Change Your Brain Every Day - A Talk about Curing Autism – Part 1 of an Interview with Lisa Ackerman

Episode Date: May 22, 2017

There may be 100 ways to autism, but with the right strategy, there are just as many ways to make vast improvements in the life of your autistic child. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by Lisa Ackerman, the founder of TACA (Talk About Curing Autism). Lisa shares stories of her personal journey in finding avenues for positive change for her autistic son, Jeff.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Greetings, everyone. Tana and I are here with a very special friend, Lisa Ackerman, who is the founder and executive director of Talk About Curing Autism. We actually highlighted Lisa's story in our new book, The Brain Warrior's Way, Turning Pain into Purpose.

She was, goodness, so many different things uh i think what i know about lisa is she has helped literally tens of thousands of people and it came out of the pain uh that she felt uh, I guess would be another word, of having a child that was really suffering. So welcome. Well, thank you. It's great to be here with you guys. Yeah, thanks, Lisa. One of the reasons I really loved your story for our book, as I got to know the story and what you do do is because with

all the people that we know with autism i mean the thing that is the the common thread the common story is that sheer not just terror despair like complete lack of knowing what to do the guilt the shame the sadness the um you know the loss of dreams, all of it wrapped up into one and not knowing what to do for your kid. Yeah. I think that, and sometimes it's personal, it's far, you direct it upon yourself. Right. But you're like, no, that's not about me. It's that epiphany.

It's about this dear child we brought into this world. We need, our job is to have him be whole, independent, fall in love, and be able to navigate his world without us. That's our job as parents. So tell us this story so that everybody who's listening understands it. And thank you for the accolades. It's like, you know, sometimes, you know, what you do in life, you don't pick it, it picks you. And Jeff picked me as his mom. And I am so grateful and so in love with him. And he is just so amazing and so important. And the thing that's just astounding to me is telling the story, we hear it thousands and thousands of times. So it's not just unique to me. It's Jeff is unique, but the story and parts of that story are very same across the board. So what I see,

and what I saw my kid was, you know, for 15 months, everything was by the baby book, everything was milestone after milestone, check it off. And I'm kind of you know, me, I'm a documentarian. I used to work with GIS statistics and demography. So that's what I did for a living way back 100 years ago, which really seems like 100 years ago now that I think of it. But, you know, so with Jeff and our daughter, Lauren, we experienced the beauty of having a kid and just the awe and the amazing and God giving you this amazing gift. And then one day, it just was taken away. And it was shocking. It was scary. It was literally within an hour, he was a different human being. So, what we looked at is, you know, did he have a stroke? Did something happen? Did... But can I ask you, what does that mean? What happened to that? Well, he was really sick on antibiotics, day four of a 10-day course. I preloaded him with

Tylenol. We went to the pediatrician and unfortunately had an adverse reaction to vaccines. So, it was the MMR and varicellavax. That's not the case with everyone. I'm not saying my story is everyone's story, but there's, it could be an infection. It could be anything that happens within the environment that something changes. And I think there's probably a hundred ways to get to autism. Our way was just that way. And, you know, so I thought a lot of times that he had a stroke and, you know, sitting down and confirming some things with you was really important, I was afraid to look remember you had to kick me and dragging and screaming but our story started I offered it about 10 times only 10 yeah and I finally listened

and I'm like and then he offered to scam me and I'm like hell no that's a great mess let's leave it alone let's just let that one sit there but you'll get me one of these days. I know you will. He's a dog. You're a dog with a bone and a good way. But the point being for Jeff is he got really sick. He got extremely sick. So projectile vomiting, no more than sleeping two hours a night for almost six years. So he was up 22 hours. There are many times where we were concerned for his safety. He would wander and be a Houdini, get out of any car, any car seat, out of the house,

even though you lock the door and here's the short guy figuring out how to pull the chair, get the key, get the door open and get out to the park, but walk down the middle of the major street to the park. So once we, again, sorry, I will come back to center. So he was diagnosed with autism about a year after that. We knew something was terribly wrong. So all this was going on before you got that diagnosis. You knew something was up. You just didn't know what. I didn't know what to call it. And when I Googled back in the day when you hear the crazy modem, this was 100 years ago, folks. Right.

The modem went in and I typed in the symptoms that he had and autism came back. But I'm like, he didn't hand flap in front of his face and he didn't rock. And he didn't do other things that were on the list. But what we know is autism is so different based on the individual. It's a completely different story. So we finally saw our pediatrician. It was a different pediatrician. Our regular one was sick and out of the office.

And she said, you know, let's just rule some stuff out. And I really appreciate that strategy. Don't panic and destruct the parents right then and there. Let's rule stuff out. Exactly. And I've, I just appreciate her more even to this day. We use it all the time. Let's rule stuff out. You know, and it just worked really well. We went in, got the speech eval, got the hearing eval. He wasn't deaf. The speech eval said, instead of operating at two years, nine months, he was operating at a three to six month level. When I had videotape of him saying 10 to 20 words at the time of 15 months. And there were

other things that disappeared too, his smile. So on backwards. Correct. Okay. Correct. He regressed. Regressed, lost skills. So that's why I kept thinking maybe he had a stroke. Something happened with his brain. There was obvious skills that he had a stroke something happened with his brain there was obvious skills that he had that were no longer there so as a mom i'm always let's fix it let's fix it yeah i want to fix this yeah i'm a mama bear i get it where something's broke great just tell me what it is yeah duct tape let's go right you know i've got a hammer yeah i can well anyways the point being is he's this beautiful little thing we can't use a hammer um but what we what we ended up doing is like well my husband said the most important thing we saw one expert and he said your kid has autism there's no hope

nothing you can do get some therapy for both you and the kid and then in some time period we don't know when you'll have to institutionalize so he basically left you with no hope at that point correct and my husband and i were shocked and then we went and saw other experts and they said the same thing and um me of course i'm a puddle you're talking about my dearest thing my love how dare you um he said well you say there's no hope. We're going to be the best at no hope, and we're going to go see what we can do. Oh, I love that.

Yeah, I thought that was pretty fantastic. So we just didn't want to give up. That's like the best line I've heard. Yeah, I attribute that to my dear husband. Wow. The point from there, what like you said pain into purpose and i just think that when you said it at our last conference and you made those words i just was like holy guacamole that's it pain into purpose and and we had no intention of creating a foundation

we had no intention of starting a movement and i don't feel like it's a huge movement. But you can't not do it, right? It's just that thing you can't not do when you see people suffering. Well, as Jeff got better, I wanted every kid to get better, you know, and that was so important to me. So I looked at it like that. It's not just our family not sleeping. There are probably hundreds of thousands of families across the United States, the world, that aren't sleeping. So looking at what we did with Jeff is we used Quest and LabCorp tests. And we just kept running labs and we tried to normalize the labs. My husband's a kinesiology major.

And so he's very logical and methodical and can look at the problem and read books and understand them. It took me weeks to read one book, weeks. It was him for a couple of days and he understood it. And I'm like, can you explain this in English? He just was very thoughtful and let's just normalize the labs. And we kept hearing over and over, oh, those are just symptoms of autism. Well, constipation and diarrhea, throwing up, you know, tantruming. Yeah, that could be a symptom of autism.

But why is the kid tantruming? So to me- Understanding the why. Right. And peeling back the layers of the onion, figuring out what the issues were. And as we've figured out with good folks in our journey, including you, Daniel, that helped us. So even though I ignored you for some time and I really apologize, I'll send you more food baskets.

My point being is just we wanted to do no harm, find the things that would help him feel better and function as a human. I mean, he's still quirky today he's still got challenges um but he's in college he's in college on his own doing amazing things his homework is stuff that i can't understand i think both of us are kind of at three at three with autism follow-up with apraxia. Had a big regression. Correct. What were the things you did early on that were the most helpful? What are some of the things you think most parents with autism should do, should try? And this will astound some of the people because I know who I am today.

Food is medicine. But this will crack you up. My husband read on the internet, I heard about removing gluten and casein would be really good for autism. Maybe we should look into that. And I'm like, nah, it's my job feeding the family and you just gave me a huge beast. No way. We can't implement that. That's all he eats. And so, we got in a big fight. It was hysterical was hysterical so today me being food is medicine girl it's kind of funny to look right so the first thing i did and he said well you know food it's not love lisa even though to me it's love that's how i show love you come to my house i feed you yeah that's my job right um but my point is that's the first

thing we did was we said well well, we'll feed them. We're not going to not feed them. We'll just feed them different things. Right. And the thing that woke me up besides being mad at my husband, which was terrible, we got, like I said, in a fight, was why am I defending this kid's diet? He ate Burger King chicken nuggets, Tiger Milk's bar, half gallon of milk, and french fries and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. How is this a defendable diet we took out dairy and he stopped projectile vomiting we took out interesting so it took about six months to notice the difference with wheat because we made so many mistakes we accidentally gave wheat because back this is a hundred years ago

like i keep saying where our food came from canada okay we would get boxes of bread that didn't taste like rear end right from canada because we did it horrible in the united states right so our food would come and then i figured out oh he's got a yeast overgrowth you know he would get rashes all over and so we would do labs and we treated the yeast. So these were the things that just slowly were bringing Jeff out of the fog, still nonverbal, 15 months, and we're about five, five and a half now. So we started looking at other labs and things to do. So the most important things were removing food allergies. He 42 food allergies it was easier to say what he could eat versus what he couldn't and i would put a shirt on him if you feed me my mom will kill

you that's so funny so he little tasmanian all over the place funny so nobody would dare to feed they were sick i made them afraid of me that's that i understand food is medicine food is medicine now that now you can order even though you took away 42 things there were like 8 000 other things you could feed him correct yeah correct that were actually food i mean all of tana's recipes are will fit for gluten-free dairy-free corn-free soy-free i've created 400 it's basically an elimination diet that tastes awesome but it's funny i had to i just have to relate to you on one level here because when we talk he always tells people i went from disaster to master because when i met him i literally i literally when i was single i had i okay, I shouldn't even say this on the air. No, come on.

It's a monk friend. I used to have a thing of frosting in my refrigerator. That's what I ate on my way to the hospital as a nurse. I'm like, I'm going to have a spoonful of frosting and I'm headed to the hospital. Like, no, I'm not kidding. Like, I was like, that was my crack. And so for me to be able to go to this level and go, okay, I knew something was wrong. So I just want to be able to relate to you on and go, okay, I knew something was wrong.

So I just want to be able to relate to you on that level and go, you know, you can do it too. I promise you, you can do this. And what I found is, you know, I got into my 40s and I started to have gastrointestinal issues and health issues. And so. You'd think I would have understood after cancer three times a long time ago. But, you know it took me i'm not i'm a slow learner so it was stupid i got on my knees and prayed dear god how can i help my son help navigate me help you know show me the way and he's like great you get it too right thanks right that's not what i meant yeah because they do what you do not what you say

right exactly right all right so normalizing labs you can't change what you say. Right? Right? So normalizing labs, you can't change what you don't measure. Correct. You can't change what you don't measure. Getting rid of gluten and dairy. Correct.

And then we found out soy and corn were huge problems. Soy and corn. Correct. 85% of the corn in this country is raised with Roundup. Yes.

And it's really hard on your gut safe for humans yeah but it's not safe for your microbiome it's hard on your gut anyways well and it's just interesting you know the other things that we went through and did is we looked at his methylation pathways and this is how your body takes out the trash they were incredibly broken incredibly broken so adding glutathione in and we did different levels of glutathione for him and he needed to metabolize it so there are different ways that we did that and you saw the study with n-acetylcysteine which is one way to boost glutathione so there's a study that came out last year that n-acetylcysteine decreases

aggressiveness in autistic kids and that stuff was like buckets of gold so it was n-acetylcysteine decreases aggressiveness in autistic kids. And that stuff was like buckets of gold. So it was N-acetylcysteine, vitamin C, and glutathione. And it was infused. It was an IV infusion because he was in such terrible shape. Right. And oral glutathione isn't, it's not absorbed properly.

It doesn't convert. It breaks down. And there's transdermal. Transdermal, there's a couple of products that are transdermal that are amazing. I mean, I go in a couple times, you know, like in the winter because I tend to get sick a lot after having cancer. So I do the vitamin infusions and I have them add glutathione to it. Ten minutes. It's not a big deal. And it's the best.

I do it, too, just to keep my immune system up as well because there's so many things we've got to get done, right? Right. No time to be sick um the other thing was his vitamin d um blood level vitamin d levels for him was a six oh my gosh i was nine i was excited i was almost a 10 like beau derrick but it was the wrong way to look at it total wrong way to look at it which doubles your risk of cancer correct and so everybody listening should know your vitamin d level you should know it like you should know your weight like you know your blood pressure correct so people who are listening are going to want to know like what it should be

so it depends doctors are different in what they think my doctor who manages that my you know the cancer that kept coming back right likes me at between 80 and 90. That's high normal. No, but there's even newer research that shows above 100 is okay. Right. My doctor doesn't get freaked out about that. Some doctors do.

So high normal is okay. I mean, how many of you wanted to be in the bottom of your class? Not me. Not me. So I like my patients to be somewhere between 70 and 100. and you have to be careful if you're prone to kidney stones sometimes it can trigger it right uh which means you have to be

careful with green juices because they're loaded with oxalates uh so i actually have a couple videos on that because you're going to now get people sending me a bazillion questions. I have videos on this on my Facebook page, on oxalates, on kidney stones. So, no worries. What's crazy is as you talk about the journey and what we had to do, oxalates was a big part of it. So, low oxalate diet, gluten-free, dairy-free, and we had to go specific carbohydrate diet to get rid of the yeast and treat with antifungals at the same time.

On a low carbohydrate diet correct so you had a lot of challenges but you did it yeah and now he has i think it's four food allergies that remain yeah we can't yield as good yeah exactly um and you can do that i think probiotics were a big bang for us uh hyperbaric oxygen made a big difference for him because again, suspecting stroke. So what was interesting was when he started talking after almost six years of age, it was like he had a stroke. It was mommy, water, please. And he's not from France. So I did play some jokes on people. Yeah, we lived in France for the first two years of his life. He got the eye.

I got nothing. I'm so horrible. I know. I'm horrible. But you got to make jokes, right? Oh, God. So many practical things. And to learn more about Lisa and Lisa's just really amazing work, you should go to TACA, T-A-C-A,a now n-o-w dot org and you can learn about the

journey if you have someone you love who has autism or one of the autism spectrum uh disorders you just you have to know about taca they have so many incredible resources we're going to talk about more that more coming up but in the next podcast we're going to talk about that more coming up. But in the next podcast, we're going to talk about a new study that we're just publishing on just about a thousand autistic kids. Stay with us. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We have a special gift for you.

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