Slide 33:
Now, how did I get up here? How have I been coming out here to New York?
Well, when I graduated medical school, I did have an interest in attention deficit. But
the truth is, I really pulled away from it because I didn’t like the idea that we
basically didn’t know what was causing this in these children. We had no idea why
they seemed to get better on a stimulant medications, Ritalin or Dexedrine. We were told,
by the way, that while these children got better on Ritalin or Dexedrine, you would never
give those medications to a teenager or an adult. Now there are teenagers and adults being
put on Ritalin regularly.
At that time, autism was considered a psychiatric disorder. These
children were untrainable. As I said, I was told that if I saw one in my entire lifetime
of practice, it was one too many. But what’s very interesting about my training
besides the autoimmune, immunology, allergy exposure, was at that time at UCLA there were
stories about a crazy guy, Dr. Lovaas, doing these crazy things in the NPI with these
crazy children. That was my first knowledge of autism.
