There are hundreds of alternative treatments available for parents of autistic children to try.

Researchers, scientists, and the medical community at large have made a lot of noise about the validity of most, if not all, of these alternative treatments, saying things like, "They haven't been scientifically proven to work" and "They're treating something which has been scientifically proven to be inaccurate".

They would prefer to test these various treatments using two different methods, either of which would be scientifically valid.

Double Blind Studies. Take 200 similar kids, give 50% the treatment and the other 50% a placebo, and study the effects. If the results are different between the two groups then the treatment works.

Identify a Single Variable. Keep everything else in your child's environment exactly the same, and introduce one new variable. Then see what happens. If you see improvement then the variable made a difference.

Both of these methods are great, but both of them have major problems for parents trying to help their little ones.

Problem 1. There is no such thing as 200 autistic kids who are otherwise similar - autism affects each child differently, all the way down to their brain and central nervous system's ability to process information. There are many cases where a treatment/supplement helps one child and has no effect on another child, or even makes him worse.

Problem 2. In many cases, a child will make improvements based on multiple variables working together. In these cases, it would be impossible to isolate the one variable which caused the improvement.

Problem 3. Time. If we wanted to try 200 different remedies, treatments, therapies, supplements, diets, etc., and we kept everything else constant, and we tried each "variable" for one month, it would take 17 YEARS to get through all the possibilities. And that's just doing them one at a time!

Personally, we didn't want to wait 17 years. We believed we had a small window of opportunity, a few years at the most, to make the biggest impact on Calvin's life.

We listened to the scientists for the first year or two, but then we realized they didn't really have an answer - they were guessing as much as us, but would only try one thing at a time.

After that, we tried a lot of different things, often times in combination. If we threw 6 new things at him, and if/when he improved, we were happy with the improvement. Then, over time, we could try to reduce or eliminate some of the new things to figure out what wasn't necessary and/or helpful. If we introduced new things and he had a bad reaction, we could pull the plug on some/all of them quickly.

One of the keys is to keep a detailed record of what you're doing, which I've written about before. Another key is to be patient, yet impatient, at the same time. But listening to the doctors and scientists and taking their words as gospel - that's not the key. Maybe if they had an answer or a solution I would think differently. But so far they've proven that their methods aren't helping each individual family out there.