ChARMtracker & The Treatment Question

by Kristina Chew · 2009-05-23 14:07:00 UTC
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ChARM logo from http://www.findingthewords.org/site/img/fw-charm-logo.jpg
"Recovery from autism" is something I stopped worrying about a long time ago. There's still plenty of talk about it among parents of autistic kids and 'round the web and here's a site called ChARM, as in "Children’s Autism Recovery Map." Yesterday's USA Today describes ChARM as a free online service that

... enables families to gather and track data about treatments in a systematic way, using ChARMtracker, a tool created by Palo Alto-based MedicalMine. Some 400 families worldwide have been using ChARMtracker to keep daily records of treatment regimens that influence their autistic child’s behavior.

There's some "public data" on the ChARMtracker site. As the people entering the data are a self-selected population----parents interested in "recovering" their children from autism---this "data" (from 269 "patients") is of circumscribed use. Under the "top 10 supplements," cod liver oil is the most frequently used, while MethylB12, Diflucan (used in biomedical "treatments" like chelation---in this case, anti-fungal therapy), and Risperdal are the most frequented used prescriptions. Speech, occupation therapy, and Applied Behavior Analysis are the "top three therapies." Other categories include pre- and post-natal events and genetics.

The listings of supplements, medications, and therapies can be taken to suggest (and, again, this data set is very limited) that parents turn to biomedical and more "traditional" treatments for their children on the spectrum. Certainly that's been our own story. We tried more of the biomedical treatments when my son was younger and have settled on education and those so-called "traditional" medical treatments as he has gotten older, and as we've learned more about the background to the biomedical treatments (many of which are not only used to "treat" autism, but other medical conditions).

So I won't be signing up for ChARMtracker but I'll be curious to see what other "ChARM data" it might produce. Autism is a lifelong disability and families are going to keep trying what they can to help their children.

Kristina Chew
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