Book Review: Children With Starving Brains

This book was written by a doctor who began researching autism and treatments when she realized her granddaughter was autistic. She is now a DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) doctor.

This book was written to educate parents and physicians on the new treatments available for Autistic children. Though it explains in details the pathologies and symptoms that they are finding, the lab tests, the treatments, it is easy enough for a lay person to understand. The appendices are a little more technical and I found myself scanning a bit more in them, but they were still informative to my lay mind!

The book is divided into a Introduction that describes how austitic children are children with real medical illnesses that can be treated and how the author became involved in biomedical treatment. Part one describes the foundation for a broad spectrum biomedical approach to ASD. It includes causation models (gentics, vaccines, heavy metals, immunity, diet, etc), GI Pathology-Nutrient Deficincies and Impaired Detoxification, Toxic Accumulations and Politics. Part 2 gotes in to Diagnosis and Treatment. This is where she describes the clinical and diagnostic evaluations, Gut healing, nutrients, chelation (removing heavy metals) and Immune issues. Part 3 includes an overview and what we can learn from all this. There are several appendices with future devopments and research.

I greatly appreciated the information in this book. It really helped to pull together some of the information I heard in the talks from Dr. Davis and Dr. Walsh. It answered a lot of questions. Dr. McCandless explains the reasoning behind the diets, gut healing, nutrients, chelation, etc. She describes the lab tests and when and why you would order the various tests. She gives information on where and how the samples can be gathered and sent. She explains who a typical DAN! consultation will go. She gives resources for parents who may be limited in what help they can obtain. I appreciated that she provided sources for nutrient supplements for those who can't test.

She describes in detail the chelation process. The medicines used, the dosage and frequency. How it works. I also really appreciated that she discussed the differences and similarities between DAN! chelation protocol and the process used by Dr. Walsh at Pfeiffer. This was just what I was looking for as we try to determine which route to take. I will probably reread that chapter over. It was very helpful.

I found the chapter written by her husband to be a little new agey and evironmentalist. If he had written the entire book, I would probably have put it down! His anectodotal obsevations were interesting, but it was kind of a strange section.

Overall, I found it to be very informative. I challenge everyone who has a loved one, or treats someone on the Spectrum to read this book and educate yourself on the illnesses that most ASD children experience and the variety of treatments there are out there. Whether you choose to go the BioMedical route or not, I think it is important to be aware and informed of the options avaiable to us. It is not just some genetic disorder that one just has to live with. Children are individuals and no treatment is guarenteed to work with all kids or at the same success rate. But any improvement we can help our children to reach is better than none!
(Review written April 2007)