Autism-Articles

There are many children within the school environment that have feeding difficulties. For these children, the task of eating lunch and snack at school is a daunting one. However, lunch and snack time can present the perfect opportunity for addressing feeding difficulties if given the necessary attention and intervention. A team collaboration framework is necessary for the design and implementation of a successful feeding therapy program within the schools, with many people and steps involved. Who is involved? The child is the primary person involved. The student's family is a key player in the success of the program. The school based speech/language pathologist or occupational therapist is typically the person responsible for designing and overseeing the feeding therapy program. Teachers and paraprofessionals play a major role in the direct implementation of the program. There may be other school personnel involved for each individual child and his/her needs, suc...

Musical therapy is gaining acceptance in the field of treatments for autism. Individuals on the autism-spectrum who receive music therapy will often have improvement in overall temperament and learning abilities. I recently saw a young boy who loved the Beatles. Hearing their music has helped with his behavior and willingness to communicate. Other individuals have responded in similar ways to other types of music. Music makes connections to the non-verbal part of our brain making it a perfect therapy for disorders in which the person has trouble communicating. This is why it is a perfect fit for autism. Music therapy has been used in conjunction to help with learning skills. Classical music often playing in the background has been shown to help with mental processing for math and complex problems, but more importantly in autism music in general provides a non-threatening medium for people while playing games that help to improve social and behavior skills. For ex...

There are a lot of things that you want to avoid when using diet as an autism treatment tool for your child. But there are also a lot of things that you want to put in their diet, that can help ameliorate some of the symptoms and help them cognitively and behaviorally. 1. Vitamins First of all, you will want a diet that is well balanced in terms of essential vitamins. Vitamin B is an important one. It helps increase brain function, can help produce neurotransmitters, and helps the absorption of essential nutrients into the body. This in turn helps improve nervous system function. All of this increases overall health. Vitamin C improves the immune system, as most people know. Also, though, it helps neutralize free radicals in the body. Free radicals are naturally occurring chemicals that can cause problems for the body; Vitamin C is an anti-oxidant, and as such, helps to control the damage that the free radicals do. Multivitamins are important to take because many ...

There are hundreds and hundreds of alternative treatments for autism available, leaving parents of autistic children left puzzled as to, what really works, and what is worth investing in. These treatments can be expensive and sometimes painful for the child, and many show no results. Some parents and doctors believe it is not worth the effort, while others are strong believers in some of the treatments. Every child with autism has different tendencies and symptoms, that causes many different reactions to the treatments. Many doctors have agreed, that there are two proven treatments for people with autism. One is applied behavioral analysis, and the second is a drug treatment. But others disagree and offer different results. Below are listed a few of the alternative therapies that have had results in some individuals with autism, in the past. *Gluten Free Diets-Many parents have spoken about the difference a gluten free diet can make with their children. A glute...

So what is autism? First of all, we must make some distinctions. There are various types of difficulty within the spectrum of disability of which we are speaking. The major distinctions are as follows: Autism Asperger's syndrome, Rett Syndrom, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. The most prevalent and commonly known two of these are autism and Asperger's Syndrome. What do we mean when we say autism is a 'spectrum disorder?' When the term, 'spectrum disorder' is used it means that there are a range of symptoms, which can be attributed to autism. Any one individual may display any combination of these symptoms, in differing degrees of severity. Therefore an individual at one end of the autistic spectrum may seem very different to an individual at the other end of the spectrum. Who first discovered autism? Autism was first recognized in the mid 1940's by a psychiatrist called Leo Kanner. He described a group of children, whom he was t...