A Decade of Torture

Ok, so last Thursday I went to this presentation, against my better judgement.  

It was just as bad as I thought it would be. And in many ways it was worse. 

They started out with a mom getting up to speak about her experiences with "natural healing" and autism. She talked about how she avoided most pharmaceuticals, and yes, she pronounced the word with derisive italics. She started out by showing a picture of her kid at age two, miserable.  Sensory overload, not having a good time of life, cranky kid.  

She then started treating her for yeast, put her on a casein/gluten free diet, gave her every trendy supplement under the sun including B6 injections. She had alternating diarrhea and constipation, so she got treatments for each extreme. She got chelated for a year. At one point they had her scoped to check for H pylori from some supposed specialist they had to fly to, even though this is something they can check for locally (and much less invasively I might add). And on and on.  

She got a bit teary eyed as she admitted that her now 12 year old was still not "recovered" but don't give up hope! Her 12 year old was not going to sleepovers and making lots of friends, but she was smiling, talking and obsessing about airplanes, probably, as she put it "because she's been on so many of them to see all these specialists." As proof, she presented a picture of her 12 year old smiling. 

The whole thing just pissed me off. What I saw was probably different than what the rest of the audience saw, but what I saw was that this woman had tortured her daughter for ten years with invasive and unnecessary medical procedures. That poor girl. And I'm willing to bet any benefits she thinks she got out of it were just from the passage of time. I'm sure I could find a whole gallery of autistic, miserable 2 year olds that smiled and talked at the age of 12.

And yet, here she was, totally enthusiastic about how awesome naturopathic medicine was. This wasn't an evil woman, and I know she thought she was doing things for the best interest of her child. She clearly spent a lot of money trying to "fix" her, but she's never going to get the results she thinks she wants this way. 

Ok, and I'm not necessarily anti naturopathic medicine. In fact, I have good friends who are naturopaths. I just think you have to really step back and evaluate whether or not you're doing something that even makes sense, or you're going to end up riding the crazy wagon and torturing your kid instead of enjoying them.