Integrative Approach to Autism with Patricia Lemer: Rational Wellness Podcast 286
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Patricia Lemer discusses a Functional Medicine Approach to Autism with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
4:05 The rates of autism are rising rapidly. Some of the experts claim that we are just diagnosing autism more frequently, but today everyone knows someone with autism and when I was growing up, we never heard of anyone with autism. According to Patricia, “Did those people used to hide in the attic and in the basement so we didn’t see them? Or didn’t they exist? And are we just more aware?” And those of us who are in the field don’t believe that’s true, though this is a new phenomenon as kids in our world get sicker and sicker. In the 1980s we were seeing one kid in 10,000 with autism, while today the rate is one in 23 children. And kids with autism could not have been confused with kids who simply failed to develop normally and are mentally handicapped, since kids with autism typically are seen to be developing normally until one and half years or two and then in a matter of a few days undergo a radical transformation and stop communicating, sit in one place, and bang their head against the wall and perform other repetitive actions.
9:53 Patricia explains autism with the total load theory that she borrows from engineering that explains why a bridge collapses. When a bridge collapses, we seek to find out who’s to blame. Was it the engineer who designed the bridge? Was it our terrible weather that rusted out the moorings of the bridge? Rather, it is a combination of things over time that overload the tensile strength of the bridge. Kids with autism have a threshold of health they hover under and different load factors are added to the child until they go over their threshold and then start getting sicker and sicker. Children used to be born with a lot of room under the threshold, so they could be exposed to a few toxins, such as painting the room or spraying for termites and they would be fine. But today because families are having kids later in life, the mother carries a bigger toxic load, and we have all these other chemicals and toxins that are bombarding our baby and lead to them overloading their threshold till they start experiencing symptoms such as autism.
And so kids used to be born and way, way, way down here and we could have a few toxins. We could paint the room. We could spray for termites. And the kids still had a lot of wiggle room there. But because of a couple of factors, like families having babies later, the mother carries a bigger toxic load herself, which nature has her dump into her unborn baby. And then we have all these other chemicals and toxins and environmental things that are bombarding our baby, that are adding up, adding up, adding up to where the bridge collapses. Along with this autism epidemic, we also have an epidemic of infertility and miscarriages. We need to start working with the parents for a good year prior to conceiving to get them healthy, so they can have healthier kids.
14:05 Environmental Toxins. One environmental toxin to avoid is antimony, which is contained in the flame retardant chemicals that are sprayed on most mattresses, furniture, and even clothing. You should buy all natural, toxin-free bedding, since we spend a third of our life in bed. The bedroom should be for sleep and sex and nothing else. And we want to avoid EMFs, which are more pervasive since 5G. Patricia has a canopy over her bed to repel EMFs.
17:10 Heavy Metals. Mercury is commonly associated with autism. Mercury can come from amalgam fillings and from coal fired power plants, which spew mercury into the atmosphere and that falls into the oceans and gets into the fish. The big ocean fish like tuna have the highest levels of mercury. The best fish to eat are the smaller fish like sardines and anchovies and high fat fish like salmon. Aluminum is latest metal that many are concerned with from cooking in aluminum pans, to using aluminum foil on our food, to aluminum in the air from chemtrails. One person with autism that Patricia knows who when he was a kid had pica syndrome where he kept eating dirt and he was poisoned by arsenic from the playground that was built out of railroad ties that have arsenic in them. Arsenic can also be found in well water and rice and sometimes in chicken.
27:30 Cerebral folate deficiency can be a factor in autism and antibodies to dairy can block the absorption of folate. Unfortunately, kids with autism tend to eat mostly foods with wheat and dairy like macaroni and cheese, pizza, cereal with milk, bagels and cream cheese, and pizza. Most kids with autism are reactive to both casein and gluten and an elimination diet can help show this. We need to have kids with autism to eat real food like fruits and vegetables, animal products and fish, beans, and good quality fats. Cheez doodles and Goldfish crackers are not real food.
Patricia Lemer is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), and practiced as an educational diagnostician for over 40 years. Patricia wrote several books, including her most recent, which is Outsmarting Autism, Updated and Expanded: Build Healthy Foundations for Communication, Socialization, and Behavior at All Ages (2019). Patricia was co-founder and Executive Director of Developmental Delay Resources (DDR), an international, non-profit organization for 20 years which merged with Epidemic Answers in 2013. Patricia’s books on Outsmarting Autism are a part of the curriculum for the Epidemic Answers Health Coach Training Program, in which she delivers 3 modules. She also has a podcast, Autism Detective.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting-edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates. And to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me and let’s jump into the podcast.
Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Today we’re going to have a discussion about how to outsmart autism with Patricia Lemer. Autism or autistic spectrum disorder is a developmental disability marked by deficits in social communication and restricted repetitive behaviors. Autism typically begins before the age of three years. While there is a range of levels of severity, people with autism tend to behave, communicate, interact, and learn in ways that are different than most other people. Some patients with autism experience an improvement in their symptoms over time, while some never improve. Some of the most common symptoms include reduced eye contact, differences in body language, lack of facial expressions, not engaging in imaginative play, and repetitive gestures or sounds among others. Rates of autism are increasing rapidly with levels reported by the CDC of autism in the year 2000 being one in 150 children. And one in 44 in 2018, according to the CDC. And one in 23, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Autism is four times more common in boys than in girls. Clearly, autism incidence has been increasing, though it appears that the consensus in the conventional medical mental health and medical community is that autism is not more prevalent, but that it’s simply being diagnosed more often, especially with patients who might have previously been diagnosed with other mental disorders, which also corresponds with the societal trend to stop institutionalizing people with mental disorders. And then there’s another factor, which is that if a child gets diagnosed with autism, then insurance coverage might kick in, that will pay for behavioral and other therapies that can be quite costly.
Patricia Lemer is a licensed professional counselor and she practiced as an educational diagnostician for over 40 years. Patricia wrote several books including her most recent, which is Outsmarting Autism, Updated and Expanded: Build Healthy Foundations for Communication, Socialization, and Behavior at All Ages, published in 2019. And I read it and there is just a ton of great information there. A great reference for anybody who wants to know more about autism. And it’s available through Amazon and I’m sure other book sellers. Patricia was a co-founder and executive director of Developmental Delay Resources, an international non-profit organization for 20 years, which merged with Epidemic Answers in 2013. Patricia’s books on outsmarting autism are a part of the curriculum for the Epidemic Answers Health Coach Training Program in which she delivers three of the modules. She also has a podcast, Autism Detective. Patricia, thank you so much for joining us.
Patricia: Thank you, Ben, so much for having me. That was a long introduction. And I appreciate you covering so much of the history of autism, and what’s going on in today’s world. Because no matter where I am, and if I’m meeting new people and they say, “Well, what do you do, and what is your field?” When I say I work with kids with autism, people with autism, inevitably someone says, “I have a family member with autism.” My grandchild, my brother’s child, my next door neighbor’s child. Everybody knows somebody today with autism. And we didn’t growing up.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Yeah. I don’t recall knowing anybody with autism.
Patricia: And so what you said is, “Did those people used to hide in the attic and in the basement so we didn’t see them? Or didn’t they exist? And are we just more aware?” And those of us who are in the field don’t believe that’s true, though this is a new phenomenon as kids in our world get sicker and sicker. This is what’s happening. You see more and more autism diagnoses.
Dr. Weitz: It’s shocking though, the rapid increase in rates. My understanding is, is back in the 1980s, we’re talking about one in thousands.
Patricia: Yes, like 10,000.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Wow.
Patricia: And I’ve been in this field, not the autism field, but the field of children with disabilities since the late ’60s. And because I was working with kids with other disabilities, when autism reared its ugly head in the late ’80s, I was an instant expert because I’d seen one kid with autism and nobody else had seen any. So that’s how I fell down the autism rabbit hole. And because I was always a questioner with, “Well, why does my child have a learning disability? Why does my child have ADHD?” I could apply those out-of-the-box thinking ideas to this new phenomenon called autism.
Dr. Weitz: What I’ve heard from other doctors is some people feel that there were kids with mental disabilities. We used to call them something else, retards or whatever terminology they used to use. And some people feel that we’re just reclassifying them now as autism. But it sounds like you feel that was something different, a different form of mental disability.
Patricia: It was. Those kids who… And I did diagnostic testing on those kids and we had horrible categories like imbecile. And it just was horrible how we labeled those children. But they presented differently. First of all, they were kids who many of them had birth injuries. Second of all, they were kids who had classifiable syndromes that we could identify. And most importantly, those kids were not developing normally and typically and looking like they were doing well for a period of time before they regressed. And not all kids with autism have a history of regression, but many do. And because today’s parents have video cameras and cell phones, they can document this. They can show that this kid waved “Hi, mommy” at this first birthday party. And by his second birthday, he’s kind of sitting there not even noticing the candles on the cake. And so it is documented. And so that’s very different from those kids who were cognitively impaired in the past.
Dr. Weitz: And it’s quite shocking for parents showing these videos and to see a kid that seems by all measures to be completely normal, communicating, developing, learning, acting normal, going through normal developmental stages, and then all of a sudden over a day or a few days or weekend does stop talking, sits in one place and bangs its head against the wall. I mean, it’s just unbelievable how this sudden change can happen.
Patricia: Right.
Dr. Weitz: Now I do recall, I either read an article, was speaking to or maybe listened to a podcast where some doctor claimed that there’s no way all these environmental things that happen are really causative factors because we can actually see something going on in the brain during in utero, even though you don’t notice it until age one and a half or two or something like that.
Patricia: I don’t think so.
Dr. Weitz: You don’t think so?
Patricia: And the theory that I borrowed from engineering was something called total load theory. And total load is an engineering term that explains why a bridge collapses. And I live in Pittsburgh where we have over 400 bridges and one of them just ended up in the park. And when that bridge collapsed, we said, “Well, who’s to blame? Was it the engineer who designed the bridge? Or was it our just terrible weather that rusted out the moorings of the bridge?” But kids with autism are similar. I think we all have a threshold of health and we hover under that threshold. And when we add different load factors, we get sicker and sicker. And at some point when you add too many, you go over your threshold and all a sudden the grandma says, “What happened to my grandbaby?” “Oh mom, he has ADHD or he has a learning problem, or he has autism.”
And so kids used to be born and way, way, way down here and we could have a few toxins. We could paint the room. We could spray for termites. And the kids still had a lot of wiggle room there. But because of a couple of factors, like families having babies later, the mother carries a bigger toxic load herself, which nature has her dump into her unborn baby. And then we have all this other chemicals and toxins and environmental things that are bombarding our baby, that are adding up, adding up, adding up to where the bridge collapses.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And we use the same analogy all the time when we’re talking about a functional medicine approach to analyzing autoimmune diseases.
Patricia: Exactly.
Dr. Weitz: And you have food sensitivities and toxins and all these things that add to immunological insult. And once you get to a certain level, you end up having problems.
Patricia: Right, right. And that’s what we’re seeing with our kids. And so for those who are listening and thinking about having a baby, I want to get with a young couple a good year out because healthy parents have healthy kids. And work with moms and dads with allergies and moms with low thyroid and looking at their environment and saying, “What are the toxic products around here that you need to remove?” And clean up this environment, get some sleep, get rid of the computer in the bedroom. There’s all kinds of things we can do to get these moms healthy so that they can carry a healthy baby. And along with this autism epidemic, we have an epidemic of infertility and miscarriages.
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Patricia: And these are not viable pregnancies that of course we mourn, but they are nature’s way of saying, “Honey, this isn’t a healthy environment. Your womb cannot grow a healthy baby.” This is the way nature works. And so clean it up and then we can have a nice healthy baby.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Absolutely. And a lot of the toxic chemicals are endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And this is one of the reasons why we’re seeing lower levels of testosterone and sperm counts, and it’s playing a role in fertility and also in autism.
Patricia: Right, right.
Dr. Weitz: So let’s go into some of these environmental toxins that you mentioned in your book. One that I had not heard about before that you mentioned in your book is antimony which is often contained in flame retardant chemicals, which if most people are not aware are most mattresses, furniture, even clothing, sleeping gowns are sprayed with flame retarding chemicals.
Patricia: Right. So we want to buy all natural bedding. We spend a third of our life in bed. And we want that bedding to be as natural and toxin-free as possible. And that bedroom to be a sleep sanctuary. It is for sleep, period. It is not for reading your book. It is not for watching television. It is not for being on the computer. It’s not for talking on a wireless phone. It’s for procreating, having sex, making babies, and sleep. And it has to be toxin-free for us to get good quality sleep. And the latest boogeyman are these 5G towers that are sprouting up everywhere and bombarding our homes, from the church down the street, that got paid to put up a cell phone tower. And so I now have a canopy over my bed that gets rid of, that repels some of these electromagnetic frequencies.
Dr. Weitz: Interesting.
Patricia: So this is so important. And it’s especially important if you want to get pregnant and if you want to have a healthy baby.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, yeah. It’s probably a good idea to use an environmental expert to come and inspect your home and see where the EMFs and other electrical fields are that may be affecting your bedroom and your home.
Patricia: I had somebody come to my home, he has a little Geiger counter. When he got near the bed, it went… and said, “How old’s that clock radio?” And he said, “You don’t want that next to your head.”
Dr. Weitz: Right. Even the wiring in the walls can be…
Patricia: Exactly.
Dr. Weitz: … discharging electrical signals.
Patricia: Right.
Dr. Weitz: So let’s go into some of the other chemicals. Let’s go through some of the heavy metals. We’ve got mercury, lead, aluminum, arsenic.
Patricia: Yeah. Well, mercury is the big bad metal of autism. And of course lead was the metal that most people know about. And lead is old news. Then mercury is newer news. And how do our kids get mercury? Well, the first way they get it is a mother who has silver amalgams in her teeth, which off-gas into her unborn baby. And so that’s one of the things that we want to do is to have the mother remove those amalgams safely prior to getting pregnant if she has some. There’s also mercury in power plants and we can’t do a lot about those.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, basically coal fired power plants are spewing hundreds of tons of mercury into the atmosphere and that’s what eventually falls into the oceans and gets into the fish.
Patricia: Right, right. And so that’s the next thing is our food. And so the rule to follow is that the larger the fish, the more mercury it has. It’s the top of the food chain. So medium-sized fish eat baby fish and big fish eat medium-sized fish. So our big fish like tuna fish, which could weigh hundreds of pounds, are probably the least desirable fish for our diet. And I can’t tell you how many mothers of kids with autism tell me, “Oh, I ate tuna fish every day in my pregnancy because I heard fish was good for you.” So the choice should not be tuna. And so we want smaller fish, these little babies like sardines and anchovies, and fish that is high fat. Because even if it has a little bit of mercury, the higher fat content is protective because our nervous system is myelinated in this fatty sheath, which is like the protective cover on an electrical cord. And that protects our nervous system from all kinds of attacks. So we want to eat good quality fat, and the best omega-3 fats come from fish.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And then we have all these other chemicals like PCBs and bisphenol A.
Patricia: Right. Yeah. Well, let’s go. Let’s finish… I can do a little more on the metals.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, let’s finish with the metals.
Patricia: Yeah, because aluminum is the newest boogeyman. So we went from lead, and everybody knows about lead testing, mercury, and now aluminum. And aluminum is… We’re cooking with aluminum pans and there’s aluminum in the air from the chemtrails. And so we’ve got to protect ourselves from aluminum.
Dr. Weitz: Some people use aluminum to cover their food. They make a turkey and they cover it with aluminum foil.
Patricia: You’re right, you’re right. And so that gets in…
Dr. Weitz: The holidays are coming. They have those aluminum pans that you throw away that a lot of people use for cooking your Thanksgiving meal.
Patricia: So people say, “Well, what am I going to use?” Well, the best thing to use is parchment paper. Parchment paper’s very, very benign. So that’s not a problem. But we want to avoid aluminum. And aluminum has been implicated in Alzheimer’s and dementia too, not just in autism. And then the arsenic. I know one child who’s now… He’s not a child. He’s 30 years old with severe autism who was poisoned by arsenic from the playground where they built the playground out of railroad ties.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, yes.
Patricia: And he had pica, which is eating dirt. And kids who have pica are looking for minerals. Their bodies are craving minerals, but he got the wrong one. He got arsenic. And there are common signs of arsenic poisoning that I put in my book that most people don’t know, like calluses on your hands. And the mother of this young man often said to the pediatrician, “He has these giant calluses. What is that?” And this doctor said to the mother that this autistic boy, “Maybe he’s playing too much basketball.” She said, “I don’t think so.”
Dr. Weitz: Interesting. I’d never heard that about the calluses. How does arsenic lead to calluses?
Patricia: I don’t know what the phenomenon is. But he also had rainbow-like skin, sort of iridescent skin on his back. And that was another sign of arsenic poisoning.
Dr. Weitz: And arsenic can be found in chicken. It can be found in rice.
Patricia: Rice. And that’s where this boy also got it. They were macrobiotic at the time, eating a lot of rice. And rice from China is particularly heavy in arsenic. So you just have to be really careful about food in particular. And our food is… When we talk about GMO foods and glyphosate, Roundup being used to grow our wheat and our corn and our soybeans. If you don’t buy organic, you’re getting a taste of glyphosate or this Roundup in every bite of food. So that’s really important to watch for too.
Dr. Weitz: So what do we do about all these heavy metals?
Patricia: Well, there are ways of getting them out of the body. There’s a process called chelation that is used in Europe a lot.
Dr. Weitz: You’re talking about intravenous or are using oral chelators?
Patricia: You can do it with a doctor, with IVs and specific oral chelators. But one of the things that Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, who I have followed for years, recommends is a substance called chlorella. And chlorella is a natural seaweed that is very, very high in minerals and is able to chelate naturally. And it comes in little pellets that look like M&M’s. And he likes people, pregnant mothers to chew on chlorella. He likes kids to chew on chlorella. I don’t know how you feel about that as kind of a natural chelator.
Dr. Weitz: Mm-hmm. Interesting. What about using liposomal glutathione and other binders?
Patricia: Yep, yep. So glutathione is really important because it’s our natural substance that we have that can chelate out the toxic metals. And if you’ve depleted your glutathione by using too much Tylenol, then you can use liposomal, which means it’s carried by fat and you use it through your skin. So there’s lots of products that you can buy that can help get rid of some of the metals. But if you’re seriously mercury toxic or aluminum toxic, you have to work with a doctor to do proper chelation.
Dr. Weitz: Right. So glutathione is actually one of the nutrients that kids with autism are often deficient in. And deficiency or insufficiency of specific nutrients can be a major factor in autism. Isn’t that correct?
Patricia: Absolutely correct. And one of the autism world’s heroes, Dr. Bernie Rimland, who founded the Autism Research Institute, was one of the first people to discover these nutrients and minerals that kids are deficient in. And he has a son, Bernie’s gone, but his son Mark is still alive. I think he’s in his 60s now. Bernie started supplementing Mark with vitamin B6 and magnesium with terrific results. And he did studies with families with autism and found that magnesium was just a marvelous benefit to many, many of our kids.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And I understand that cerebral folate deficiency can be a factor. And I understand that sometimes antibodies to dairy can block the absorption of folate.
Patricia: That’s correct. And so if you look at the diet of so many of our kids with autism, it’s almost like they’re colluding. Like they’re getting on the internet and say, “Let’s only eat foods that have wheat and dairy in them, okay?” And so they live on macaroni and cheese, pizza, cereal with milk, bagels and cream cheese, and pizza. And even though these have different names, then they’re basically the same thing. They’re combinations of wheat and dairy and wheat and dairy. And our kids are reactive to the casein, which is the protein in the dairy, and gluten, which is the protein in the wheat. And if we put them on an elimination diet that takes away these products, some of them improve markedly. And you can test for it to see if they have gluten sensitivity or casein sensitivity. And sometimes doctors are willing to do that and sometimes not. But if you can just do it by elimination and then have for two weeks or so, and then have kind of a glutton day where you eat nothing but these combinations, you’ll see your kid could have this going on.
Dr. Weitz: Yes. So when you recommend an elimination diet, what foods particularly do you take out? Do you just take out gluten and dairy? Do you also take out other foods, peanuts? How do you do your elimination diet?
Patricia: Well, first and foremost, you only want to do one thing at a time. If you do more than one thing at a time, you don’t know what the problem is.
Dr. Weitz: Well, typically what people in the functional medicine world do is they pick six foods or eight foods or something. They take them all out and then they test [inaudible 00:30:00] one at a time.
Patricia: That’s a good way to do it too. Yeah, yeah. But something like peanuts, if a child has a peanut allergy. Most parents are pretty aware of peanuts because their child has anaphylactic type, life-threatening maybe, reaction.
Dr. Weitz: Right. But we’re really talking about sensitivities, not…
Patricia: Correct, correct, correct. So those six foods are dairy products, wheat products, soy products, corn products, eggs. What’s your sixth?
Dr. Weitz: It all depends. Some people would take out seafood. Some people would take out soy. They would take out…
Patricia: So my clue is always what the child’s eating the most of.
Dr. Weitz: Right, right.
Patricia: And then the mother goes, “Ah! He’s going to starve to death.”
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Patricia: So I will tell you, I’ve never seen a child starve.
Dr. Weitz: Here’s the pizza food group and here’s the McNuggets food group.
Patricia: Right. So kids do not starve, but parents have to be stalwart. They have to be a Nazi and say, “I’m sorry, you can’t have that today.” And I tell them to blame me. “I met this crazy lady who told me, ‘You might do better if you didn’t drink four glasses of milk every meal.'” And for the older kids, I would bribe them. I would pay them not to eat those products.
Dr. Weitz: There you go. A number of people have proposed specific diets for autism. I went through your book, and in there you mentioned the low oxalate diet, the yeast-free diet, the low glutamate diet, the Feingold diet, the REID diet.
Patricia: Yep, there’s a huge chapter on dietary dos and don’ts. And these are down the line. You start with eating real food. If you eat fruits and vegetables and animal products and beans and fish and good quality fats, you don’t need a special diet because you’re not eating processed food. You’re eating real food. And real food is very rarely the problem.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Patricia: And so that’s really hard from families today who don’t cook, who are in a hurry, who eat out, who order in. They drive-through. You want to eat real food. And those are the diets that kids prosper on. And occasionally we will find a child who’s allergic to garlic. But the garlic or the onion or the egg isn’t making him autistic. It’s these additives, this processing, the way the food’s grown, that is the problem.
Dr. Weitz: The pesticides, the…
Patricia: Oh my God, yeah.
Dr. Weitz: … toxins, the herbicides, the fungicides, the way we grow our fruits and vegetables. And then when they get made into processed food, all the chemicals that are added, it’s just unbelievable. It’s not relieving food at that point.
Patricia: It’s not. And I have a slide when I present this, that the heading says, “Are Goldfish crackers food?” And the answer is no.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Patricia: And shame on you if you buy them, because you can’t live on Cheez Doodles and Goldfish crackers because they aren’t food. And this chapter of my book, the Dietary Dos and Don’ts, has just been republished as a standalone booklet in Greek, Spanish, German, and I think French. No, in Italian. And so they’re also available as e-books. I don’t know if you have an international audience or not, but those are available if you need something not in English.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, we do have people from other parts of the world. I get that little map showing and it’s like, “Oh, 14 people in Iceland have listened to my podcast.”
Patricia: Oh, that’s great. So this is the number one thing is the lifestyle issues. Before you go on and do expensive therapies and pay out of pocket or ask your insurance, this is in your hands what you’re feeding your children, what they’re eating, what they’re drinking, what they’re breathing. This is necessary to do prior to any kinds of other therapies. And we can get in about 80% by changing the diet, by making it more nutritious, by adding in good fats, by taking away some of these potentially problematic food sensitivity foods. We can get better behavior, better eye contact, better learning, better sleep, better everything.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And eat organic and start to work on reducing your exposure to some of these toxic chemicals…
Patricia: Absolutely.
Dr. Weitz: … the metals, the other… And maybe do some testing and find out what chemicals you are getting exposed to. Are there mycotoxins in your home?
Patricia: Right, right. And some of the tests are fascinating. For instance, some doctors… I don’t know if you use a hair test. There’s some very interesting hair tests that we look at what metals are coming out in the hair. And they did this with kids with autism, and they found that many of them weren’t showing mercury and aluminum in their hair. And the first conclusion was that they didn’t have any. But then they did a challenge test with a chelator and the mercury poured out into the hair. So it wasn’t that it wasn’t in there, it was that the kids were not detoxifying it.
Dr. Weitz: Right. That’s one of the tricky parts about testing for some of these toxins, like some of these heavy metals, is if you look at… The typical physician is going to order a serum mercury test, but that’s only going to discover the mercury that’s floating around the bloodstream. If it’s stored in some of the organs or in the bones or the fat, it’s not going to be circulating around. There’s not going to be high levels in the serum necessarily, so.
Patricia: Right, right. And so you have to be a good detective. And that’s why I named my radio show The Autism Detective. And it’s so much fun to interview these parents who had to be a detective, what happened to their child, to these therapists, to the functional medicine doctors. I have several functional medicine doctors who I have interviewed who talk about, well, like you, where do you start? What do you start looking at when you have a child with autism? How do you peel that onion to figure out what is the most important thing that is affecting this child? And my old Autism Detective episodes, about 65 of them now are on Spotify. So you can go there and find them.
Dr. Weitz: Cool. Yeah. Well, one of my favorite tests these days is this urine test from Vibrant called the Total Tox-Burden. And you can do 20 different heavy metals, a bunch of different environmental toxins and mycotoxins. And so…
Patricia: Interesting.
Dr. Weitz: … it’s a really good initial screen for toxins.
Patricia: Who makes that test?
Dr. Weitz: Vibrant America. Are you familiar with them?
Patricia: I’m not.
Dr. Weitz: Oh yeah, check out Vibrant America. It’s a premiere testing for functional medicine practitioners in particular.
Patricia: That’s great.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. So another type of toxin is endotoxins. And these are often coming from bacteria that are found in the gut. And we know that gut health has a major factor in autism. So maybe…
Patricia: Absolutely.
Dr. Weitz: … you can talk about that.
Patricia: Yep. Well, the word microbiome, which is who we are living with, because we’re only 10% human, it’s all the gut bugs that live in our intestines and in our belly button and on our skin. And those critters that we share our body with can be friendly and helpful, or they can be problematic. And one of the reasons I had to revise my Outsmarting Autism book was because of the research that was done on the microbiome. And that’s a brand-new word, only a little over than 10 years old. And it’s just we have ways of now evaluating our microbiome through a stool test or a urine test, and we can look at what our ratio of good bugs to bad bugs is. And we know that we need a balance. We have to have the proper balance. And our kids with autism have an imbalance, which is called dysbiosis. That’s just a fancy word that means they have more bad guys than good guys, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Patricia: Yeah. And so by using probiotics and some supplements, which we know the good guys like to eat, and then they can proliferate, we can change the balance in the gut. And by doing that, we miraculously change the behavior and the focus and the ability of this child to be present and learn.
Dr. Weitz: Great. So gut health is super important.
Patricia: Absolutely.
Dr. Weitz: And we do stool testing all the time. And then when we see an excess of fungus or pathogenic bacteria. Or sometimes you just have bacteria that are supposed to be there, but they’re overgrown so it throws things out of balance. One of the things that we’ll use are particular herbal antimicrobials.
Patricia: That’s great. So people say, “Well, how did we get so much fungus in the gut?” And typically these are kids who’ve had a lot of infections. And the infections in the first two years of life were treated with antibiotics. And we know now that antibiotics have gotten stronger and stronger and stronger, and they wipe out everything. And they wipe out the good guys and the bad guys, except that the fungus are hardy and they hang around.
Dr. Weitz: And some antibiotics like penicillin are actually fungi themselves.
Patricia: That’s true. That’s true. And so we need to use some counteractions to these antibiotics and be more vigilant about when we use antibiotics. And most women who’ve had a yeast infection know what that’s like. It’s not good. And it often happens after you’ve taken antibiotic.
Dr. Weitz: Right. So what about the V word?
Patricia: What about it?
Dr. Weitz: Is that playing a role in autism?
Patricia: Probably, and in most kids. And I didn’t know how much you wanted to talk about that.
Dr. Weitz: I’m not sure how much I want to talk about it either, but.
Patricia: How safe it was to talk about it, so you can lead me.
Dr. Weitz: I’ve been very vociferously avoiding that word.
Patricia: Okay. So the V word is important because of what’s happened between my generation and your generation and today’s generation. And we are much more heavy-handed than we used to be.
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Patricia: And so our kids today are heavily inoculated. And we don’t know what this is doing to their systems. And the inoculations also by necessity have what’s called adjuvants or additives in them, which are put there on purpose to stimulate the immune system so that they don’t have to put so much of the pathogen in. And those adjuvants are just as bad as the chemicals in our food, in our personal care products, on our furniture, because they are the same ones. They used to be mercury and that’s gone, but then they added more alumina and propylene glycol. And if you’re a kid who can’t detoxify those things, your body has to deal with them and has maybe an autoimmune reaction. But if the V word was implicated in as the number one cause of autism, every kid in America would have autism. So we know that some kids are higher risk than others. And we just want to be cautious about how we use those Vs. We don’t want to ever do it with a kid who is sick or on antibiotics because that kid is vulnerable.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely.
Patricia: Yep. And we don’t want to do too many at a time.
Dr. Weitz: Exactly. Now that’s more convenient for the doctor and big pharma if we can load up three, four, five at one shot. But that’s a lot for a kid’s immune system to deal with.
Patricia: It is. It is.
Dr. Weitz: And then if they have side effects, what do we do? Give them some Tylenol, which further decreases your detoxification abilities.
Patricia: Right. So this is very hard to discuss with the mainstream. And there’s not allowed to be any controversy anymore. And it’s really important, I think, that parents educate themselves, that they read both sides, they understand what they’re doing so they can make educated, informed decisions.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And I don’t think you have to be for or against. I think you can recognize the benefits of some of these, but yet do it in a manner that might be more safe for your particular kid.
Patricia: Right, right. Every kid is different. And we don’t want a one-size-fits-all schedule.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Patricia: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: So let’s talk about some of the beneficial nutritional supplements that kids with autism might be on.
Patricia: Well, the B6 and magnesium are really important. My number one supplement for everybody, autistic or not, is vitamin D.
Dr. Weitz: Yes. And now vitamin D with K?
Patricia: Now vitamin D with K. I live in Pittsburgh. We have 50 days of sun. That’s not very many.
Dr. Weitz: No.
Patricia: And the way your body makes D is through sunlight. So if you can’t make it, you’ve got to take it. And there are lots of ways of taking it. And you want to take a high-quality pharmaceutical grade vitamin D with K, so it’s absorbed. And so you want to get your numbers up so that… It’s very protective. And from the reading I’ve been doing, I believe that it is very protective in COVID [inaudible 00:48:55].
Dr. Weitz: Oh, a hundred percent. Not even controversial, in my mind.
Patricia: Yeah, mine either. And those people who go down with COVID are the ones with the lowest vitamin D levels.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Patricia: So I think the FDA or CDC says that a level of 25 is adequate. You want twice that. You want a good 50 or 60, would you agree?
Dr. Weitz: Oh yeah, absolutely. 50 to 70. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there’s plenty of data now. I know there’s still controversy. But there was a really good paper that came out a few years ago showing that women, if their level is 60 or above, their risk of breast cancer is reduced by 30%. I mean, there’s very few…
Patricia: And colon cancer.
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Patricia: And colon cancer.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Patricia: Very, very protective of all kinds of things. So the best way of course is to live in Florida or Arizona.
Dr. Weitz: I just got back from Florida. Not a big fan of living in Florida. It’s a big old swamp.
Patricia: Right. So that’s why we have to take it.
Dr. Weitz: Yep.
Patricia: And again, because D is a fat-soluble vitamin, you want it with fat. So liposomal D.
Dr. Weitz: By the way, I apologize to anybody who lives in Florida. It’s just not the place for me.
Patricia: Yeah, nor me.
Dr. Weitz: Yes, absolutely. Take your vitamin D when you consume fat. So you’ll have those fat enzymes that will help you to absorb it at a higher rate. And then we got the B vitamins.
Patricia: All the B vitamins, especially B12. And James Neubrander has helped so many kids with IV vitamin B12. Very, very important with our kids. And then the B6 I mentioned earlier, the B vitamins. And it’s important to look at the B vitamins separately. They make these B50, B100 compounds, but they’re not in the ratio of what your body needs.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And somebody else who’s an expert on autism, Greer McGuinness, who I interviewed a number of months ago. She pointed out that some of these kids can’t properly metabolize the methyl B12. And so in some kids, if that’s the case, the methyl B12, which is now the preferred form, will actually over excite these kids. And so those kids are actually going to do better on the [inaudible 00:51:54] or the hydroxycobalamin.
Patricia: Very interesting.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, based on some of those methylation genes. So we also have acetyl-L-carnitine, which is kind of an interesting compound for brain health.
Patricia: I’m not so up on that to be able to talk about that.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, okay. So you have a chapter in your book on hormones, and I thought that chapter was really interesting because you talk about some hormones that most people don’t talk about. And you talk about oxytocin, which is generally only talked about as the hormone that’s involved in orgasm. But it has a number of other important roles in the body that you talk about and may play a role here in autism.
Patricia: It’s the bonding hormone. It is what allows a child to bond with a mother. And with our hormone disruption, with our pesticides in our foods, we are seeing many, many, many kids who are hormonally disrupted and autistic. And that was the hardest chapter in the book for me to write. It is the cascade of hormones of how one turns into another, which begets just a couple of others is so complicated that I needed several people to help me write that chapter. It actually was the last chapter that I wrote. But oxytocin is a big one. And if you can stay away from these hormone-disrupting foods, that’s really important.
But the one hormone that is often seen as deficient is the thyroid hormone. And the thyroid is the master gland. And many of these kids are born to low thyroid mothers. So back to healthy parents have healthy kids. I want a mother to have her thyroid tested and balanced and made sure that it is strong enough and efficient enough to get her through the pregnancy and to have a child with adequate thyroid hormone. And you’re the doctor, you know about thyroid testing. Our typical thyroid testing isn’t complete enough.
Dr. Weitz: No, of course not. Typically, all they do is TSH.
Patricia: Right.
Dr. Weitz: Nobody’s looking at the free T3 and the free T4. Occasionally they do. And then nobody looks at the antibodies, whether you have antibodies to your thyroid.
Patricia: So if you’re thinking about getting pregnant, if you have one child with autism, you want to be sure that you get a good thyroid test from somebody who really understands all the different aspects of thyroid.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, you need to go to a functional medicine doctor because…
Patricia: Absolutely. Yes.
Dr. Weitz: Unfortunately, insurance doesn’t really want to cover that. Vasopressin was another interesting hormone that people don’t talk about that you also mention is a factor. You write in your book that it enhances muscle tone, peer bonding, and even plays a role in brain function.
Patricia: So many of these kids have low tone. And I just had the privilege of observing twin girls. And they’re fraternal twins. They look very different. And one is like a little fire plug, and the other, I tried to pick her up, it was like picking up a noodle. And low tone is a big problem. We have to have good tone in our face to be able to talk. We have to have good tone in our hands to be able to pick things up and later to write. But the biggest area regarding tone is our digestive system. Our intestines are just one giant muscle.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. Gut motility is a key factor. Alterations and gut motility is a major cause of IBS, which is the most common gastrointestinal condition.
Patricia: And our kids are notoriously constipated or they have diarrhea, or they alternate constipation and diarrhea. And so part of it, not all of it, part of it’s what they’re eating, part of it’s that they’re not moving. But part of it is that this muscle tone in their gut is weak. And so that’s something that needs to be looked at thoroughly.
Dr. Weitz: Another thing that I saw in new chapter on hormones, which I thought was kind of an interesting clinical pearl is you mentioned DHEA, which is another hormone that typically is not measured by doctors. And that low DHEA leads to low tryptophan, which leads to low serotonin, which we know is one of the essential neurotransmitters in the brain that can lead to depression and anxiety and all sorts of other brain issues.
Patricia: And guess where they’re made, in the gut. And so you have a damaged gut, you’re not going to be able to produce those, and absorb your food properly, and then your hormones are off. So we’re back. We’ve gone full circle now. The proof is in the gut. We’ve got to be able to heal the gut. And functional medicine doctors are really the best at doing that work.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Now, we just talked about oxytocin, and I just found this discussion of oxytocin so interesting. You also go into the book how it’s very common during the birthing process for women to be supplemented with Pitocin in order to induce labor, which is a synthetic oxytocin. And this may actually turn off the oxytocin production in your baby.
Patricia: That’s right. And who thunk it?
Dr. Weitz: Here we are injecting all these hormones going, “Oh yeah, it’ll be fine.”
Patricia: Right. It’ll be fine. And doing these birthing procedures that do not enhance later development and post-birthing procedures. I have a whole chapter on reflexes and the importance of primitive reflexes and how our body is like a computer that’s programmed with over a hundred different reflexes. But if the baby isn’t come down through the birth canal and is taken by C-section, that is a bad situation for future reflex development, which is the pattern for talking, for looking, for reading, for standing and sitting and rolling over, all these things. So the reflex integration has been affected by the hormones…
Dr. Weitz: Fascinating.
Patricia: … by the birthing process.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Patricia: It’s all interrelated.
Dr. Weitz: One more reason to avoid a C-section if at all possible.
Patricia: Absolutely.
Dr. Weitz: Not only is there increased risk to the mother, increased risk to the baby, increased cost, but you lose out on the development of the microbiome because the baby develops the bacteria from the mother’s womb as it’s passing through. But it also affects the primitive reflexes.
Patricia: Right. And we’re now, thank goodness, we’re swabbing babies with mother’s vaginal fluids if they’re born by C-section. So that’s a good thing. But the better thing would’ve been to be born that way. But then we have this back to sleep movement where we’re putting babies on their backs to sleep when they’re neurologically upside down. When a baby’s on his back, his eyes are up there somewhere. When he is on his tummy, he sees his hands and he can move and he can look left and look right and look up and lift his head and use the strongest muscle in his neck to lift his head. When he is on his back, he’s like a beach whale.
Dr. Weitz: Well, this is all an attempt to try to stop sudden infant death syndrome, that’s why.
Patricia: Yes. Yeah. Well, guess what, we’re back to that V word where many people can correlate the timing of that sudden infant death syndrome to 24 hours prior a baby having some kind of inoculation.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Patricia: And what is sudden infant death syndrome, really? It’s probably a V reaction. And in Japan where they stopped doing that with young babies, there is no sudden infant death syndrome. And I quote that research in my book.
Dr. Weitz: Interesting, interesting. So what do you think about using… You mentioned using the oxytocin supplementation for kids with autism. And I guess there’s also a homeopathic version.
Patricia: There’s a homeopathic version of everything. There’s even a homeopathic version of some of the pathogens that we inoculate against. And so for those who know about homeopathy, it’s an energetic version of animal, vegetable or mineral. And so when you energetically introduce it into the body, when the pathogen comes along, the body… It’s not a foreign substance to the body. So the body says, “I know this, I can deal with this.” And that’s what homeopathy does. And for some kids, homeopathic oxytocin is enough to get their bodies awake, just as it is for some of the other things that we do use homeopathy for. And homeopathic detoxification, I talk about in the book. And that is one of the most exciting ways of getting kids back to themselves in a very gentle, sequential fashion.
Dr. Weitz: Cool. Another hormone you mentioned is that some of these kids may have high testosterone, and that can result in aggression and some of the other symptoms.
Patricia: Right. And testosterone…
Dr. Weitz: And that could be…
Patricia: What?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. That maybe is one of the reasons why it’s more common in boys.
Patricia: That’s what I was just going to say. That testosterone and mercury are a bad combination because it potentiates the problem and that’s what looks like aggression. And so the doctors, Geier, G-E-I-E-R, Mark, and can’t remember the other one’s name, they were using Lupron to lower the testosterone in boys. And they were accused of castrating their autistic patients. But they were very, very successful by lowering the testosterone and chelating the mercury to bring down the aggressive behavior. And the girls with autism typically have high testosterone levels…
Dr. Weitz: Interesting.
Patricia: … which is fascinating. They’re more masculine in their features and their levels are too high. And estrogen is protective from some of the metals and from some of the chemicals and the viruses. So we want to, again, and this requires very careful management. This is not something you go and do yourself. This requires a doctor who really understands these hormones. This chapter that you have focused on doesn’t happen to be my area of most expertise, but I’m glad you did it because it’s really, really important for parents to understand how complicated this autism picture is. It’s not just about one thing. It’s not about poor speech and not having friends and not having eye contact. It is biological. And the biology of autism is where our important functional medicine doctors are going. And this started with Martha Herbert. She would be a great one for you to have on your show. Martha Herbert wrote the book The Autism Revolution. And she was one of the first doctors to talk about, “This is a biomedical problem. This is not a psychiatric disorder.”
Dr. Weitz: Right. You have a chapter in there about structural work, and you mentioned chiropractic, and I’m a chiropractor, so I thought that was kind of interesting.
Patricia: Right. And you know that the birth process causes all kinds of issues if it’s not clean and easy. And so many of our kids with autism have a history of traumatic birth. And many chiropractors want to be present at birth. They want to catch that baby. They want to do teeny-tiny little manipulations to balance out anything that might have gone wrong during that birth process if there was use of vacuum aspiration or forceps. Those are absolute necessities to have a good chiropractor on your team. And there are so many other methods that chiropractors use, like craniosacral techniques or myofascial techniques that some of them are done just by chiropractors. Some of them are tools in the tool chest, say, of occupational therapists or physical therapists or other medical practitioners who can help balance this out, some structural issues. And some of them may be obvious, like a head tilt or a child who is walking crooked. But some of them may not be obvious to a parent or a teacher. And it’s important that you have a good structural evaluation of a child with autism.
And some of them, some of chiropractors work with optometrists. And I have gotten particularly interested in vision on my website, which is my name, patricialemer.com. There are several long interviews like this about vision, and I’ve titled most of them, Vision Is More Than Meets The Eye. And what happens if the two eyes are not working together, if the brain and the eyes don’t work together, if a child is having double vision or is not using the eyes well together, it may not be obvious. And a good developmental optometrist can work collaboratively with a chiropractor to do therapy that can help this child use vision more efficiently. And I don’t mean eyesight, I don’t mean the clarity. I mean something conceptual, organizational. When you say someone has vision, you’re not talking about the prescription in their glasses. You’re talking about something, about thinking, that is missing in many of our kids with autism.
Dr. Weitz: Cool.
Patricia: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: There were a couple of other things when we spoke before we started that you wanted to make sure we covered.
Patricia: Besides vision and other sensory areas. Many kids with autism see occupational therapists. And the occupational therapist works on sensory issues. Temple Grandin, who’s probably the most famous adult autistic, she talks about her sensory issues, her tactile, her olfactory, her auditory sensitivities. But vision gets its own chapter. And again, an OT and an optometrist should collaborate. And the other area that this book has, that my book Outsmarting Autism has that is often neglected, is the dental area. If you look at kids with autism, many of them have overbites. They have very narrow and high-arched palate and they’re not getting good breathing and good oxygen to the brain. So a good functional, holistic dentist who doesn’t use fluoride, who understands why our palate should be wide, is an important member of the autism team because they can put expanders in the jaw and open it up, which will help breathing, will help speech, which will help get more oxygen to the brain for thinking. And so I have a whole chapter on that, which is another really important piece of the autism puzzle.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, that’s super important. And proper breathing techniques like learning how to breathe through the nose and not through the mouth, and maybe even using mouth taping or other techniques.
Patricia: Yep, the mouth is for eating, the nose is for breathing.
Dr. Weitz: Excellent. Excellent, Patricia. So we’ve covered a lot of great information. So any final thoughts? And then let people know how they can find out about your book and get in touch with you.
Patricia: So as a final thought, I told you early on, where I really have made a difference is helping people understand the sequence of working with a child and why sequence matters. And my book is written in sequence with five steps of how to get your child better functioning. And it has to start with the biology of autism. It has to start with lifestyle, with diet, with sleep, with hydration, and with movement. Those are the way we function best when all of those are on par. And people don’t want to start there. They come to you or me and they say, “My child’s not talking.” Well, I can’t get him to talk if he’s living on Twinkies and Coke. It just doesn’t work that way. He has to have good gas for his car to be able to talk. And he’s not going to talk if the muscles of his tongue and his lips and his cheeks aren’t working, and if those mouth and eye and facial reflexes aren’t working. So you’ve got to be patient for talking.
“And he doesn’t have any friends.” Well, socialization is the end product of all these things coming together. And that’s why the subtitle of my book, Outsmarting Autism, is so important. Build Healthy Foundations for Communication, Socialization, and Behavior at All Ages. And we didn’t talk about ages, but it’s never too late. It’s never too late for some of these young adults today to start using communication skills. Some to be able to be more independent, to eat better. Their lifespan is… we’re getting it to be longer and longer by helping them eat better, sleep better, and have better health.
And so all of this is in my book, Outsmarting Autism, which is available, as you said, on Amazon. It’s in a 600-page paperback with the world’s best index and also comes as a Kindle that you can read on a tablet. And there’s also an audiobook, which I do not read. They hired a professional actress to read the book. And you can go also, I have two websites. I have patricialemer.com, and my last name is spelled L-E-M-E-R, one M. And I have outsmartingautism.com. And both of them have lots and lots and lots of information on them.
And then I’m on Facebook, Patricia Spear Lemer, S-P-E-A-R. And Outsmarting Autism also has its own Facebook page. And you’ll see that I travel all over the world and I like posting on Facebook. And I often post what I’m doing related to autism. And that my Autism Detectives podcast is… I post every time. I have a new podcast, which is the second and fourth Tuesday of the month at 1:00 PM Eastern, 10:00 AM Pacific. And it’s on something called healthylife.net, which is a web streaming radio station. So you can listen live. But the best way is to find it on Spotify and I post it like a day or two after I’ve done it live. So there’s tons of those to keep you busy if you want to know everything there is to know about autism.
Dr. Weitz: There you go. Excellent, Patricia. And are you still working with clients?
Patricia: No, I’ve retired about 15 times. If you have questions though, I’m happy to answer them. My email address is developdelay@gmail. And that’s D-E-V-E-L-O-P-D-E-L-A-Y, developdelay@gmail.com. And that’s the way I work with clients. It’s best for me if I don’t have to go through what’s in my book. And I realize that every parent has a great story. I’m gotten too old to listen to the long story, so I’m not a good listener. But I sure would be happy to help you find resources and figure out the best sequence to helping your child if you want to email me.
Dr. Weitz: Excellent. Thank you so much, Patricia. Fact-filled podcast.
Patricia: Well, Ben, this has been fun. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show.
Dr. Weitz: You got it.
Patricia: Thanks so much.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you. Thank you.
Patricia: Okay.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please go to Apple Podcast and give us a five-star ratings and review. That way more people will be able to find this Rational Wellness Podcast when they’re searching for health podcasts. And I wanted to let everybody know that I do now have a few openings for new nutritional consultations for patients at my Santa Monica White Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition Clinic. So if you’re interested, please call my office (310) 395-3111, and sign up for one of the few remaining slots for a comprehensive nutritional consultation with Dr. Ben Weitz. Thank you and see you next week.
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