A mother’s seemingly successful search to “cure” her autistic son…
This is the most e-mailed article on psychologytoday.com right now….
The Strange Case of Homeopathy
In 1994, NASA computer scientist Amy Lansky of Portola Valley, California, began wondering about her two-year-old son. Max knew the alphabet and could beat adults at memory games, but he barely spoke and, despite normal hearing, didn’t seem to understand language. At preschool he was a loner. His main form of communication was poking people with his finger. Eventually, school officials urged Lansky to have him evaluated. The diagnosis: autism, a neurological and behavioral disorder for which there is no known remedy.
But Lansky refused to believe Max was untreatable. Her search for an answer led her to homeopathy, an 18th-century healing art now enjoying renewed popularity because of Americans’ growing interest in alternative medicine. Homeopathy involves treating illnesses with such extreme dilutions of herbs, animal substances and chemical compounds that frequently not one molecule of the diluted substance is left in the solution. Homeopathy defies the known laws of science, not to mention common sense. But rigorous studies show it just may work. The rest of this article can be found here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20040302-000003.html
Jenna Purdy
October 25th, 2007 at 9:15 am
I know several families that use homeopathy to treat their children with autism, and it has led to some very amazing breakthroughs with the children. I can promise you this: if one day we find a cure for autism, it will not be a behavioral therapy or something that is strongly accepted by the symbolic/scientific world, it will be a product of ‘mother nature’ or a therapy focused on the maternal/imaginary.
Notice too that children with autism frequently learn to read before they ever speak a word. I would argue that they understand the symbolic very well, but they do not implement their knowledge of it in the same way that we do. Most parents are told their children will never imagine or interact with people, and yet through play therapy I’ve had children interact with me imaginatively for an hour at a time or more. I’m still unsure about what all of this means, but I know that autism is very much a struggle between the imaginary and the symbolic.
October 26th, 2007 at 12:02 am
That’s really interesting. One of the reasons this class intrigues me so much is because I actually learned to read before I learned to talk. I was born with a severe to profound hearing loss in both ears. Haha, I just realized something. I “read” lips when people talk. Man, that took awhile for me to realize…in the context of the class, anyway.
~Jenna Purdy