When Are We Going To Do More For Our Children?

Since I started writing my blog, I have heard from a lot of you and I love it!  I’ve talked to people I haven’t talked to in years and I'm so happy about that. Writing about our journey with Nathan has resonated with a lot of people.  I am so glad I am able to help, but it's also made me mad. Really mad. When is more going to be done?  When are we going to figure out why so many children are being diagnosed with not only autism, but also ADHD, asthma and allergies?

In 2007, one of Nathan’s doctors, Dr. Kenneth Bock, wrote a book called "Healing The New Childhood Epidemics, Autism, ADHD, Asthma and Allergies, The Groundbreaking Program for the 4-A Disorders”.  That was 8 years ago, yet nothing has changed since then. The number of children diagnosed each year with these disorders continues to go up.  A lot of people, including researchers, say, “It’s better screening and diagnosis”.

Really????  1 in 68 children (and 1 in 42 boys) has autism because of better diagnosis?  What about ADHD?  The CDC reports that in 2011- 11% of children had been diagnosed ADHD and diagnosis rates has been increasing every year since 1997. Because autism and ADHD are diagnosis clinically and there are no blood tests or x-rays, it's easy to say it's just better diagnosis and the number of children impact really isn't going up.

It's not as easy to brush off allergies and asthma. The CDC says both food and skin allergies are increasing steadily among children with 5.1% of children having food allergies and 12.5% having skin allergies in 2011. The CDC reported that in 2011 1 in 12 people have asthma and those rates increase every year.  Hmmm.. how are we going to explain that? Because there are actual allergy and asthma lung function tests, we can't really say that's because of better diagnosis now can we?

There is a reason that more and more children are being diagnosed with these disorders. But what is it? I don't know! Could it be the food we eat? Could it be vaccines? Could it be pollution in the air or water? Could it be something else? I don't know! But it must be something! When are we going to figure it out? When are we going to stop this cycle? I know there have been studies that have found no connection to food, pollution or vaccines- but we can't give the entire population of children milk or peanut butter or a vaccine and expect that all of them will be fine- some will NOT be fine! I'm going to repeat- I DON'T KNOW why the rates of these disorders are going up. But I do know that there is a reason. When are we going to figure it out? When are we going to do more for our children?