Jump to content

Menu

AmyinMD

Members
  • Posts

    439
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by AmyinMD

  1. Our clinic charges $300 for just articulation. $475 for a full eval. That includes a 3 page write up which is nice to have. Our insurance has an allowed amount of $240 and will pay a percentage of that. Our insurance will cover the eval but it is harder to get the actual speech therapy covered. My ASD son's is covered because it is considered medically necessary. My son with articulation issues is not covered. Therapy runs $75 for 30 min or $120 for an hour.
  2. Our Speech Clinic offers social skills classes for children with Autism. My son is only 4 with almost no verbal ability so we probably won't try them for awhile but I've heard many good things from other parents. There are usually 4-5 children with ASD and they try to get them fairly close in age. Some of the kids it is the first time they are really able to make friends.
  3. We've used these directions and I thought it had a nice texture. http://www.thespunkycoconut.com/2010/07/refined-sugar-dairy-free-yogurt.html
  4. If he is on the spectrum then having in home ABA would be a big help. My 4 yo son was diagnosed right after he turned 3 with ASD. I wish he could get more ABA than he does. He's sitting on our state's waiver program waiting list for ABA services and will likely be there for the next 7-8 years before we see any services at all. He's doing 4 hours a week right now that we fund completely out of pocket. I wish we could afford more. It has given my son some functional communication where before he didn't have any. If it is only speech then maybe he has Apraxia. My son does speech therapy right after a little boy with Apraxia and while they aren't too far apart in age you can tell a huge difference. The little boy with Apraxia will point things out to his mom even though it's obvious he has difficulty forming sounds and words. My son doesn't point things out and often if you are trying to get his attention he'll just start humming or completely ignore you. It's also apparent that the boy with Apraxia has age appropriate receptive speech. My son's is very delayed. I'd be more concerned with things like receptive speech, pointing, shared attention, repetitive behaviors (my son does not exhibit any of the more "classic" ASD stims like hand flapping- 6 months ago he developed a jumping stim but prior to that his only stim was repetitive play where he'd take things out one at a time). At the time he was diagnosed we thought he didn't do anything repetitively but the psychologist pointed out the repetitive play to us.
  5. I'd be inclined to let the thumb sucking go. Putting a thumb guard in might just wind up with him finding another coping mechanism. I know with my ASD son when we think we've got one stim down he just increases another. Yes it would be ideal for the thumb sucking to stop but I think that professionals who don't live with special needs children often times do not really get what they are asking for. I don't think the thumb sucking is tied to ear infections. My very unscientific anecdote is that my 7.5 yo dd sucked her thumb for years and she's never had an ear infection. I think she still sucks in her sleep occasionally. It has effected her teeth to some degree. Her bottom teeth are super crooked and I've not seen them set so far back in any of my other children. She's not SN though and has mostly stopped the thumb sucking on her own except at night. I'm sure a set of braces are in her future but other than that I can't see any other side effects of her years of thumb sucking.
  6. Directions for making your own ghee. I haven't tried it but I love her recipes. She has a child with Autism and they are GFCF but are able to use ghee. I've bought ghee a couple times but it isn't very spreadable. I mostly just add it when I'm cooking on the stove for a buttery flavor. http://www.thespunkycoconut.com/2010/04/how-i-make-ghee.html
  7. We avoid whey when we've done GFCF. We use soy free Earth Balance for a butter substitute. I would encourage you to do the IgG blood test if you can get a doctor to order it for you. We did it last year and I think it was around $100. We did GFCF for awhile and saw a little improvement but not a lot. We just started it again now that I've done more research. This time we are trying to lower ds's glutamate levels because they just tested super high. Both gluten and casein are higher in glutamate but so are things like tomatoes and when we did GFCF before ds ate a ton of spaghetti with gf noodles. We aren't allowing tomatoes this time. We are also avoiding things like protein powder, cysteine, msg, aspartame, and many other food additives. My son did show an intolerance on IgG to all gluten grains but his reaction was a 1 out of 3 so the lowest reaction. He also reacted to most dairy, all citrus, peanuts, and cashews. Almost his entire diet were things he reacted to.
  8. There are numerous chelating agents and different protocols out there. I don't think it's fair to make a sweeping statement that all chelation is dangerous. I think chelation can be safe if done properly. I've seen many dangerous protocols out there. I think DMSA is safer to give than high doses of cilantro. Cilantro's half life isn't known and I've heard of people getting worse while on it. I'm not talking about amounts that would be in food but some people try juicing it and taking large amounts. We've done low dose oral chelation with DMSA with our son and seen some mild improvements. My son is considered severe and even with doing chelation still has no functional speech but we have gotten more words since starting it and his eye contact has improved. We give him 4mg (1/6 of the smallest capsule available) every 4 hours for 72 hours straight. For an entire "round" he gets 3 capsules which is 75mg. I think that is very safe. My son does have very high tested levels of arsenic though and part of the reason I'm giving him the DMSA. I'm not sure if we'll continue with it but I know some people see better results than we do. I'm part of a board with many parents of ASD children. Many of them do GAPS and chelation. Not all add chelation but I know many of them do at some point because they do not feel the diet is enough for detox. We did try GAPS but my son has many oral aversions and after almost 2 weeks I gave up because he wouldn't eat any of the healing foods. I did have some luck getting him to eat the yogurt by mixing it with juice and making freezer pops. The other foods he ate (meat and bananas) are the not the healing foods that are going to aid in detox. People always bring up the 2 cases where a child died from chelation. In both cases the child was accidentally given the wrong chelating agent and both cases were from IV chelation. We have only done oral aside from one round of suppository chelation. For that one we used DMSA prescribed by my son's doctor that was specially compounded. For more natural detox I really like bentonite clay. We've been working with the woman mentioned in the article here and she claims the bentonite removes toxins and heavy metals from the body. I've been using it on myself with good success but for my son who can't yet swallow caps we haven't really been able to try it out yet. I plan to when he's a little older and can swallow caps. I am already giving him the aggressive amount of probiotics mentioned in the article. I think probiotics are so important and a lot of people either skip them or give such small doses. The standard cap from a health food store has 3 billion organisms. I buy either VSL#3 or Custom brand which have over 200 billion per dose. http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/06/donna-pessin-healing-the-gut-in-autism.html If you have parasite issues I don't think anything beats prescription Vermox. We tried naturals for 2 months and finally did Vermox. My son stopped smearing poop and it also got him to not constantly have his hands in his pants. Love the stuff.
  9. I don't think 400iu is enough but my son tested slightly low even after months of supplementing at 400iu. I'm currently giving him 2000iu a day. We use Carlson drops and there is 2000iu in one drop which make them easy to give. I used to give gummies but they really got expensive.
  10. You can check here to see what the laws are in your state. http://www.hslda.org/strugglinglearner/sn_states.asp Where I live the public school does not offer any services to homeschoolers but would do testing if asked. If I had wanted my son's speech evaluated they would do that but if I wanted him to receive speech therapy at the school I would have to enroll him. My 4 yo son is my one in special ed and he is enrolled to receive the services he gets. I think since he is below compulsory age that he could still receive speech therapy if he were not enrolled but that is it. Even having him enrolled we still do most things privately.
  11. My twins are 7 and sound similar. I started both together in math thinking it would be great to teach them together but it became apparent very quickly that ds was way ahead of dd. I wound up using Singapore for my very mathy ds. He does not need a bunch of review and often picks up math concepts very quickly so Singapore is a great fit for him. When we did carrying and borrowing he just needed to be shown a couple examples and he has made very few mistakes since. With my dd she is doing MUS and doing well with that. She has a much harder time picking up math so I think it is a good fit for her. She still needs to build problems and I think she would not do well with Singapore. I think it would move too fast for her. It is really better they are in different programs altogether. It helps eliminate some of the competition between them. They both did Singapore 1A for awhile but ds finished it in just a couple weeks and dd was having a hard time with it. That's when I decided they had to do different programs.
  12. We have an Otterbox for our I-Pad but my son was constantly picking at the seal and it kept coming undone. At the time we paid $80 for it and I was very unimpressed in the quality of it. We finally gave up on it. He has put 2 pretty good sized cracks into the I-Pad now from dropping it (one while it was encased in the Otterbox). We are sending it in for a new screen so I've been looking for a better way to protect it. This actually looks ideal for him because I wouldn't have to worry about him dropping it. We have hardwood floors and dropping the I-Pad on that is what got the cracks in it. His ABA coordinator would like us to get Proloquo2Go for the I-Pad and I've been kind of hesitant because ds doesn't know how to take care of the I-Pad.
  13. That sounds higher than what I've been seeing for VT. When my dd did it we paid $5000 for a year. I've seen quotes of people paying around $100/session. I would look elsewhere because $250 seems unreasonably high to me. I wish insurance would have to cover VT. I know I've heard of some people getting it covered by insurance but ours considers it "educational". They won't cover my son's speech therapy either because it's not considered medically necessary for articulation disorder. He's not going as often as was recommended just because we can't afford it. My 7 yo dd also needs speech but since she isn't as bad she has to wait.
  14. Yes!! We tried it and I just couldn't keep up with it. We actually didn't even make it 2 weeks. I was doing it for my ASD son and the entire time he ate bananas and legal hotdogs. He ate eggs for breakfast each day but started getting sick of them and refusing them. He still won't eat eggs and our SCD trial was around 6 months ago. I would have liked to have stuck with it if I could have gotten him to eat the foods that were more healing. I made tons of legal foods when we tried it and he generally wouldn't try it or would try one bite and start crying. I don't know if we'll try it again. We've been working with a certified nutrition counselor instead and that has actually helped my ds more. If I were to do it again I would need more meal prep help. It is a lot of work. The night I threw in the towel we had spent the entire afternoon out and arrived home to nothing to eat. I didn't have the energy to make a SCD legal meal from scratch. Having legal frozen meals in the freezer would be a big help for nights like that. I can't find it now but I had been reading a blog where the mom froze single serving portions for her son that was doing SCD so he would always have something quick to eat.
  15. Our ABA program does not have us take data like that. I really wish they would though because it would be easier to track if it is even helping. My son only does 4 hours a week because we have to pay out of pocket for it so there aren't many hours there to take data on. We do get parent meetings every 6 weeks but I usually push them to 8 weeks because it is $150/hr between paying the coordinator and the trainer for the meetings. We have one this Friday and I need to push to see if we can get more date because otherwise I'm looking at dropping it. I'm more interested in trying Floortime but they really discouraged that. I feel like that will give us as parents more tools to work with ds which I don't feel like we are getting with the ABA. The Floortime would also cost less because they would train us to do it and we wouldn't have to pay for the tech hours. Of course then I'd have to try to find more time to work with ds one on one if we cut his 4 hours a week with the ABA trainer (really 3 hours because she claims to need 30 minutes out of a 2 hour session to take notes- it doesn't include any data collection though)
  16. My ASD son has had lots of sleep issues. We just started using Natural Calm a couple weeks ago and it has really helped. http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Vitality-Calm-Rasp-Lemon-powder/dp/B000WVY4PE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1329766362&sr=8-2 The other supplement recommended by ds's doctor is if the magnesium in the Natural Calm didn't help was to use 5-HTP. I don't think we'll need to add it though. We also use melatonin but haven't needed it near as often since adding the Natural Calm.
  17. I think Kenneth Bock's book also talks about amino acid supplements. http://www.amazon.com/Healing-New-Childhood-Epidemics-Groundbreaking/dp/0345494512/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329763359&sr=8-1 We have given Acetyl-L-Carnitine and it was hard to tell if it helped much. What we are doing this week is a Urine Amino Acid test to see what amino acids we should be supplementing. I think it will give us a much better picture than trying ones without knowing ds's levels.
  18. My son was evaluated using Module 1. His eval says it is for kids with single words or pre-verbal. It was fitting for him because he primarily speaks in single word echolalia. He does not have any functional communication. I haven't seen module 2 to see how they compare. My son also was evaluated on the GARS-2 (Gilliam Autism Rating Scale) and met the cut off for Autism on both GARS and ADOS. I liked that they used 2 different tests to confirm the diagnosis. I have heard of some evaluators using DSM-5 already instead of DSM-4. Under the new DSM-5 many children will no longer qualify for an Autism diagnosis because they are doing away with PDD and Aspergers. If your child does not have expressive/receptive speech delay then they may be in that category.
  19. Have you looked into what kind of help you can get with a diagnosis? My 4 yo has an ASD diagnosis and honestly I'm not sure it was worth having him diagnosed. He hasn't qualified for any extra services for getting the diagnosis so far.
  20. I thought dd was going to high school so I have done very little planning. Right now the plan is CC Challenge (I need to see how this will work out for credits but at most it will be 5 so we will need to add) TT Algebra I'm looking for some ideas on electives. I need a 1 credit Fine Arts. Dd hates anything I've suggested. She is allowed to participate in a private school's musical each year and thinks that should count but I told her that is just extracurricular. She doesn't like anything art/drawing related. I suggested a photography class which she didn't like either. She also needs things like a 1/2 credit Health class. I told her she should get it out of the way but she hated Health when she attended PS and would prefer to not have to take that. I told her it's a requirement for graduation unfortunately. Dd seems so uninterested in any of it right now but says she is definitely doing CC Challenge but I've told her that is not going to be quite enough. I think I need to lay out exactly what she needs and then have her come up with a plan and dh and I can make suggestions on it.
  21. I've never done history in 1st grade. I had great intentions to do more with my twins this year for 1st but life has been crazy with my younger son's therapy schedule. I'm concentrating most of my efforts this year on getting them reading. They are doing MFW 1 so they are getting some Biblical history and I also do occasional FIAR books with them which covers a bit of history. For 2nd grade they'll be doing Classical Conversations so I'm going to be adding some type of Ancient History to do at home next year but we'll probably keep it pretty light. The public school they would attend has 30 minutes of Social Studies every 4th day. I think just about anything we'd do at home would cover more than the PS.
  22. Our insurance won't pay for articulation either. What we've done is set the money aside in our flex spending account for it which helps a little. Our clinic also gives a small discount for prepaying the entire month in advance. My 7 yo son is the one with articulation issues. My 4 yo son also uses the same speech therapist except he has an Autism diagnosis. His speech therapy is covered. He has both a speech delay and severe articulation issues but we have it billed with the Autism diagnosis code. My state also does not allow homeschoolers to receive therapy at the schools. I wasn't going to enroll ds just so he could get 30 minutes of speech therapy a week. His issues aren't too major luckily but it was impacting his reading because there were some sounds he just couldn't say. Our clinic charges $75 for 30 min and $120 for 50 min. I'm currently paying $69.75 for 30 minute sessions for paying the whole month in advance and ds just goes every other week and we try to practice at home as much as we can.
  23. My son had a 24 hour EEG to check for seizures and that is what was recommended by the neurolgist. He has these staring spells and many children on the spectrum have issues with seizures. It wasn't cheap at all but I'm not sure how the cost would compare to an MRI. My son had to be put under general anesthesia to attach all of the leads and he spend the night in the hospital hooked up to the monitors. What our insurance paid was over $6000 for everything and that was the reduced rate for in network (the billed amount was almost $30000!) Our neuro had mentioned doing an MRI instead but the way she talked about it the MRI was more for checking for seizures.
  24. There isn't a penalty as far as I can tell and at least on ours they will count just about anything as progress. One of my son's goals used to be that he would answer a what/where question with a 2 word phrase. This is way beyond his ability (functionally nonverbal autistic). They said he was making sufficient progress on the goal because he was sitting and paying attention some of the time instead of getting up and running around the room. I'd make the goals challenging but ones that could possibly be attained. We just had to redo ds's IEP because they watered down the goals so much that they didn't seem like enough. We had the issue where they were too difficult and now they are not challenging enough so it can be hard to strike a balance.
  25. We're in a similar situation. My dd is planning to do Challenge B and I want to add a history course to it. I have Notgrass World History here but it doesn't seem to be exactly what I want. I don't want the Lit or Bible part of it but I guess I may have dd try doing just the history portion. I was looking at BJU but I think that seemed like too much info with dd's other work.
×
×
  • Create New...