Thanks gtto and YepperBepper for the replies.The UK guy is Andrew Wakefield. There's another person on that list who was on probation by the state medical board (probation was fulfilled). Careful.
GTTO, my son has been given better information , support and care from our family practitioner. He is an MD, but attends autism conferences as he has been personally effected. He recently noted allergies when I was convinced my son had a cold. I, as directed, began giving him children's allergy medicaton...and for the first time in several weeks he has no runny nose or watery eyes. He also suggested GFCF for his stomach problems. It worked!
I tend to agree with you that just because someone is a DAN, or a specialist of any kind, does not guarantee good care.
But when you find a doc who has proven himself, stick with him/her... often they are not easy to find.
BTW...is John Wakefield...THE John Wakefield? Or was that another Wakefield in the UK?
I've seen the first one.
He noticed that I had stomach inflammation but did not do anything about it (it was only noticed and treated by a non-DAN doctor years later). He wanted to give me Secretin. At the time, there were already studies out showing it was ineffective. He was completely unaware of the studies. He tried to do a hair test for heavy metals, I can't remember the results but I know the hair tests are not effective for those because they can show falsely high or low readings. He also ran some sort of dubious energy healing practice on the side. He wanted stool samples, but I refused to give them because by that point I was becoming wary of his medical skills. My mother took me to him when I was 19.
When I was 18, I saw the fourth one on that list. He put me on an incredibly restrictive diet that nearly starved me (I went from 150 pounds to 120 pounds in a matter of weeks), worrying my general practitioner greatly, who attempted to talk me out of it. But he had used a lot of scare tactics about what would happen to me if I did not follow it, and it took me a long time to stop. (See this page for more information.) He diagnosed a systemic candida infection, despite the fact that my immune system was functioning perfectly well (systemic candida affects mostly people with AIDS and other severe immune deficiencies). He did this by measuring that there was in fact candida in my body (there is candida in everyone's body). He put me on a powerful anti-fungal drug. The drug made me vomit uncontrollably for an entire day. When I refused to take more of it, he wanted to put me on an even scarier one. He convinced my mother I was going to die or something and that if I cared at all about my health I would continue to take them. He also tried to pull the idea that it was not that the medication had awful side-effects, but that I would not experience this if it were not working, and if I did not have an infection in the first place. He claimed that the constant vomiting was a good sign, a sign that the candida was dying off, and that I had to keep doing it if I was going to get well. I refused the medication, angering both of them at the time. I am still alive about eight years later, and still the only candida infections I have ever had, even while immune-suppressed by medication, are the ordinary localized ones, never systemic. (Systemic candida infection is in fact extremely difficult to get, and extremely difficult to test for, you cannot diagnose it from a blood test.) I think he might have also used a dubious blood test for something else, too. I did not like his scare tactics or his attributing medication side-effects to the medication being a good thing, those tend to be the tactics of people whose medicine is dubious as well.
I don't think a person needs to even be a doctor to be listed on the DAN list. And while the skill of DAN doctors varies widely, a lot of them employ dubious testing from dubious labs and untested (or tested-and-known-to-be-useless-or-worse) methods and so forth. I'm not eager to head back to one, I have gotten better care from regular doctors, and both of the above doctors noticed real symptoms of real problems (one of which eventually required surgery) and either did nothing or did things that either didn't help or made things worse.
I have a short list of DAN doctors in my area. Does anyone here have experience working with any of them ? Please advice.
Raj Patel, M.D Elisa Song, M.D. Ann Wolf, M.D. Robert Cathcart, M.D. Richard Kunin, M.D. David Traver, M.D. David Traver, M.D. John Wakefield, M.D.
Hi All,
My 2 year old daughter has been recently diagonized as PDD/NOS. We have been told that she shows sympoms of Autism.
Yes. I am a newbie here.
Please help me find a good DAN doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Jose).
Any other advice/help would also be appreciated. It's great to find this support group.