Sensory Processing Disorder Drove Me Over the Edge

He was crying about everything almost non-stop, and almost nothing I could do could console him.

I read an article the other day from SheKnows Parenting called, “How To Talk To Your Pediatrician About Sensory Processing Disorder” that summed up Sensory Processing Disorder very well:  “The difference between a finicky child and a child with sensory processing disorder (SPD) is that the child with SPD will often react in what you would consider a highly over the top manner, such as prolonged screaming and crying.”

That was my older son, and that’s what drove me over the edge.

A Whole Host of Sudden, New Symptoms

Because of this, I developed middle-of-the-night insomnia, extreme irritability, shingles (twice), bronchitis (which I’d never had before), the worst case of poison ivy ever (I took a 6-pack of steroids which made it go away until I stopped taking it, at which point it came back with a vengeance), systemic Candida, chronic sinus infections, suddenly irregular cycles, a uterine fibroid (which caused intra-cycle bleeding) and an ovarian cyst.

I had never had “female” issues before, but now I was loaded with them!  And all of these things happened within a year and a half’s time.

Stress Led to Uterine Fibroid

Shortly after, I developed a uterine fibroid.  It was about an inch long and, luckily, was pendulous, making it easily removed with surgery.

I remember my gynecologist at the time telling me I had three choices:  1) do nothing; 2) remove it surgically; or, 3) remove it surgically and also perform an ablation to make sure it never, ever came back.

This kind of scorched-earth policy on my body freaked me out, so I chose not to do that.  I went ahead with the surgery, which was easy enough, because he led me to believe that the fibroid would not likely go away and may, in fact, get bigger.

I suppose I could have gone for a second opinion, but the only other gynecologists I knew of, that most of my friends knew of, were his colleagues, and so I assumed I would just get the same answer.

Adrenal Fatigue

I was bone-tired and needed 2-3 hour naps every day, and even then I woke up tired.  I was more tired than I usually had been throughout my life.

I remember needing naps as a teenager.  Even as a young woman, I remember taking naps on the couch at lunch.  In fact, when my brother came to see me recently, the first thing he asked my boys was, “Does your mommy still take naps?”

In any case, naps were necessary, but they weren’t making me any less tired.

Other symptoms of adrenal fatigue that I had were low blood pressure, feeling dizzy after rising from lying down, brain fog, poor immunity, craving salty and sugary foods, unexplained hair loss (it used to come out in clumps in the shower – ugh!), insomnia and a tendency to startle easily.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve had low blood pressure (which doctors said was never a problem – yeah, right!) and dizziness after rising.  I must have had a mild case of adrenal fatigue almost all my life!

Craving carbohydrates (breads, cereals, crackers, cookies, bagels, etc.) and sweets is another sign of adrenal fatigue.  It can also be a sign of a system Candida or other pathogen infection, too.

That’s because a lot of times (or always?  I’m curious!), these two issues go hand in hand.  The preferred food of Candida and pathogenic bacteria is carbohydrates in the form of sugar, grains and starches.

Maria Rickert Hong is a Certified Holistic Health Counselor who received her training from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  She specializes in recovery from symptoms of autoimmune, neurological, behavioral and digestive disorders, as she has recovered her own sons from Sensory Processing Disorder, asthma and acid reflux.  She is also a board member, social media director and blogger for Epidemic Answers, a non-profit whose goal is to let parents know recovery is possible from autism, ADHD, SPD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune, Lyme and more.

Maria Rickert Hong can be contacted at maria[at]epidemicanswers[dot]org

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This document is not a substitute for medical advice, treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a medical professional.  It is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on to make determinations related to treatment of a medical condition.  Epidemic Answers has not verified and does not guaranty the accuracy of the information provided in this document. 

Beth’s presentation is titled, “Canary Kids, The Tipping Point, and the End of the Autism Epidemic”.  Here’s a quick summary:

“While many dedicated individuals are focused on ending the autism epidemic by advancing science and research, we can push this process along by cultivating and encouraging a cultural shift that is already underway.

With more than half of American children with a chronic illness, the tipping point is near.  We need only nudge it along.”

You’ve got to check out Beth’s presentation!

Beth Lambert is the author of A Compromised Generation:  The Epidemic of Chronic Illness in America’s Children.  She is also the Founder and Executive Director of Epidemic Answers, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.  Beth is a former healthcare consultant and teacher and holds an M.A. in American Studies, with a concentration in American Healthcare.

Sign up for our newsletter and find out why this epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses is occurring and what you can do about it. 

This document is not a substitute for medical advice, treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a medical professional.  It is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on to make determinations related to treatment of a medical condition.  Epidemic Answers has not verified and does not guaranty the accuracy of the information provided in this document. 

Come and meet the Director of the Canary Kids Film Project, Mary Mazzio, as well as practitioners experienced in recovering kids from autism, ADHD, allergies, asthma and other chronic conditions.  Our panel includes:

•  Kristin Canty, Director and Producer, Farmageddon
•  Silvana Spinelli-Casale PHD, School Neuropsychologist
•  Beth Lambert, Author, A Compromised Generation; Executive Producer, Canary Kids 
•  Mary Mazzio, Director/Producer Canary Kids
•  Alison MacNeil, Author, The Thinking Moms’ Revolution  
•  Sarge Goodchild, Director of Active Healing, Gloucester, MA
•  Heather Tallman Ruhm, MD, Center for Integrative Medicine, Concord, NH
•  Michelle Tortora, Energy Medicine Practitioner, Co-Founder Epidemic Answers
•  Stephanie Seneff, PhD, MIT Professor, Researcher

Register here for this free event.  We hope to see you there!

Could this be responsible for their sensory processing disorder (SPD), asthma, allergies, eczema, acid reflux, and developmental delays?

Would I finally find the common thread that I had been looking for all along that tied all of these conditions together?

Yes, unfortunately. 

My Sons’ Heavy-Metal Toxicity

After finding out about my toxicity, I had both sons tested with a heavy-metal hair test because it’s not invasive.

My older son was in the 97th percentile for heavy-metal toxicity; my younger at the 90th.

That means that my older son had more heavy metals in him than 97% of people in the reference group, which contains roughly 40,000 people.

My older son had elevated levels of aluminum, antimony, barium, cadmium, lead, mercury, nickel, silver and tin, while my younger son’s levels of aluminum, antimony, arsenic, mercury, silver, thorium, tin and uranium were high.

Among other things, the Doctor’s Data lab report said that:

• “Hair aluminum is commonly elevated in children and adults with low zinc and behavioral disorders such as ADD, ADHD and autism”.
• Insecticides are a common source of arsenic.
• Lead is a neurotoxin, and children with lead levels “greater than 1 g/g have been reported to have a higher incidence of hyperactivity”.
• Mercury contributes to immune dysregulation and is also a neurotoxin. Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill say in “Age of Autism” that one in six children is born with blood levels of mercury high enough to cause a neurodevelopmental disorder later on in life.
• “Nickel can hypersensitize the immune system, subsequently causing hyperallergenic responses to many different substances”.
• The isotope of radioactive thorium that is tested for is Th-232, which eventually decays to lead.  It’s typically used as a coating for tungsten in incandescent light bulbs.

I believe the high levels of lead and mercury in them (they were ages 3 and 4 when I had them tested) were responsible for their sensory processing disorder, as both of these metals are known neurotoxins that damage the nervous system, and SPD is a nervous-system disorder.

Heavy metal accumulations are typically found in children with autism.

How Did My Sons Get So Polluted?

You may be wondering, as I was, how the heck my sons got so polluted.  Guess what?  They got it from me.  You read that right.

Not many people, pediatricians included, know about the Environmental Working Group’s report from 2005 entitled, “Body Burden:  The Pollution in Newborns:  A Benchmark Investigation of Industrial Chemicals, Pollutants, and Pesticides in Human Umbilical Cord Blood”.

The study found 287 “commercial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides” in the cord blood of 10 randomly selected newborns from across the U.S.

It used to be thought that the blood-brain barrier between the mother and the fetus would protect the fetus from toxins, but this report showed that it does not.  

There’s only one way that a newborn baby could have such a high toxic load and that’s from the mother.

I really felt sick to my stomach when I realized that I had unknowingly passed these toxins on to my boys.

And then I got angry, really angry.  Why hadn’t I been warned?  Why don’t doctors know about this?

The truth is that most pediatricians and other doctors have not been trained in medical school to look for environmental causes of illness, despite the growing preponderance of evidence and the growing epidemic of autoimmune diseases.

If you want the real answers to these questions, you have to do your own research and look outside the narrow viewpoint of conventional Western medicine.

I’m fortunate because I used to be an equity research analyst on Wall Street and a marketing analyst for an oil-services firm before that, so I know how to research issues.

My mom was an information analyst for the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Lab, which played a significant role in the production of the first atomic bomb, so I must have picked the ability up from her.

I urge you to be very selective in where you get your health news.

If it’s from the mainstream media like TV news, newspapers and magazines, you have to remember that nothing is going to be said or written that is too controversial.

They know who butters their bread, and a significant chunk of that butter comes from ads from pharmaceutical companies and even Big Ag companies, whose interest is not in keeping you healthy; it’s in making money for themselves from you buying their products.

I find my best sources to be books and newsletters because they are well researched and because you can independently review the research that is referenced.

I particularly like Dr. Sherry Rogers’ “Total Wellness” newsletter as she references her articles to the nth degree.

When I read a book, I also look at the list of scientific papers and books that are listed in the resource section in the book, which gives me a whole other set of publications from where I can learn more.

Bioaccumulation of Toxins

What’s happening is that these toxins are bioaccumulating from one generation to the next.  Do you remember how pregnant women are told to avoid large, fatty fish like tuna and swordfish because of the high levels of mercury they contain?

They have that much mercury because it bioaccumulates: a tuna eats lots of smaller fish, which in turn eat lots of still-smaller fish.  Mercury doesn’t leave these fishes’ bodies, so the levels continue to climb as you go further up the food chain, as in a tuna or swordfish.

And people are at the very top of the food chain so all of those persistent pollutants like heavy metals, pesticides and plasticizers are accumulating inside of us.  Both pesticides and plasticizers are known thyroid disruptors, and pesticides also damage the nervous system.

Other nasty toxins also bioaccumulate like perchlorate, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (such as benzene and toluene), hexavalent chromium (the Erin Brockovich chemical), and tri-chloroethylene (TCE), which is now causing a huge epidemic of male breast cancer at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base.  (There’s a documentary about this issue:  Semper Fi:  Always Faithful.

I believe this bioaccumulation of toxins from one generation to the next has reached a critical point and is the number one reason behind the growing epidemic of cancers, autoimmune diseases, autism, SPD, ADHD, asthma, allergies, developmental delays, even heart disease, obesity and diabetes.

Our babies are being born pre-polluted.  The cards are stacked against them to begin with; they really don’t stand much of a chance unless you detoxify them!

Dr. Sherry Rogers, author of many books including “Detoxify or Die”, “The High Blood Pressure Hoax”, and “Is Your Cardiologist Killing You?”, is constantly writing and lecturing about how environmental toxins are constantly overlooked by the medical profession as causes of disease.

She should know because she recovered herself from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and numerous other toxin-related illnesses and conditions.

I really wish other doctors and laypeople would read her books to gain an understanding of the nature of most chronic diseases and conditions:  toxicity and deficiency.

I’m really beginning to believe that most people are far more toxic than they realize, and the toxicity compounds from one generation to the next.

In addition, some people are better at detoxifying than others, and this ability can vary depending on the ability to handle stress (remember those adrenal glands I wrote about a few blogs ago?), the nutritional quality of a person’s diet, exposure to toxins, and the use of antibiotics and pharmaceuticals.

As Dr. Rogers says, “drugs work by simply poisoning a pathway” and “the sick get sicker quicker” when they take pharmaceuticals; that’s why there are so many nasty side effects to taking them.

Pharmaceuticals also put a tremendous amount of strain on the already toxic, overloaded liver.

Prevention, Not Cure

I believe there is far too much time, money and attention paid to researching genetic origins of diseases and to developing pharmaceuticals that mask symptoms.

Why are we spending millions of dollars trying to find a cure for breast cancer, for example, and not looking at what can be done to prevent it or what causes it?

Keeping with this example, I’m not talking about mammograms as a means of prevention.

I mean:  why aren’t most scientists, doctors and the media looking at the causes of breast cancer:

• The toxins that lead to the disease (such as the TCE I mentioned above)
• Foods that can reduce the risk of getting the disease (such as mushrooms and cruciferous vegetables)
• Supplements that can help detoxify the body (like silymarin, vitamin C and vitamin D)
• Pre-disease conditions that lower the body’s immunity (such as hypoadrenia, hypothyroidism, systemic Candida infections, and food sensitivities and allergies)?

Why?  Because there’s no money in prevention.  OK, maybe a little, but it’s nothing in comparison to the money that is generated by a drug that provides a temporary benefit and simply masks a symptom without getting to the root cause.

As Robyn O’Brien said in, “The Unhealthy Truth:  One Mother’s Shocking Investigation into the Dangers of America’s Food Supply– and What Every Family Can Do to Protect Itself”:  “people are profit centers”.

In other words, you’re worth more as a sick person because you need drugs and medical services to treat your condition, which costs money, certainly far more money than it would have cost you to eat cruciferous vegetable and take some silymarin (for example).

There’s a new field of study called epigenetics, which, thankfully, is getting some attention and funding.  The basic premise is “genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger”.

Yes, you may carry BRCA1 gene which means that you’re more susceptible to breast cancer, but what you eat and drink, what you put on your skin, what toxins you’re born with and the toxins you’re exposed to, how you deal with stress, how healthy your gut flora are, and whether or not you take pharmaceuticals, hormones or over-the-counter drugs is far more important in determining if you’ll ever get breast cancer.

“The Perfect Storm”
I’ve established that my sons got their heavy-metal poisoning from me.  As if that weren’t bad enough, there are several compounding factors that made their health worse.

Beth Lambert, one of the founders of the Epidemic Answers non-profit for which I blog, details these factors in her book, “A Compromised Generation:  The Epidemic of Chronic Illness in America’s Children”.

She calls these factors a “perfect storm” that’s leading to the growing epidemic of children with autism, ADHD, allergies, asthma, etc.

The perfect storm consists of stressful lifestyles, an overuse of antibiotics and pharmaceuticals, growing exposure to environmental toxins, a lack of nutrients in the mother’s and baby’s diet, and excessive or improperly administered vaccines.

Little did I know when I was first pregnant that we were about to get caught up in that perfect storm.  Here’s what it looked like for me, and I believe it’s the reason for my sons’ SPD, acid reflux, asthma, allergies and eczema.

Stress
I grew up in a dysfunctional, stressful home.  My parents had a home-based technical translation business (Trans-Chem, Inc., for anyone that was familiar with it).

They were both chemists and both knew a multitude of languages, so they made a living at translating foreign chemical patents into English for companies such as Dow, Monsanto, Wrigley’s, Conoco, Hoechst Celanese, etc.

They did this before the age of personal computers, so everything was translated by hand, typed with a typewriter and copied in the basement with a mammoth-sized Xerox copy machine that was as big as some people’s kitchen counters.

I worked in that business since I was six.  I used to stand on top of a footstool making copies of pages one by one.  This was the old days; we didn’t have multi-page copiers back then.

I remember being yanked out of my bed in the middle of the night on a school night and being forced to make copies in the cold, dark basement alone because I had messed up.  It took me a loooong time to get over my fear of making a mistake!

I believe my dad was bipolar because he was either very happy or very angry.  He got angry a lot, and when he did, he cursed and threw things.

I remember not wanting to be in his line of sight when he was like that, so I was either hiding under the bed or out the door.  Usually, however, he wasn’t home.

He was either catting around (to put it nicely) or indulging in his favorite money-losing pastime, racing cars.  He always had new cars, but we rarely had new clothes, I remembered.

Given that our family business was in our home, the hours were erratic, and we had no structure and certainly no typical family activities or involvement from our parents.

I was the neglected one, the youngest of six, the little wild child in the corner, and I really don’t remember much of my parents when I was little except that we were forbidden to go into the rooms where they were working unless I had work to do for them.

This is an example of how neglected I was:  we moved to a different town closer to ORNL when I was nine.  My parents, instead of properly researching the schools, which is ironic given that they were both researchers, assumed I would go to the school up the road.

It was only after I’d been at school for a few days that the teachers realized I shouldn’t be there.  It was a school for the mentally challenged.

My dad died when I was 11 of a rare cancer combination (stomach and bone marrow), and my mom became an alcoholic after that.

She did have a paying job by then at ORNL, as I mentioned, and somehow she kept it together enough to work during the week, but she would drink when she came home and binge drink to the point of passing out on the weekends.

Because we had no nanny at this point, there was absolutely no structure in our lives, except for going to school.  Nutrition for me was cereal in the morning, a Snickers bar and a carton of milk for lunch, and frozen, processed food for dinner.

I remember the stress being so bad for me in high school (not that I knew that that’s what it was back then) that I would have horrible gas cramps in my intestines, and I would double over in pain.

Given that I was the youngest, I was now home alone with my mom and not old enough to drive myself away from there (I did that when I graduated high school).

I hated watching what she would do to herself and often wondered what would happen to me if she died, which she talked about wanting to do a lot:  “What do you want in the will when I kick the bucket?”  That should never be asked of a child!

Fast forward to a few years later after I had moved away from home and never went back except to visit.  My mom died when I was 25, and I felt like such an orphan.

A few years after that, I put myself through business school at Tulane University while working full-time at my corporate market analyst job.  After I got my MBA, I moved to New York to start my career on Wall Street.  It was exciting and fun, but very stressful.

I was still working on Wall Street while I was pregnant with my older son.  It was a stressful job, and the hours were long:  working from 7am to 6pm was considered a short day.

I always had to be up on current news, and if there was some breaking news, I analyzed it by running it through my financial model for that particular company to see what the impact on earnings and, ultimately, share price would be.

I had to be fast and accurate, as people were trading on these ideas.  Let’s just say when there’s money involved, it brings out the absolute worst in people as far as their ability to be abusive to their colleagues goes.

To say that my colleagues were dysfunctional is putting it lightly.  I honestly believe that the more dysfunctional you are on Wall Street (and probably other career callings as well), the more successful you are.

Obviously, I was not dysfunctional enough, as evidenced by the numerous knife-marks in my back.

In any case, that amount of stress is not good for the mother or the fetus.  There was a recent study that came out saying that a mother passes on her stress response to her fetus.

Other studies say that living in a stressful environment at home affects the body’s ability to detoxify because a lot of the body’s energy is used to deal with the “fight, fright or flight”.

At that point, detoxifying becomes a luxury; staying alive is a necessity.  Anyway, all this has been to say how I’ve had a pretty stressful life, which has affected my ability to detoxify and later, my children’s ability to detoxify.

Total Load Theory
According to a Swedish study, a mother dumps 75% of her toxic load into her baby.  I believe my older son got the bigger dump because he was the first; there were more toxins for him to get from me.

In addition, I was 39 years old when he was born, so that’s 39 years of accumulated toxins that he received.  My younger son was born on my 41st birthday, and his heavy-metal toxicity was lower than his brother’s but still substantially higher than average.

Have you ever noticed that in most families with autism, ADHD, etc., that it’s usually the older/oldest child who has the worst symptoms?  That’s because of the toxic load theory:  they get more toxins than their siblings.

Traumatic Birth Experience
My older son also had a very traumatic birth experience.  I was in labor for several hours when all of a sudden the nursing team couldn’t find his heartbeat.

At this point, they broke my water so they could insert a monitor to listen to it.  They found it, but when they broke the water, my son went into fetal distress, and I was wheeled into the surgery room for an emergency C-section.

My doctor, who had not yet shown up, was finally contacted, and she halted the surgery.  I was then told to relax (yeah, right) for several hours so the anesthetic they had given me for emergency surgery could wear off.

Pitocin was then administered to restart labor, and when my son finally emerged, he had meconium in his lungs, which then had to be immediately suctioned.  His APGAR score was 5/9.

Both fetal distress and Pitocin have been linked to neurological damage in babies that were exposed to them.

Antibiotics
Antibiotics were administered to me during labor because of my mitral valve prolapse and, with my younger son’s delivery, the presence of strep B bacteria in me.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride in her book, “Gut and Psychology Syndrome”, details how an imbalance of good bacteria and yeast versus pathogenic types leads to gut dysbiosis, which then leads to psychological syndromes like autism, ADHD, OCD, as well as dyspraxia, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, etc.

She writes that the following things can lead to gut dysbiosis:

• The overuse of antibiotics in everything from meat and dairy (remember, if it’s not organic, it’s got antibiotics in it) to the antibiotics that doctors over-prescribe
• The use of pharmaceuticals, including birth control pills
• A highly processed and refined diet devoid of nutrition and loaded with sugar and starches
• Stress

In addition, the mother passes her gut flora, good and bad, on to her baby as it travels through the birth canal and through breastfeeding.

A recent study showed that children with autism and gastrointestinal disturbances have altered expression of genes involved in digestion because bacteria in your gut actually control your immune response and thus your gene expression, so good flora = good immune response and gene expression, and bad flora = bad immune response and gene expression.

It’s my belief that one of the reasons why we’re seeing such an increase in children’s chronic health conditions is for these reasons and also because more and more women are having C-sections.

If a woman has a C-section, antibiotics are administered and the baby doesn’t receive any flora from her birth canal.  Let’s hope C-section moms can at least breastfeed.

In addition, my older son had three ear infections by the time he was 3, and I dutifully gave him antibiotics.  I remember his first one occurred when he was 3 months old, and he had pus oozing out of his eye.

Little did I know when I gave him antibiotics that I was making his gut dysbiosis worse.  His pediatricians knew nothing about gut dysbiosis or even about probiotics.

These days, he doesn’t get ear infections (my younger one has never had one), but if he were to get one, I now know that there is a multitude of antibacterial herbs and remedies that our naturopath uses, such as goldenseal, cat’s claw, olive leaf, and colloidal silver.

By the way, both Donna Gates of “The Body Ecology Diet” and Dr. Natasha have dietary programs that can be used to recover a child from autism, ADHD, depression, etc.

Yes, you read that right, “recover”.

Why doesn’t everyone, including doctors, know about this?

Children can be recovered from autism and sensory processing disorder!

I will say that there is a window of opportunity, however, that Jenny McCarthy referred to in “Louder Than Words:  A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism.”

The window closes at about the age of 5 years because the brain has been hardwired by then.  That’s why I worked so hard and diligently on doing as much as I could for my boys when they were little so that they wouldn’t suffer the consequences of me waiting too long.

Both programs are based on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, which in itself has been used to recover children from autism.

They both use similar approaches such as avoiding allergenic foods such as gluten and dairy, supplementing with fermented foods, and avoiding foods that feed Candida, such as sugar, refined/processed foods, and most/all grains (depending on the program).

I used and continue to use the principles of these programs for the recovery of my children and myself, although I will say that treatment from our naturopath also significantly contributed to our recoveries.

Boys
Just being a boy raises the risk of having a chronic health condition like autism, ADHD or SPD.  That’s because testosterone blocks the body’s ability to make glutathione, so boys need extra help in making glutathione.

Inoculation
My sons were fully vaccinated before I began reading about the dangers of over-vaccination.

Children today receive at least 69 doses of vaccines by the time they are 18, roughly 4 times the level kids received 30+ years ago, and new vaccines are constantly introduced.

Here’s my theory on vaccinations:  I believe they are sometimes the last straw to break the poor child’s “back” (immune system).  Kids today are born so pre-polluted that vaccines and their adjuvants can sometimes be the external factors that drive their immune systems into overdrive.

Knowing what I know now, I would never vaccinate my child if he were sick or ill, as the immune system is already under attack at that time.  Also, I never give my kids or myself the flu shot, as they typically STILL contain mercury!  As of my current research, the hepatitis B vaccine also still contains mercury.

I was horrified when my state last year required my younger son who was in preschool to get a mandatory flu shot.  My husband and I signed a religious exemption form that we found online instead.

And as far as heavy metals in vaccines goes, non-flu-shot vaccines contain other adjuvants such as aluminum and formaldehyde that have also been shown to cause neurological damage.

These days, instead of getting booster shots, I have their blood titers of the specific antibodies drawn and analyzed instead.  If the child has enough antibodies for measles, for example, he won’t need the booster for it at that time, although you may need to keep checking if your state requires you to do so.

It’s more money out of pocket to pay for the lab fees, but at least I know I’m not doing any further damage to their immune system.  I was extremely upset when I found about “having titers checked” because none of the pediatricians even told me it was an option!

Other Toxins
Heavy metals aren’t the only toxins contributing to this perfect storm.  Pesticides have been shown to damage a person’s nervous and endrocrine systems.  After all, that’s how they were designed to kill those pests.

The pesticide Roundup significantly increases the bioaccumulation of mercury.

Organophosphate pesticides have been linked to ADHD, while organochlorine pesticides may decrease T3 thyroid hormone during early life, leading to hypothyroidism and damaging a child’s neurodevelopment.

I believe hypothyroidism, as well as adrenal fatigue and systemic Candida, may be the great under-reported links leading to this epidemic in chronic illnesses in both children and adults.

If your thyroid isn’t working properly, neither is your immune system.  I’d be curious to see what proportion of kids with ADHD, SPD, autism, etc. is also hypothyroid.

Prenatal exposure to phthalates, a group of chemicals that I like to the think of as the “rubber ducky chemical”, as they are what softens plastic to have that rubber ducky feel, have been linked to lower mental and gross motor scores in infants, particularly boys.

Phthalates, BPA and other plasticizers have also been shown to be endocrine disruptors.  When you see that term, think “thyroid damager”, so not only do endocrine disruptors damage the thyroid, but they also damage the reproductive system and its hormones, which may, in my mind, be one of the real reasons for the rise in infertility and the reduction in age of puberty.

Maria Rickert Hong is a Certified Holistic Health Counselor who received her training from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  She specializes in recovery from symptoms of autoimmune, neurological, behavioral and digestive disorders, as she has recovered her own sons from Sensory Processing Disorder, asthma and acid reflux.  She is also a board member, social media director and blogger for Epidemic Answers, a non-profit whose goal is to let parents know recovery is possible from autism, ADHD, SPD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune, Lyme and more.

Maria Rickert Hong can be contacted at maria[at]epidemicanswers[dot]org

Sign up for our newsletter and find out why this epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses is occurring and what you can do about it. 

This document is not a substitute for medical advice, treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a medical professional.  It is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on to make determinations related to treatment of a medical condition.  Epidemic Answers has not verified and does not guaranty the accuracy of the information provided in this document. 

“H” means higher than the reference range, and “VH” means it’s a way-high number.  My initial mercury levels were literally off the charts! Mercury is toxic at one part per billion, which is about the same concentration as one grain of salt in one swimming pool. 

Metal              Reference Range      March 2010 Level     January 2011 Level

Aluminum                   <35                              0                                  9.5

Antimony                   <0.4                             0                                  0

Arsenic                        <117                            120H                           19

Barium                            <7                                6.2                               6

Beryllium                    <0.6                             0.4                               0

Bismuth                      <15                              4.6                               0.5

Cadmium                     <1                                0.6                               0.4

Cesium                        <10                              7.8                               11H

Gadolinium                 <0.4                             0                                  0

Lead                            <2                                4.9H                            4.3H

Mercury                      <4                                25VH                          4.3H

Nickel                          <12                              7.4                               5.1

Palladium                    <0.3                             0                                  0

Platinum                      <1                                0                                  0

Tellurium                    <0.3                             0                                  0

Thallium                      <0.5                             0.4                               0.9H

Thorium                      <0.03                           0.02                             0

Tin                              <10                              1.5                               0.4

Titanium                     <15                              0                                  0

Tungsten                     <0.4                             0.5H                            0

Uranium                      <0.04                           0                                  0

You’ll notice that my first test showed no aluminum toxicity, while my second one did.  In addition, my cesium and thallium toxicities were higher in the second test.  Why is this?

One of my doctors explained that metals are so tightly bound that they may not have been pulled out enough to be detected initially.

Ongoing detoxification and chelating pulled aluminum out enough to be detected during the second test and caused cesium and thallium to be higher.  My doctor explained that chelation and detoxification will be ongoing things, and that I will have to constantly monitor the levels even after it appears that there are no more heavy metals in me.

Some People Are Better Detoxifiers; I’m Not

Some people are better detoxifiers.  I’m guessing that I’m not.  Knowing what I know now, I know this is because my mother passed her toxicity (yes, it’s been proven that a mother passes her toxic burden on to her child in utero), bad bacteria and stress response (yes, it’s proven that a mother’s stress response during pregnancy gets passed on to her child) on to me.

She was an alcoholic chain-smoker who ate a very poor diet consisting of processed, convenience foods.  She had lupus, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

She died of an aneurism at age 62, which I believe is far too young.  She was an intelligent woman, but she was in so much emotional pain from her relationship with my father that she didn’t have the energy or desire to take better care of herself.

The sad thing is that all of the diseases she had are mostly preventable through proper diet and detoxification.  At least I learned from her what not to do!

The funny thing is that I learned a lot of what to do from my dad before he died.  He had a PhD in organic chemistry and became very involved in the health-food movement in the 70’s.

He wouldn’t allow us to eat sugary foods, drink soft drinks or eat junk food.  It was a rare treat when he would take us to get pizza and onion rings or ice cream. He would make his own yogurt and beer from scratch, and he made my brother, sister and me put in a half-acre garden that we hated to work in but loved to eat from. You can see where I get my tendencies!

I think he knew that something might be wrong with him and maybe that’s why he became such a health nut.  He developed pesticides for Dow Chemical and invented DDE (a close cousin of DDT) and nylon materials for them.

I’m guessing that being around all those toxic chemicals led to his development of a highly unusual cancer combination of stomach cancer and bone-marrow cancer.  Apparently, this combination only occurred in a particular set of Dow research chemists, of which my dad was one.

Cancer took him quickly, and he died at the age of 57 when I was 11.  I remember later when I was in high school, I took an aptitude test which showed I had the highest aptitude for being a chemical engineer.

I specifically chose not to pursue this career, though, because of my knowledge, even then, of what being around toxic chemicals can do to you.  After my dad died, my mom became a full-blown alcoholic, and it was all she could do to go to the store and buy processed food for us to eat.

You can see how the cards were stacked against me, especially during my formative years.  I remember always being tired and needing to take naps, even as a teenager.  A lot of this could be because I kept my own hours in high school, which I’m sure contributed to my fatigue as well as the emotional stress I was going through.

I’m sure that this didn’t help my ability to detoxify, either.  Another sign of toxicity that I had at an early age was cellulite.  I’ve had it ever since I hit puberty at 14, and I was by no means overweight.

Cellulite is where your body stores toxins.  One of my high school boyfriends thought I had it because I needed to lift weights, but it’s really because of my toxicity.  Now I know.  I’ve also had other signs of a toxic liver:  sensitivity to caffeine, irritability and disproportionate anger responses are all classic signs.

Maria Rickert Hong is a Certified Holistic Health Counselor who received her training from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  She specializes in recovery from symptoms of autoimmune, neurological, behavioral and digestive disorders, as she has recovered her own sons from Sensory Processing Disorder, asthma and acid reflux.  She is also a board member, social media director and blogger for Epidemic Answers, a non-profit whose goal is to let parents know recovery is possible from autism, ADHD, SPD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune, Lyme and more.

Maria Rickert Hong can be contacted at maria[at]epidemicanswers[dot]org

Sign up for our newsletter and find out why this epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses is occurring and what you can do about it. 

This document is not a substitute for medical advice, treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a medical professional.  It is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on to make determinations related to treatment of a medical condition.  Epidemic Answers has not verified and does not guaranty the accuracy of the information provided in this document. 

Sign up for our newsletter and find out why this epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses is occurring and what you can do about it. 

He had been working on opening up my pathways of elimination such as kidneys and intestines when heavy metals came up in his assessment. 

How did he find this?  He uses an ASYRA machine.  It’s based on the principle that your body is made of energy.  If you’ve ever had acupuncture done, you know that different organs and systems in your body have different energetic readings.

The energy of your liver, for example, is different from the energy of your eyes.  The ASYRA, also known as electro-dermal screening, reads different energy systems in your body and can tell the practitioner whether organs or systems are in better or worse health.

I suppose I have no trouble accepting this premise because of the classes I took in remote sensing satellite imagery. In class, we learned that everything has a unique “spectral signature”, giving off a unique combination of light wavelengths from far infrared, infrared, visible colors and ultraviolet light.

For example, a remote-sensing satellite can tell that it’s looking at a crop of wheat next to a maple-tree forest near a cold-water lake because each of these things reflects a unique pattern of light, which is energy.

I think it’s pretty much the same principle as the ASYRA.  As with remote sensing, even non-living things like vitamins, minerals, hormones, and heavy metals can be “read” by the ASYRA.

The ASYRA allows the practitioner to test different substances and foods in a person to see if they resonate.  Sounds pretty “woo woo”, doesn’t it?  But it works.

In any case, the ASYRA found heavy metals in me, so my naturopath ordered a provoked heavy metal urine test.  This involves taking a dose of chelating agents like DMSA and/or EDTA and measuring the amount of heavy metals that are excreted in the urine.

It’s not recommended that you do this unless you’re under the care of a health practitioner, as the heavy metals that potentially could be released can do a lot of immediate harm.  If your pathways of elimination aren’t open, the heavy metals will re-circulate and re-deposit in you.

So why didn’t he do a blood test?  A blood test for heavy metals, like the one your pediatrician does for your child, shows only acute levels that you’ve been exposed to in the last 4 to 6 weeks.

After that time, they get deposited and bound to tissues and organs in your body.  A provoked urine test shows what is called the “body burden” of heavy metals because the chelating agents pull them out of your tissues and organs.

I was shocked by the results.  My mercury levels were at 25 micrograms/gram; the reference range was 4.  It was over 6 times the reference range.  The reference range is not the acceptable limit, as there is no acceptably safe limit of mercury or other heavy metals.

The reference range is just a representation of what the levels are of a healthy population under non-challenge or non-provoked conditions.  My lead levels were also fairly elevated at 4.9 versus a reference range of 2.

I also had sizable amounts of arsenic, barium, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, cesium, nickel, thallium, thorium, tin and tungsten.  HOW DID I GET SO POLLUTED?

Obviously, I can only theorize as to the sources because I am not a lab rat in a controlled-environment experiment and I can’t “prove” how these heavy metals got inside of me.  Here are my theories:

Metal fillings in your mouth are actually 50% mercury.  The mercury when it’s transported to and from your dentist’s office has to be labeled “hazardous waste”.

Why is mercury suddenly not hazardous waste just because it’s in your mouth?

There’s a famous video on the IAOMT (the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology) website that shows “smoking teeth”, i.e., mercury vapor off-gassing from a mercury filling.

Guess where that mercury goes to?  That’s right – your body!  It goes there faster if you’re eating or drinking something hot.

My advice:  get your “silver” fillings removed by an IAOMT dentist who is specially trained to remove them without harming you or him/herself and staff.

I am fortunate to live near the office of Dr. Mark Breiner, a dentist who has been campaigning against mercury amalgams since the 1970’s.  He’s written a book, “Whole-Body Dentistry:  A Complete Guide to Understanding the Impact of Dentistry on Total Health”.

In it, he explains the dangers of mercury, including the electrical problems caused by them.  Before he removed my fillings, he measured the voltage, current and power provided by each of them.

Voltages ranged from 40-220 MV, currents from 1-4 MA, and MW x seconds from -0.01 to -0.33.  Our bodies are electrochemical in nature, and these mercury fillings throw an electrical monkey wrench into the mix.

Did you know that coal is laden with heavy metals? 

I grew up in east Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains (cue banjo music now, I know).  In our town, there was a coal-fired power plant.

In fact, there was an environmental disaster a few years ago in the town where I went to high school because a dike of the retention pond that holds all of the sludgy waste from the smokestacks broke and all that sludgy waste dumped into the river for miles, polluting the beautiful lakes and rivers around it.

Test results showed significantly elevated levels of toxic metals including arsenic, copper, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, and thallium in samples of the slurry and river water.

Even though I was no longer living in the town when this disaster happened, I had grown up breathing this nasty air and swimming in the polluted water for years.

I lived in Baton Rouge for 4 years and in New Orleans for 10 years.  The Mississippi River in those parts is called “Cancer Alley” because of all the oil refineries along the river that dump waste into the water.

There’s a pretty good chance that there are heavy metals in the water, too, I bet, in addition to all the carcinogenic petroleum byproducts in there.  Even though I drank mostly bottled spring water, I was still cooking, cleaning and bathing in the tap water.

In addition, I lived in old houses in New Orleans.  Old houses have lead pipes within them and lead pipes leading up to them from the city’s water supply.  Lead easily leaches out of these old pipes and into the tap water.

I had elevated levels of tungsten, which is used as a filament in incandescent light bulbs.  Given that I had lived and worked in New York City before and after the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, I was surely breathing in some toxic chemicals and metals at the time.In fact, as part of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Scientific American wrote an article called, “What Was in the World Trade Center Plume?”

They wrote that people living and working in New York City were exposed to lead and other heavy metals, record levels of dioxins, PCBs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and asbestos for the more than 3 months that the World Trade Center fires smoldered.

Chicken, if it’s not organic, contains arsenic, as part of an anti-fungal used on the chicken feed.  I had elevated levels of arsenic, which can also come from untreated pressure-treated wood and refineries.

Cadmium, which was high in me, can be found in cheap jewelry, especially if it’s from China.  This article says that, “As the chemical helps add shape to jewelry, Chinese jewelry makers used it extensively in trinkets after 2008 U.S. legislation outlawed the use of lead.”

The article also stated that major retailers like the Gap, Forever 21, Target, American Eagle Outfitters, Saks, and Hot Topics would no longer be able to sell jewelry with cadmium in it.

Lead and tin are both used in ceramic glazes, and the dishes I’d been using for years had become scratched and chipped, easily letting the heavy metals out.

Large fish, such as large tuna, sharks and swordfish, contain some of the highest amounts of mercury of seafood.  All that sushi I had eaten most likely contained mercury!

Mercury bio-accumulates up the food chain, meaning that a large-sized fish eats a lot of medium-sized fish that eat a lot of small fish, and all of them likely contain and retain mercury.

People are at the top of the food chain, so we are capable of retaining the most mercury, depending on our level of exposure and ability to detoxify.

My mother smoked 3 packs of cigarettes a day when I was growing up.  After watching “Mad Men“, I’m thinking it was the norm back then.

This article says that, “For each pack of cigarettes smoked, a person can absorb an additional 1-3 mcg of cadmium over what is taken in from other sources in their daily life.”  I’m sure that I didn’t receive as much cadmium as my mom did, but second-hand smoke has been shown to be dangerous.

“Clear plastic wrap used to cover dishes also contains cadmium and should not be microwaved or in any way heated.  It should be safe in the refrigerator,” says Dr. Russell Blaylock, in “Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Change Your Life”.

I’m not sure if this includes all those plastic covers on the Lean Cuisine, Weight Watcher’s and Amy’s Kitchen meals I ate for many years.

“Drinking water can be a source of cadmium; in most instances, levels are relatively low, but plumbing can increase cadmium water levels since both plastic (PVC) and metal pipes contain the metal” as well as lead, writes Dr. Blaylock.

Flu vaccines still contain 25 micrograms of mercury, and Dr. Blaylock writes that, “Almost from the inception of vaccination programs, manufacturers added a mercury preservative thimerosal to vaccines.  The practice continued until recently.”  So all those shots I had when I was a child had mercury in them.  Great.

Some types of cosmetics still contain lead (usually red lipsticks) and mercury (some mascaras).  Don’t believe me?  Read these articles from the Environmental Working Group.

Mercury is perhaps the most insidious of the heavy metals.  It binds with and inactivates, glutathione, the body’s principal protection antioxidant, thereby preventing the body from getting rid of it.

Dr. Blaylock says that, “Like its cousins, cadmium and lead, mercury greatly increases free-radical production within the cell and lipid peroxidation in the cell membrane.”

He also says that, “In the cell’s nucleus, mercury binds tightly to all of the nucleic bases of DNA and as a result is mutagenic, causing the cell to mutate.  Mercury has also been shown to damage the membrane lining the mitochondria…which can trigger cell death.”

He writes that because mercury inhibits the function of antioxidants, like glutathione, “many diseases are associated with impaired antioxidant protection, including diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases.”

Dr. Blaylock writes, “Mercury inhibits progesterone production”.  So this is why I’ve had so many problems with my hormones!  I had never had any “female” problems until they coincided exactly with the extreme period of stress I had in deal with my older son’s sensory processing disorder.

All of a sudden, I had shorter and inconsistent cycles, a uterine fibroid, and an ovarian cyst.  My theory is that during this extremely stressful time, mercury began inhibiting my progesterone (the “happy” hormone) production because my antioxidant levels were used up by the stress.

Mercury also attaches to macrophages, a type of white blood cell, thereby inhibiting the body’s ability to rid itself of the yeast Candida albicans.  My systemic Candida was likely because of the mercury.

Dr. Blaylock writes, “Because mercury also impairs white blood cell function, we may be more susceptible to infections and infectious illnesses.”

One of the first signs that something was wrong with my immune system was when I came down with shingles, had colds that would last for weeks, and got bronchitis, which I had never had before.

Dr. Blaylock lists some of the symptoms of mercury poisoning as:

• Personality changes
• Unusual irritability (check)
• Timidity or shyness
• Weakness (check)
• Insomnia (check)
• Apathy (check)
• Impaired concentration (check)
• Suicidal disposition (thankfully, not a check)

If you’ve read my other blogs, you know that I had many of these symptoms and more.

Maria Rickert Hong is a Certified Holistic Health Counselor who received her training from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  She specializes in recovery from symptoms of autoimmune, neurological, behavioral and digestive disorders, as she has recovered her own sons from Sensory Processing Disorder, asthma and acid reflux.  She is also a board member, social media director and blogger for Epidemic Answers, a non-profit whose goal is to let parents know recovery is possible from autism, ADHD, SPD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune, Lyme and more.

Maria Rickert Hong can be contacted at maria[at]epidemicanswers[dot]org

Sign up for our newsletter and find out why this epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses is occurring and what you can do about it. 

This document is not a substitute for medical advice, treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a medical professional.  It is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on to make determinations related to treatment of a medical condition.  Epidemic Answers has not verified and does not guaranty the accuracy of the information provided in this document. 

This was extremely hard for me because he didn’t walk until 3 weeks before his little brother was born, and I was having to carry him everywhere.

I suppose the bright side is that he didn’t weigh a whole lot, given that he was also a failure-to-thrive baby. 

His sensory processing disorder turned him into a barnacle.  I felt as if he were permanently physically attached to me.

It wasn’t so bad when he was younger, but after his brother was born, it was extremely difficult to deal with two small, crying children at the same time, who both wanted to be picked up and held at the same time.

And then when our nanny left to have her own baby when my older son had just turned 3, his sensory processing and anxiety went full tilt.

He was used to having someone always there immediately to meet his needs; now he had to share me with his baby brother.

And so my older son cried and cried and cried about every little thing.  The more he cried, the more it upset me because I realized pretty quickly that nothing I could do or say would make him not cry so much.

He would yell, I would yell, nobody was happy.  I knew this wasn’t any way to live, but I had no idea how to make him stop.

Over-The-Top Reactions

His over-the-top reactions to his sensory issues were really getting to me.

I quickly developed middle-of-the-night insomnia, where I would wake up wide-awake at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep for 2 or 3 hours.

This wasn’t helpful at all because the next day I was extremely tired and irritable from the lack of sleep, and the problem was compounding every night despite my taking a nap in the afternoon when the boys were taking their naps.

Constant Fatigue

I was constantly fatigued and tired before I had kids; it was so much worse now.  I was barely treading water just to get through the day.  It was all I could do to make myself go to the grocery store or get meals ready.  I could barely pull myself out of bed every morning.

The lack of sleep quickly drove my immune system into the ground.

Constant Sickness

Not only was my older son getting every cold there was at preschool (he’d go to school for a few days, catch a cold, then be out for a week with it; the cycle repeated continuously throughout his first year at preschool), but I was catching every cold, too, and I couldn’t shake them.

I would be sick for 2-3 weeks at a time with a cold, then, sure enough, my ears would get infected, so I’d go to the doctor and get some antibiotics.

Perimenopause and Other Female Problems

My menstrual cycles (lovely to have to discuss them here) immediately went from an always-consistent 28 days (that’s why I was able to get pregnant so quickly both times at such “advanced maternal ages”) to anywhere from 21 to 27 days.

I thought I was going through perimenopause, but I was highly suspicious given that my symptoms coincided exactly with the timing of the stress I was going through immediately after our nanny left.

I went to my gynecologist, and he gave me Ambien for the insomnia and Zoloft for the irritability.  I don’t like taking long-term pharmaceuticals, but I knew of no other option.  In any case, the Ambien did nothing for my insomnia, so I stopped taking it, and I was back to square one.

I also developed a uterine fibroid and ovarian cysts.  I had NEVER had these kinds of issues before.

Constant Candida

I was also constantly having Candida infections, to put it somewhat politely.

I know this is a gross subject, but Beth Lambert (co-founder of Epidemic Answers and author of “A Compromised Generation”) also said that many women have also told her that this was one of the most significant symptoms they had, where they knew something was wrong and they were getting no help from their doctors.

Mine were recurring every month, and none of the medicines the doctor gave me helped.  The gynecologist basically told me that I was an unclean person and that I shouldn’t wear tight clothes.

You’ll see later on how far-off-the-mark, condescending and ignorant this comment is.  You can also guess by now that she wasn’t my favorite person!

Shingles, Twice!

I came down with shingles.  I had no idea what this pinching, burning pain was.  I thought an insect had marched up my leg, taking bites as it went.

Shingles is supposed to be a disease of people older than 50 or 60, not someone my age.

Turns out that severe stress can make the latent virus from a previous chickenpox episode turn into shingles.  I got it not once, but twice.

Then the Worst Case of Poison Ivy, Ever!

I also had the worst case of poison ivy, ever.  I had been gardening in late winter, clearing out weeds and bushes from a part of the yard I wanted to turn into a plant bed.

It was a mild winter, so there wasn’t any snow on the ground and the temperature wasn’t too cold.  I had taken to gardening in late winter/early spring as I had become extremely intolerant of temperatures above 80 degrees or so.

And I used to live in New Orleans where it’s like that most of the year!

Apparently, I had been tearing out poison ivy vines left and right without knowing it; there were no leaves on them yet to let me know what it was.

It wasn’t until I went to my internist in early March after having suffered through whatever-it-was for at least a week that she figured out it was poison ivy.  “First case of the season”, she said.

She gave me a 6-day dose of steroids, but once I had used them all up, the rash came back with a vengeance.  It was all over me again.

You can guess again that I wasn’t too happy with what conventional medicine was offering me.  If you’ve been reading my blogs, you know that I was becoming increasingly disenfranchised with allopathic, Western, disease-management medicine and what it failed to offer my sons.

It seemed all conventional doctors wanted to do was give me pharmaceuticals or cut something out, and they didn’t understand that different systems in your body are connected.  The whole medical system really began to look out of whack to me.

Chronic Sinus Infections

I also developed a chronic sinus infection in my throat and ears.  It had been raining for 5 or 6 weeks straight, and I always had that frog-in-my-throat feeling where I was constantly having to clear my throat.

It turned out that I had a systemic Candida infection throughout my body (yuck!), which was not only the source of those lovely monthly infections but also of my sinus infection.  The constant warmth and high humidity from the rain made all that yeast inside of me really grow and gave me a mold allergy.  This was gross but fascinating all at the same time!

Maria Rickert Hong is a Certified Holistic Health Counselor who received her training from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  She specializes in recovery from symptoms of autoimmune, neurological, behavioral and digestive disorders, as she has recovered her own sons from Sensory Processing Disorder, asthma and acid reflux.  She is also a board member, social media director and blogger for Epidemic Answers, a non-profit whose goal is to let parents know recovery is possible from autism, ADHD, SPD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune, Lyme and more.

Maria Rickert Hong can be contacted at maria[at]epidemicanswers[dot]org

Sign up for our newsletter and find out why this epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses is occurring and what you can do about it. 

This document is not a substitute for medical advice, treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a medical professional.  It is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on to make determinations related to treatment of a medical condition.  Epidemic Answers has not verified and does not guaranty the accuracy of the information provided in this document. 

He would go to preschool for a week then be out the whole next week because he was sick; the preschool didn’t want kids coming in who were sneezing and coughing.

Constant Sickness Turned to Asthma

When he was 4 years old, he had a severe asthmatic episode after we went to Los Angeles to visit my husband’s family. 

We woke up the first morning after we landed in LA to discover that the whole valley where his parents lived was engulfed in smoke from forest fires in the San Gabriel Mountains.

They stayed on fire the entire week we were there, and, although we didn’t go out in the smoke too much, we couldn’t help but breathe in some of it in.

When we came back home, he had a severe asthmatic attack, which he had never had before.  It was so bad that our new pediatrician called on a Saturday morning to see if he was OK.

I didn’t like having him on the nebulizer, Xoponex, Albuterol and prednisolone because I knew that steroids suppress the immune system.

Dairy a Leading Contributor to Asthma

I had begun going to a naturopath, and I brought my older son in to see if the naturopath could help with his asthma.  My husband has asthma, and I didn’t want this for my son.

The first thing the naturopath said was to cut out the dairy, which, it turns out, is one of the leading contributors to asthma.

This was shocking to me because dairy was all I fed my kids in my quest to improve their weight gain!  How was I supposed to do this?

But do you know what?  Within 3 days of taking both of them off of dairy, I was able to stop giving them Prevacid for their severe acid reflux.

Why You NEED Stomach Acid

It also turns out that Prevacid and other proton-pump inhibitors (PPI) are not doing anyone a favor by turning down the stomach acid.  You NEED stomach acid for a couple of reasons:

• The gastrointestinal tract is the first line of defense against viruses, bacteria and parasites.  The less stomach acid you have, the less able you’re able to fight off those bugs and the more you get sick.

• Stomach acid aids in the absorption of critical nutrients, such as iron and B12.  Without enough stomach acid, you can become anemic.  In fact, in the book “Could It Be B12?  An Epidemic of Misdiagnoses”, authors Sally Pacholok and Jeffrey Stuart discuss how people who have had gastric bypass surgery (stomach stapling or bands) WILL develop a dangerous B12 deficiency because they no longer have enough stomach acid to help absorb it.  Long-term B12 deficiency can lead to severe neurological damage and its symptoms can mimic autism and other illnesses.

I was completely thrilled to have both of my sons off of Prevacid, but, once again, I was furious at these doctors!  Why couldn’t they have simply suggested removing dairy from their diets?

Doctors Learn Very Little, If Any, Nutrition in Medical School

Why?  Because doctors are taught absolutely nothing about nutrition in medical school.

What made me even more furious was the fact that my younger son had a completely unnecessary endoscopy.

And what made me even more furious than that was when I read “Could It Be B12?”.  It turns out that the nitrous oxide that the doctor gave my son to put him under depletes B12 reserves and can also lead to a dangerous B12 deficiency and neurological damage.

After learning these things and after being dismissed and condescended to for so long by so many doctors, I really had had enough of allopathic doctors.

Conventional, Western-style medicine is allopathic, and these types of doctors look at suppressing symptoms with either pharmaceuticals or surgery instead of trying to find out what is causing the symptom to begin with (such as the dairy, in our case).

Pediatric Allergist Didn’t Test for Food Sensitivities or Intolerances

I was frustrated and furious at another of my son’s previous doctors.  I had taken him to see a pediatric allergist at Mount Sinai in New York City when he was a year old.

She did the skin-prick allergen test on him, and he had no allergy to any of the common allergens she tested for, like dairy, soy, corn and gluten.

What she didn’t tell me is that there are other types of allergies other than the kind that immediately make you break out in a rash or need an epi-pen because you’re going into anaphylactic shock.

Allergenic Foods Cause Inflammation

There are other types of allergies called sensitivities and intolerances that don’t cause immediately visible reactions but instead work on a subtler level to cause inflammation.

Allergenic foods cause inflammation, and when the body has inflammation, it starts attacking itself and anything it perceives as attacking it, like pollen or cat dander.

This is known as an auto-immune attack and can lead to any number of illnesses, but for children, they usually show up as eczema (which both of my sons continue to have), allergies, asthma, ADHD and/or autism.

Maria Rickert Hong is a Certified Holistic Health Counselor who received her training from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  She specializes in recovery from symptoms of autoimmune, neurological, behavioral and digestive disorders, as she has recovered her own sons from Sensory Processing Disorder, asthma and acid reflux.  She is also a board member, social media director and blogger for Epidemic Answers, a non-profit whose goal is to let parents know recovery is possible from autism, ADHD, SPD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune, Lyme and more.

Maria Rickert Hong can be contacted at maria[at]epidemicanswers[dot]org

Sign up for our newsletter and find out why this epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses is occurring and what you can do about it. 

This document is not a substitute for medical advice, treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a medical professional.  It is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on to make determinations related to treatment of a medical condition.  Epidemic Answers has not verified and does not guaranty the accuracy of the information provided in this document. 

When he would, he would shriek in pain or fill up so much (probably because he was starving) that he would throw it right back up. 

Again, this wasn’t a little “spitting up”; this was projectile vomiting and, by now, I had become used to having stains on the rug, chairs and clothes that simply wouldn’t come out.

The pediatrician referred a lactation specialist who recommended that I cut out all dairy products from my diet.  She said that dairy was the most likely culprit in causing pain to my son.

Probiotics Not Enough

She also recommended that I take a probiotic, “the refrigerated kind, like they sell at Whole Foods” because this kind, unless it’s listed as being “shelf stable”, has more live cultures.

She told me that many times during childbirth, women are given antibiotic drips, which I was given because my doctor told me many years ago that I had mitral valve prolapse.

Having this condition means that the mitral valve of your heart doesn’t fully close, and, because it doesn’t, there’s a backflow that’s created, sort of like a stagnant pool of blood, in which bacteria can take over and enlarge the heart, causing death.

Dentists always made me take a prophylactic dose of antibiotics before having any cleaning work done because the bacteria scraped off the teeth during cleaning could enter my heart, causing death.

I was always suspicious of this, even though I went along with it, because if I were to get a cut or scrape, wouldn’t that be just as dangerous?

I took the probiotic and eliminated dairy, but neither worked.  My younger son continued to shriek when I fed him, so I quickly gave up nursing him and pumped for a while instead.

He seemed to tolerate this better, so I thought maybe it was just a mechanical issue with him not being able to latch on properly.

In the meantime, my older son continued to vomit after almost every meal and Pediasure feeding.  Also, by this time, I began to take him to playgroups, now that we had settled into our new house.

Our new nanny took care of my younger son so that I could get out of the house, meet other moms, and have my son socialize with other babies his age.

I quickly realized how fast germs spread among babies, and it seemed as if my son would catch whatever was going around without fail.

Of course, his getting sick made the vomiting worse, as the irritation of coughing made it that much easier for him to throw up.

His throat lining was so worn out that even crying too hard, which he did a lot, would make him throw up.  He was like an endless vomit machine.

I had horrible guilt for many Christmases after the time I went to my husband’s Christmas party in the city and left the nanny to put my son to bed, something no one else had ever done before.

He was a little over 2 years old at the time.  When we got home late that night, the nanny told me that he cried so hard over the fact that mommy wasn’t there that he threw up for quite a long time.

2-1/2 Years to Get an Acid Reflux Diagnosis!

When I took my older son in for his 2-1/2-year checkup, I mentioned to the pediatrician that typically when my son was sick, I wouldn’t give him Periactin, as there was no sense in stimulating his appetite if all that coughing was going to make him throw up that much more.

One time, however, I continued to give him Periactin, and noticed that he didn’t throw up as much.  I asked the doctor if that was perhaps because the medicine relaxed his throat muscles?

That’s when a light bulb (finally) went off in the doctor’s head, and he said, “He’s got acid reflux.  Here, try this Prevacid.”

I was furious that I had asked about acid reflux an entire year ago and had been condescendingly dismissed by this same doctor, and now, because it was his idea, it was acid reflux! 

I wanted to throttle him and the previous set of doctors in New York City for making me waste my son’s health for all of that time.  In any case, the Prevacid worked immediately, and my son’s weight steadily improved.

My Little One Had It, Too

When my younger son was 10 months old, it dawned on me (I’m a little slow sometimes!) that he probably had acid reflux, too.  Knowing the condescending attitude of the pediatrician, I made a list of symptoms to convince him.  My son:

• Shrieked so much when he was a newborn that the lactation consultant suggested that reflux could be a cause.

• Cried and shrieked when he was lying down to have his diapers and clothes changed.

• Projectile vomited whole bottles of milk 4 or 5 times.

• Spit up 2 ounces of milk the other day about an hour after he woke up from his morning nap.  He hadn’t eaten anything for a few hours and was simply playing on the floor.

• Preferred smooth-textured foods.

• Frequently gagged on pastier and lumpier foods.  It became worse with stage 3 foods.

• Refused to eat more frequently.  Like feeding his brother before, it became an hour-long song and dance to get him to eat.

• Used to have a constant chest rattle/noise when breathing, even though he wasn’t sick.

• Had poor weight gain as well, although not as bad as his brother’s.

These are all classic symptoms of acid reflux/GERD.

Guess what?  The pediatrician didn’t think my younger son had acid reflux.

He said, “Just because his older brother has it doesn’t mean he has it, too.”  Again, I was furious with this doctor!  Was it going to take him another year to realize this one had it, too?

I made an appointment with the local pediatric gastroenterologist, and he didn’t believe it, either.  What did it take to convince these doctors?

Many of the moms at the playgroups were saying how their kids had acid reflux with the same symptoms, and their doctors (including the same pediatric GI) were handing out reflux meds like it was candy.

Why wasn’t my son getting the help he needed?

Instead, the pediatric GI wanted to do an exploratory endoscopy. Although it was an outpatient procedure, it required that my son be put under anesthesia.  I felt as if I had no other choice, so I agreed.

Guess what?  He had acid reflux.  It took all that to confirm what I already knew.

Maria Rickert Hong is a Certified Holistic Health Counselor who received her training from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  She specializes in recovery from symptoms of autoimmune, neurological, behavioral and digestive disorders, as she has recovered her own sons from Sensory Processing Disorder, asthma and acid reflux.  She is also a board member, social media director and blogger for Epidemic Answers, a non-profit whose goal is to let parents know recovery is possible from autism, ADHD, SPD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune, Lyme and more.

Maria Rickert Hong can be contacted at maria[at]epidemicanswers[dot]org

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This document is not a substitute for medical advice, treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a medical professional.  It is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on to make determinations related to treatment of a medical condition.  Epidemic Answers has not verified and does not guaranty the accuracy of the information provided in this document.