Finding What Works: Dealing with Autism

When dealing with autism, just as in most other disorders, you will be faced with a number of treatment options for yourself or your child. These include treatments that are educational, behavioural, biomedical, nutritional, and sensory. Fortunately, for British parents, the cost of these treatments is met by the National Health Service. One way to ensure that you or your child receives the best possible treatment for autism is to carefully monitor the effects a treatment has over time. By finding out which treatments work and which do not, you can help stop your child undergoing additional trauma and stress unnecessarily.

First, evaluate the abilities of the autistic individual before treatment begins. To do this, many services and organisations, provide a checklist of evaluation points that focus on behaviour and illnesses associated with autism. Autistic individuals tend to have increasing functionality as they mature, so remember that some of the positive effects in his or her life are simply due to the natural growth process. However, after two months fill out the checklist once again and compare it to the first. Are there any sharp positive increases in behaviour characteristics? If so, this is more likely due to the treatment.

It is important to begin only one treatment method at a time. If you try everything at once instead, good and bad effects may cancel one another out, or even if the effect is totally positive, you will not know which treatment method is causing it and which are not doing anything. Of course, past studies can help you choose which methods to use, but because autism is an extremely complicated and individual disorder, these studies are not always helpful. Also, some treatments are so new that the studies done are only on short-term effects, which is usually unhelpful.

Instead, it is a process of trial and error. Two months is a good amount of time to study the differences within an autistic individual trying a new treatment. After two months, if you do not see positive improvement, you can discontinue your use of that particular method and better invest your time and efforts in treatment options that work.

Remember that you do not always have to wait two months to make choices about whether to continue or discontinue a treatment method. If the side effects of a medication, for example, are interfering with the patient's life in an unbearable way, then you should discontinue the treatment. You can also make continual treatments based on immediate good reactions-just remember to continually monitor the various methods.

Autistic individuals grow and mature just like everyone else, so treatments may stop working after time. Before trying anything new, consult your doctor to make sure you are being as safe and healthy as possible.

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Medication Options for Autistic Patients

As with any illness, disease, or disorder, there are a number of medicine options available to help control these symptoms. It is important to remember that, as stated in previous chapters, none of these medications will "cure" autism; they simply help control some of the effects of the disorder. There are advantages and disadvantages to each drug, as they all have side effects as well as benefits.

When choosing medicines to effectively treat autism, your doctor can make recommendations, but since autism is a disorder which varies from person to person, you should use drugs very carefully, watching to see how the body reacts to the treatments.

First, consider the safety of the drug. Some cannot be used in children or in people under a certain weight. Make sure the dosage is easy to understand and before you choose one medicine or another find out how it is administered (pills, injections, liquid, etc). This is important if you are not comfortable with certain methods, such as injecting yourself or your child. Also find out how safe the drug is to individuals who do not suffer from autism. If you have small children in the house, you'll want to be sure that the drug is not lethal if it gets into the wrong hands. Find out what to do in case this happens, just to be on the safe side.

Also consider the side effects of the drugs you are considering. While they may be very good at controlling aggression, responsiveness, hyperactivity, or other autistic tendencies, they may also cause sedation or other side effects such as nausea or dizziness.

Weigh your options carefully before beginning one of these treatments, or you could find yourself with ten bottles of pills, each taken to counteract the side effects of another. Also remember that medications may have long-term effects. Will you or your child become dependent on the drug? Will you become tolerant? How else will it affect the body over time? These are all important questions to ask your doctor before beginning any medication.

You can research the many studies on these drugs at your local library or on the Internet.

Publications such as journals and healthcare magazines are probably most current and most reliable, whereas you may get some altered information on the World Wide Web, so be careful about following advice you find without first consulting your doctor. He or she may also be able to provide you with literature about the medication options available for autistic patients. Do your researching on the many choices before making any decisions, and you'll be able to better control your health.

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How is Autism Treated

There have been stories and tales of a cure or magical treatment for autism. These claims are not true. They set up the hopes and dreams of both parents and teachers alike only to be disenchanted with the discovery that the claim is false. There has only been one proven treatment for autism and the treatment is not a cure.

This treatment is an educational programme that individually fits the autistic child’s abilities and works around the disabilities to teach the child alternative forms of communication and behavioural skills which will allow them some semblance of a normal adulthood.

When an autistic child reaches school age, there will be a meeting of professionals including a psychologist, doctors, parents, speech therapists, and other interested parties who will draw up an individualised education programme for the child. This program will look at the abilities of the child and what level of achievement the child has had in the parent’s home and outside services.

Mainstreaming the child into regular classrooms is the overall goal of the programme, but the child will be pulled out of mainstream classes in order to provide special services which may include a speech instructor or an behaviour specialist who works on both the communication process and the behaviour associated with autism.

There are advocates that believe autistic children should be brought out of the ‘normal’ mainstream classes and put into a more restrictive environment that will limit the sensory stimuli that might distract or upset the child. The autistic child needs to have a pattern in their lives and in the mainstream classroom; the hustle and bustle of public education situations may lead them to sensory overload. Not only that, but the social aspect of being ‘different',and not being able to contribute or communicate to the rest of the class can be heartbreaking to both the student and the teachers involved.

The self contained class room will break down tasks into manageable chunks that the child can be successful at and maybe eventually learn. The treatment process goes on both at home and at school. The autistic child must be taught how to appropriately interact with others. A common behaviour in autistic children is to take their clothes off in public situations, as they see no sense of wrong or right by being nude in public.

Such behaviours need time and patience to mend and some methods might work for one child and then be a complete failure for others. Parents, teachers, and medical professionals need to keep abreast of new treatments so that they can replace a treatment or method that has been proven to be a failure for a particular child. Sometimes the behaviour cannot be changed at all and the individualised education programme must come up with strategies to deal with the particular behaviour in question.

Parents and teachers must remember that the autism is a life long condition and ,as the child moves through life, the treatments must change to fit the life period of that child. For example, when puberty comes along the autistic child will discover themselves sexually and masturbation usually follows. The programme must change to fit the new behaviour of masturbation and in a few years it must change again to teach the child the appropriate behaviours with the opposite sex.

The changes are not understood by the child, but like Pavlov’s dog, a conditioned response can be instilled in the child and the proper behaviour therefore occurs as a learned response.

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