Posted on 01/06/2010 9:05:59 AM PST by GauchoUSA
The vaccine theory may not be totally discounted. Gulf War Syndrome where troops got sick with many different symptoms may have been caused by too many vaccines taken at the same time. The mercury preservatives may not be the problem but the side reactions interacting with each other. From birth to kindergarden children must take many vaccines.
Tibit info, Amish do not eat processed foods, and take immunization shots, their autism rate is 1 per 15000 while nearby non Amish neighbors have autism rate of 1 per 150.
Do not take this study at face value. I have a background in statistics and studies like this are extremely difficult and error-prone. This is more likely noise and random variations in their data than true variations. Since the authors are from a university their politics is almost certainly left-wing so they may have some ax to grind, which will affect their analysis and presentation of the results. Read the Climategate emails to see how ‘objective’ these ‘scientists’ are.
Just saw this post. My daughter has special needs (brain injury that caused severe speech problems, epilepsy, auditory problems, and other issues), and we live in California.
“California mandates that all special education students have mental health counseling through the public health system (they put them on ritalin). “
We have never, ever recieved any mental health counseling from California, and my daughter needs it. She’s been to a private psychiatrist and psychologist.
“They also provide respite service for the parents.”
They have never provided any respite services for us.
“all day pre-school for the handicapped.”
They did provide pre-school, but there were 2 choices: 1 was an afternoon class that we tried, but it was during my daughter’s nap time, and she needed to take a nap.
There was a morning class provided, but it was at a school where that is primarily Spanish and the class would have been taught in Spanish.
It was very hard to get any good services for my daughter.
We have always had to provide private services for her in order to get her needs met.
They were horrible with a kid with a brain injury. Maybe it’s different if a kid has autism, but we never received much from California.
I don’t know where you live, but in Orange County, the schools contact Orange County Public Health and Orange County mental health. If the school hasn’t done that for you, you need to call them yourself as well as make a complaint to the school district, special needs dept. I’m surprised that your pediatrician didn’t put you in contact with the public health dept. If the services are there, you may as well take advantage of them. You are paying for them.
I had to contact a private speech therapist to get speech therapy for my daughter’s language deficit. The California schools are way behind in identifying specific learning disabilities and want to lump them all under low IQ, which is sometimes indeterminable, when it’s hidden beneath several layers of disability.
My daughter received one on one therapy and play skill training. We went twice a week and once a week, I got free counseling because I told them that I was angry all the time because of her behavior. For some of the kids, the counselors or social workers went to the schools to observe the children at recess and in class.
I’ve been in contact with everyone I can, including a lawyer. I’m in San Jose, and our district is notorious for being bad. It’s like they are okay if your child has autism or down syndrome, but not if it is something out of the box.
After talking to a lawyer and a friend who actually won a case against her school district, we decided just to get the services privately. We’ve had good health insurance that has paid for a lot, and then we max out our health saving account.
I have a pretty good selection of private therapists/doctors by now (speech, occupational, psychologist, psychiatrist, neurologist).
A lot of the problem is that she is high functioning in so many ways. She goes to a regular private junior high, and is getting A’s & B’s with little accomodations.
The worst year was 3rd grade. She was having all these strange symptoms (covering her ears and shouting “shut up” “shut up”, and terrible melt-downs, lots of headaches), and I didn’t know what was going on. The district just thought I was crazy. All the specialist thought it was just stress, but they were wrong. I finally took her back to the neurologist, and before we could have an EEG, she had a grand mal seizure. Once she got on anti-seizure medication, the strange behaviors stopped.
We’re lucky because we can afford to send her to private therapists/school. I feel so sorry for families that can’t do that.
The most frustrating part for me is that the school district led us down the wrong path for her on many occasions. They never told us she needed to be taught sign language. They literally told us she didn’t need it, and it would hurt her. Even if they would have said, we can’t provide the services, but this is what she needs. Our district lied to us about things.
I have to let it go, but I really hate that my taxes go to fund the district.
I was doing some research on diagnosis and symptoms recently. One of the articles I read stated that it was the fastest growing diagnosis in silicon valley since Attention deficit disorder.
Problem is there is no definitive test, and plenty of disagreement about how to diagnose autism-especially for high-functioning children.
The school districts put kids in boxes, they limit the services according to IQ or potential benefit. So, if a low performing Downs syndrome kid has a speech problem, no services are provided, but a high performing child might get services.
It is possible that in my case, the school district was extra attentive because they were proved wrong. The speech therapist demonstrated that my daughter had a language deficit, not a low IQ. She just got words mixed up. She could describe what an object or picture was but could not name it. The private therapist made the school speech department look like a bunch of idiots. What happened in our case was that the speech therapist wrote a letter to the school explaining where they went wrong and demanded a full evaluation and IEP. We had meetings that were like hearings. The school lost.
The teachers on the west coast are still very deficient in learning disability training. My daughter went all the way through high school before I heard the term, dyscalclia, from a friend who is a learning disabilities specialist in Florida.
We had an independent evaluation done (at the district expense). We could have picked our own, but we used the one that the district selected.
The neuropsychologist that did the evaluation went to the IEP, and said it was the worst IEP she had ever been to. She said usually school districts actually want to help, but not ours.
After the IEP, the neuropsychologist said to my husband and I “So what school are you transferring your daughter to?”.
My daughter always performed high on the standardized testing. She does well with multiple choice tests. However, she could write a sentence because she has word finding problems. Also, she couldn’t sound out words she hadn’t memorized. We put her in a school with a pull-out multi-sensory reading program, and then her private speech therapist really worked on her word finding problems and taught her lots of tricks when writing. The therapist also taught me ways to get my daughter to recall words (mainly by asking questions).
School is still difficult for my daughter, and she has to work for good grades. She is a slow reader, but has good comprehension. She listens to books on CD/MP3s for book reports with lots of reading. Her writing is a bit simple, but she can pull out an essay when she has to. It takes her more time than most kids, but she can do it.
The good thing is that she is not lazy. She gets really irritated at kids that don’t do their homework or study. (I don’t blame her.) At this point, she’ll be able to go to college. We’re thinking a state college near our house, so she can still live at home and get any tutoring she might need.
No, that is not true about districts wanting to help. They only want to help with easy definable problems. If it gets too complicated, they tell you that the child doesn’t qualify because the help would do no good and just frustrate the child and everyone else.
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