
If infections could damage the brain to the point of causing retardation, blindness and deafness, mental illness due to malfunctions in the brain is not unreasonable.
My grandson got Strep constantly, it turned out that a classmate of his kept giving it to him but no one even knew she was sick until she got Scarlett Fever.
One summer I had to take him to the doctor for a school physical because his parents were busy. I just had a hunch that he had it again, something in his voice and when the Dr. pronounced him fine I asked if he would do a strep test. He told me that there was nothing to indicate that test and I asked him if he would just humor me. Thankfully he did and it was positive. The Dr. was flabbergasted.
bump
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