Slide 14:
Within 5 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.
Some of you who have been with me and have heard me talk on
Saturday nights have heard me mention a 6 year old little boy, who a few months ago typed
out to his parents, "I felt so bad. I feel so much better now. Thank you."
Nobody has ever given consideration that your children are often in pain or uncomfortable
or even have headaches. If they have what the British politely term an encephalopathy,
what may be a low grade virus or just an immune process, they may literally be suffering
like many Chronic Fatigue Syndrome adults with the feeling that their brain is swollen,
that their head hurts them. But nobody has ever listened to that come out of these
children.
As we went along, she obviously felt better, the headaches went
away. She seemed to go through cycles, and this I’ve also gotten used to. It’s
just like a normal child grows. It’s like the kids will be in a spurt, things will be
doing well, and they’ll seem to plateau, or have a rough edge and then move forward.
And so, what you’re really looking at over time is the trend. Is the child improving,
are they staying plateaued or are they falling back for some reason.
A key, by the end of 1997 she was starting to wake up rested. Now
this is actually become a very big factor for me whether I deal with a child with
Attention Deficit Disorder, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or Autism/PDD. What I learned in the
late 1980’s in the first days of studying Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, becoming involved
with good researchers at UC/Irvine, was that when your brain was affected like this, you
did not go into a normal sleep cycle. They could document that these adults at that time
with this unknown, presumably psychiatric disorder were going into a stage where they did
not enter normal stage 4 REM sleep cycles. Bottom line is you could sleep 8 hours, 10
hours, 12 hours and still wake up tired. So what you look for as far as how the brain is
functioning, is you want a child or adult to wake up rested.
