You know, just says, "Hey, look, you know it's your child's.. you know, maybe they're a lazy baby, right? Or your kid's going to develop on their own time. You know, don't worry about anything, everything's okay, you're just an overprotective mom. I always tell parents that you always trust your intuition, right? When you know something's wrong, there's something wrong. And sometimes, unfortunately, when you go to the doctor, if you don't hear what you're really looking for or getting the answers, it doesn't mean that you should just always trust that. I think people should always get at least a second or third or fourth opinion.

This is Practitioner Perspectives in Autism Care, a Neurosage Hub podcast, building hope, walking together.

Yeah, so tell us a little about what does that first diagnosis look like for parents, and how does a parent actually go from like, hey, my child might be delayed and I might be seeing something to actually understanding more of what is going on with their child and where they actually fall on this neurodiversity scale,

yeah. Okay, so normally, how it kind of starts, right, as a parent, depending if she's a young parent, right, she's normally pretty well educated, she's read all these books to start looking up kind of like gross motor milestones, like when should my kid, you know, hold their head up, when should they start crawling, when should they start rolling, when should they start talking, and normally that mom starts recognizing something's wrong, right? So she goes to the pediatrician, and the pediatrician, you know, just says, "Hey, look, you know, it's your child's, you know, maybe they're lazy baby, right? Or your kid's going to develop on their own time, you know? Don't worry about anything, everything's okay, you're just an overprotective mom. I always tell parents that you always trust your intuition, right? When you know something's wrong, there's something wrong. And sometimes, unfortunately, when you go to the doctor, if you don't hear what you're really looking for or getting the answers, it doesn't mean that you should just always trust that. I think people should always get at least a second or third or fourth opinion.

We didn't realize that, like our son not speaking as much as, as he, you know, is normal by one or two was was a delay, because it was our first child, and so it wasn't till our daughter came along, who's like talking more than our two year old, you know, that we're like, oh my gosh, like maybe there's something there,

and so there's this thing called primitive reflexes, which is basically an involuntary movement that really those things have a chronological kind of timeframe that these reflexes are supposed to go away, and an adult that they should do these things, and then over here you have these primitive reflexes, like if you stroke the baby's face, you know, is there any muscle contraction in the face? You know, if you stroke the baby's hand, as the hand stays open, the feet, you know, if you roll the baby, do they roll over, or do they basically just kind of like lay there? And all of these reflexes, they literally have this chronological time frame, but the problem is, is that we don't see these things being checked in your normal pediatric wellness visit, which means that that's a problem, right? Because maybe there is a delay, but it's not resistant, necessarily being measured or detected.

You can actually start to diagnose, if I'm hearing you correctly, you can start to diagnose whether somebody is neurodiverse by 12 months. At the 12, you can.. that's amazing that you can do that. When we were getting our child, you know, and we were figuring this out early on, and we went to the doctor, and they were like, well, he might be on the spectrum, but we don't want to diagnose him until he's like five years old.

You can even look at it even earlier than that, and I can tell you right, is that I look at kids' facial features from the day that they were born, and I started going in. I start looking at all the facial features. I look at the pupils, I look at the pupil size, the black in the eye. I look for differences in the pupils. I look at the way the head tilts, like a lot of these kids get something called torticollis, which is where their head's tilted, right? A lot of these kids, very interesting, that when you look at their face, they don't have these little bitty lines on their face, they're like they're like flat, right, and they don't have the symmetry in their facial tone, and that's a very kind of early indication that this kid's probably going to have a speech delay.

I remember he was watching a show and all of a sudden, like, he jumps up and runs out of the room, like, what's going on, like, what's like nothing, like nothing, the show seemed like it should have scared him, and we knew he was sensitive to like fear and scary, everything else. It was later when I was watching him do the same thing, like you know, just a.. it was an animation, it was like a Disney movie, but he, he gets up and he runs out the door, the back door of the house, and he closes the glass door, and then he sits there on the outside of the door watching the show, so I know he wants to watch the show, but he sits on the outside of the door, and then he puts his hands over his ears. I was like, oh my gosh, wasn't even like the scary parts, it was just the build up and the intensity, the music.

Yeah, so one of the, one of the common things is called hyper acoustics. Which is basically hyper sensitivity to sound, and a lot of these kids actually have that, and if that threshold gets breached, then it can basically induce what's called a startle reflex, which is similar to like the deer in a headlights, but you also have where you can fight or flight, where instead of the freeze episode, you can basically flee, right, and that that's more than likely what happened to your son, is that he heard that build up, and then it actually scared him enough to where his brain triggered to just run.

a lot of these kids could actually hear way better than what parents actually think they can. There's kind of three lanes that we kind of run in, we have like the one lane way over here, which is just, you know, sit and wait, and then, then all of a sudden, boom, the kid gets diagnosed with ASD, and she's going to see a new doctor, right? And that new doctor is basically going to say, hey, look, we're going to look at a comprehensive aspect of autism, and what we're going to do is that we're going to look at and talk to you about diet, we're going to talk about nutrition, we're going to talk about vitamins, and then that person right there comes in, and she's like, "Hey, I went to see this doctor, and he ran a stool sample, and my kid has a parasite and this thing called leaky gut, and he's got a lot of inflammation in his stomach, and then the thing is, is that what's under the hood of this, right? We want to look under and see what's going on inside the immune system, right, with all the labs.

This is above and beyond, like an actual.. this is just okay. Your child was diagnosed with autism. This is okay. Your child's diagnosed with autism, but we're actually going to do assessments to create a baseline. It literally is like, okay, they're driving a Ferrari, and you can't go put regular gas, regular unleaded gas in a Ferrari, and you got to buy the premium, and if these autistic children that are like built differently, you got to give them the fuel,

so that way we can actually get these little kids to be like a Ferrari, right, because they are little Ferraris, they're precious, expensive little things, but what happens is, and they're very fast, but what happens is, is we need to be able to make sure that we have the gas,

that's pretty awesome. I admire you for doing that, and it seems, if I'm correct, you're not trying to hog all this to yourself, but you actually want to share all of this, your research, your tools.

Yeah, well, you know, I have a whole different background in this stuff, because I witnessed this with my mom. Right, my brother was a vaccine-injured child, and my mom literally went all over the United States seeking help, and she was literally getting kicked out of doctors' offices, crying, asking them to literally just look deeper, right? So, and I witnessed this, right, and I spent my whole kind of young childhood watching my mom and my brother's interaction. My mom doing everything in her power to get my brother out. I'm going to make sure that parents who come into my world, at least they're going to get as much information as possible.

Do you know that analogy, so when they asked him how he created the statue of David, he said, I took the marble and I removed everything from the marble that was not David, and you talked, yeah, you talked earlier about like taking these kids and and pulling them out,

we're going to chisel them out, we're going to go piece by piece, but we got to basically get them out right, because these kids are in there, they're, they're, they're wanting to express themselves, but they can't, because they're literally like constraint with all this stuff going on.

This is Practitioner Perspectives in Autism Care, a Neurosage Hub podcast, building hope, walking together.