Michael Goldberg - The Myth of Autism: How a Misunderstood Epidemic Is Destroying Our Children

W HEN JENNY FIRST CAME TO ME, and this is typical of about half a dozen children in the practice, she didnt have any other markers I was looking at as showing that her immune system was activated, some of the things I would look for normally as a virus. But she had one very important one. Her ANA was 1:640 before I even met her. Somehow this was tested, and nobody did a thing.

By the time I graduated from UCLA, Id learned that autoimmune disorders were things that happened commonly in adults. These were the early days of collagen vascular disease, rheumatoid diseases, and lupus. The characteristic was that these patients did not often have a physical diagnosisthey didnt have a set disease. However, medicine said this was abnormal to have an elevated ANA, and these adults were treated as having a disordera disease. Why we cant give the children the same benefit of the doubt is beyond me.

Jennys parents were told she was autistic, so what about her ANA? When I met her, we repeated her value and her ANA was still elevated, but the rest of her blood work was not particularly exciting. As I do with most children, I took her off milk, dairy, chocolate, and whole wheat. Her parents will acknowledge that if she cheats and has a pizza or dairy product, her behavior becomes off the wall.

I started her on an antifungal, Nizoral. The parents already had her on low-dose supplements of N-dimethylglycine (DMG), a food substance found in the cells of the body.

She began to talk a little more. Within a short time I put her on a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which is a compound typically used as an antidepressant. She began to pick up on her speech and was interacting better.

As we went along, we introduced another antifungal. She began to lose some of her autistic behaviors. We changed her SSRI to Prozac and repeated a little bit of her blood work. Her ANA, at least as a marker, was coming down. She was still showing signs of allergy with her high eosinophils, but the parents felt this child was improving daily.

By August (a month later), her auditory processing was up; her social skills were up. She was not sick anymore. The parents were obviously very happy. In December, their statement to me was that she was doing excellent. She was on amphotericin and Prozac. In her case, she did well with a little bit of echinacea. She still had behavioral issues.

I want to stress this point because this is something that has really become apparent over the years. Many parents would have been thrilled to have this child functioning at the level she was, but what Im really looking for now is that cognitive functioning. She was having behavioral issues at home and school because she had never grown through the normal social stages.

It became obvious to the parents and teachers that what they were looking at were behavioral situations. But this child, cognitively, was doing extremely well. Jenny even toilet trained.

Why should she suddenly be able to toilet train after years of being unable? Ive always been taught as a pediatrician that you dont rush your child on toilet training. When they are ready, they will learn. This same thing is happening with these children as their brain turns back on, starts moving from that fifteen- to eighteen-month-old to two-year-old to two-and-a-halfyear-old level, at some point the child toilet trains like any other child.

We bounced her around a little bit on the antifungals with the idea that the amphotericin was probably not holding her. In 1997, again, she kept doing better day by day. She reached a point where she was doing very well by many, many criteria. But it takes years for the brain to evolve. It cant jump from birth to five or birth to ten. These children have to pick up and learn.

By the following June the parents state she is acting more and more normal. We added an antiviral not because she gave me any viral titers, but because by then it had become apparent that many of these children seem to be fighting a background herpes or retrovirus-type process. Whether its because their immune systems are stressed, weakened a little bit, and they are more susceptible to these viruses lasting longer, it is not clear. Within five days, the parents saw a significant improvement; motor skills improved, she became more social, and she made a complaint to her teacher that she could not think at times because her brain hurt.

As she progressed the headaches went away. She seemed to go through cycles of growth like any other childthings will be going well, and theyll seem to plateau, or have a rough drop and then move forward.

By the end of the year she was starting to wake up rested. Whether children are getting enough sleep is a very big factor when I determine whether to treat a child with attention deficit disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, or autism/PDD. I learned in the late 1980s studying chronic fatigue syndrome at the University of California, Irvine, that when your brain was affected with these illnesses, you did not go into a normal sleep cycle. Researchers documented that these adults with an unknown (at that time) presumably psychiatric disorder were going into a stage where they did not enter normal stage 4 REM sleep cycles. You could sleep eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours and still wake up tired. The end goal is for the patient to wake up feeling rested.

By then, Jenny was going to be in a school play (which she did very well in, by the way). I have many reports from parents in my practice who report that after months of treatments their child took part in their first baseball game or performed in their first school play. Thats not something youre told to expect out of your childrenbut its possible. As we progressed, we switched her medication to Zoloft. Even though this child had been doing very, very well, the parents came in and said she was doing even bettert.

Lets go back to her diagnosis of autism. This was how she was labeled. I will guarantee you that she does not meet any of those criteria at this point.

Case Study for H.C.: DOB 5/93

• Large headcould not get down birth canal
• Jaundice
• Limited success with breast feedingthen formula
• Enjoyed interacting with mom and dad
• Some words at 9 months
• At about 1 yr.whole milk
• Realized not developing language as she should
• Sometimes refuses to cooperate
• National Naval Medical Centerpossible storage problem in headdecisionnothing abnormal
• Didnt potty train
• Lab: Jenny
• 11/98 ANANeg
• HHV6 IGG <20
• CD4 1180
• CD8 502
• NK Cells 8 percent
• Interferon alpha: 439
• GliadinNeg.
• Folate 11.7
• Vit. B12911.4
• 3/00 ferritin43
• 3/01 HHV6 IGG 1:80
• CD4 1144
• CD8 506
• NK Cells 5.0 percent
• 5/01 interferon alpha <5
• ASO695

Initial 3-D NeuroSPECT imaging on patient H.C. Holes are multiple areas of decreased perfusion and decreased function in the brain. This brain scan graphically illustrates the difficulty of normal brain function when holes are present.

NeuroSPECT scan 2.5 years later, after treatment with The Goldberg Approach (see chapter 7). While brain function is not normal, it is significantly improved.