Autism
Nutritional medicine and functional medicine support for autistic children and young people
Autism is one word doing an impossible amount of work.
It gets given to a child who is doing well, an unusual mind managing in a world not built for them, who needs understanding rather than treatment.
And it gets given to a child who is non-verbal, in pain, awake half the night, hitting himself and losing skills he had a year ago. Those two children have very different needs, and yet they are described with the same word.
That range is where the confusion starts. The first child needs acceptance and the right support to thrive as they are. The second is clearly unwell.
Plenty sit somewhere in between: coping on the surface, managing school and holding it together, but anxious, not sleeping, reacting to half the foods they eat, or worn down by something nobody has got to the bottom of.
Looking underneath the label
A label tells you what to call a child. It tells you nothing about what is driving how they feel.
Some children are visibly unwell, and everything they are dealing with gets written off as part of the autism.
Others cope on the surface, and everyone assumes they are fine. They mask it all, and they have been told this is simply who they are, their personality, their autism.
Underneath, either child may be dealing with
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Constipation, loose stools, tummy pain, reflux
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Anxious, not sleeping, reacting to half the foods they eat
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Never slept through the night
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Nutrient deficiency
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Seizures, recurrent infections, histamine reactions
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Inflammation, mast cells firing
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Joint pain, fatigue, skills lost after an illness
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An immune system reacting to everything
For some children this has been there for years and never looked at. It can be found and worked on.
A child who is struggling underneath, however well or badly they appear to be managing, does not have to keep struggling. Once the physical drivers are dealt with, children change. The anxiety lifts. They sleep. They stop reacting to everything. And the more affected children concentrate better, settle, cope with a classroom, pick up words, and start joining in with the people around them.
All of it can be worked on. It just takes someone willing to look underneath the label.
Autism does not look the same in every child.
For some children, autism shows up as a child going backwards: losing words and skills they already had, stimming more, more anxious, no longer aware of ordinary danger, pulling away from the people around them. Sometimes it happens suddenly, sometimes over weeks or months.
For others it is not a loss but an absence. The language did not develop, the skills did not develop, and the child did not reach the milestones you were expecting.
We help both.
You don’t need a diagnosis to work with us.
Plenty of the children we see have no label at all, or are still waiting for an assessment, or have been given a label that doesn't really explain anything. We work with the child in front of us.
How we work: foundations first
We work in a particular order.
Before we go anywhere near the deeper work, we get a child steady. That means calming the things that keep a child in a state of high alert and stop anything else working: the stress response and the adrenals behind it, inflammation, any infection, the mast cells that drive so many of the reactions we see, and the mineral balance the whole system runs on. Until those are settled, anything else we try tends not to last, and a child who is already flaring will often react badly to it.
There is no single starting point, because it depends entirely on the child.
If a child is badly constipated, we deal with that. If a child is inflamed and flaring, we settle that first. What we do not do is work in a fixed order regardless of the child, or pile everything on at once. This is why so many families arrive having tried a rigid protocol that made their child worse. Get the order wrong, or ask a child to tolerate too much before they are steady, and you can set them back months.
Once a child is stable, we go deeper: the gut, detoxification, methylation, whatever that particular child’s picture calls for.
Thirteen years and around 3,500 families have taught us where to start and, more to the point, what order to do things in. By the time they reach us, most of these children have already seen several different practitioners and specialists, each looking at one piece of the child rather than the whole of them.
We do not work in isolation
We work closely with a prescribing GP and other specialists who know these children well. If a child needs a medical assessment, a prescription or a specialist opinion, we say so, and we can usually help you get to the right person rather than back to the end of a waiting list.
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“His ATEC score has gone from 89 to 21”
My son was diagnosed with autism just before his second birthday. We were dealing with constipation and depression, to name but a few of the underlying issues. I found the ATEC evaluation checklist and Ethan's baseline score was 89, bordering on severe autism. We tried dietary changes and went gluten and dairy free, which overnight made a huge difference: we had a child who no longer cried 90% of the day, closer to 40%, and it was the first proof to us that working on the underlying problems changed things.
In May 2017 I found Brainstorm Health. Less than two years later, following the protocols to a tee, we are down to an ATEC score of 21. How do I know he has not simply grown out of it? Because the strides forward were huge and always right after starting an intervention, sometimes just 24 hours afterwards, as was the case when we addressed his anaemia and supported his immune system. My son is in mainstream education and thriving.
— C.F, London
What working with us looks like
Everything is done online, so where you live makes no difference. Families work with us from all over the world.
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Fifteen minutes with one of our practitioners. Nothing to prepare, nothing to pay, and no obligation at the end of it. You tell us what has been happening, we tell you whether this is likely to help your child, and you decide from there whether you want to go further.
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Seventy five minutes on Zoom, after you have filled in a detailed questionnaire covering your child’s history, symptoms, diet, sleep, gut and everything that has been tried before. We go through all of it with you, and we leave you with the first few things to start on, chosen because they are what will settle your child soonest, rather than everything at once.
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Stool, urine, saliva or blood. Only where the result will actually change what we do, and only where it is realistic for your family.
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This is the opposite of a fixed protocol. At first we review every six to eight weeks, adapting the plan each time to how your child has responded. As they need less support, the reviews space out, because the aim is always to be doing less over time, not more. We build things up carefully rather than overwhelming a child, or a family, with too much at once. Depending on what the picture calls for, the work can include targeted nutritional support, amino acid therapy, phospholipid therapy, our Gut Restoration protocol, micro-immunotherapy, and the diet, lifestyle and environmental changes that do so much of the heavy lifting. We refer on where you need it.
Most families are with us for at least six months. It is patient work, and we would rather say so at the start.
Where to start
You do not have to decide anything today. Book a free fifteen minute call, tell one of our practitioners about your child, and they will tell you what they think, what it would involve and what it would cost. You can take it from there.