Whiny Post, best to ignore

It just isn't fair. Not that Alex has the autism, but that nothing is clear. I'm so torn between doing this cutting edge stuff that definitely hasn't been proven, and listening to conventional docs that have zero answers. How do you decide who to trust? It could very well be that desperate parents are lending credence to crackpot theories. Or it could be that conventional medicine is avoiding looking too closely at what could be a grave error on their part. Will we know more in a few years? Probably. Will waiting help Alex? Nope.

But I don't want to come at this from a desperate point of view. I want facts, and it doesn't seem like there are any. Some cases of autism can be traced to chromosomal triggers... Alex doesn't have that kind of autism. Is there a genetic component? There has to be, just looking at my family. But it can't only be genetic, can it? There are so many families where they have one autistic kid out of several, and even the genetics lab said I would only have a 5% chance of having another autistic child, according to their testing.

And it doesn't matter why, unless why can lead me to how to fix it. Don't we owe it to ourselves to figure out why the numbers have exploded? Even from a purely pragmatic point of view, all these autistic kids are costing the country boatloads of cash. And it doesn't seem to matter how good your insurance is... they don't cover it. And that is a whole other side to these "cutting-edge" theories. How much is too much to invest in an unproven theory? Part of me says that money is no object, but part of me wonders if there are people out there just trying to make cash off of our, my desperation.

Because I can see how Alex could be. How he should be. And I think sometimes that he is much better, and I don't know why, and other times I think he is worse, and I don't know why.

And all of us parents, we run around, searching for answers that aren't there, while we try to keep life going, we work, we take care of our kids, we try to make time for our friends, and we drop into bed at night and worry about the next day. My mind isn't clear. How can it be? Yet, I'm the one who is supposed to decide how to treat my son. The docs and therapists give suggestions, and then tell me to choose what therapy I think is best. Best being relative to what is available in your area. Oh, and they don't actually give you the information to compare. That's up to you too. And there are nutritional therapies, and megadoses of vitamins, and supplements, and chellation, and testing for allergies, and floortime, and God knows what else. And nothing is proven. And I feel frozen.

But what if I miss on the thing that works?