When Treatment Goes Too Far: Boy Burned at HBOT Center

by Kristina Chew · 2009-05-01 14:03:00 UTC
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Hyperbaric oxygen chamber from http://repairstemcell.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/hyperbaric-oxygen-therapy1.jpeg
Kev at Left Brain/Right Brain reports that a woman and child had been been critically burned in an HBOT explosion in a Lauderdale-by-the-Sea medical facility. It's not clear if the child is autistic; the facility, the Ocean Hyperbaric Neurological Center is said to have "frequently" treated patients with cerebral palsy. As Sullivan on Left Brain/Right Brain pointed out, at least one autistic child has been treated at Ocean Hyperbaric Neurological Center. The director of the center, Richard Allen Neubauer, M.D., has been referred to as the " Father of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy for the Brain."

While some have offered anecdotal reports about the effectiveness of HBOT in "treating" autism, HBOT is one of many experimental, unproven, biomedical treatments for autism---why is it that families willingly try "anything and everything to 'treat' autism? Why put a child's safety and even life at risk in the name of "treatment for autism"?

Four years ago, Abubakar Tariq Nadama died after receiving chelation treatment for autism in the office of Dr. Roy Kerry in Pennsylvania. Is it because of the misperception that autism is "worse than cancer"---worse than being critically burned, than death---that families continue to try such experimental treatments?

Our life with our son, as Jim and I noted at Charlie's IEP meeting, is often the other side of easy. As Jim said after the meeting in the middle school parking lot as we walked back to our car, it's the three of us and being together makes life good. Were we to lose any of our tight team of three---that would be a loss too much; that would be tragic. But autism itself---it's not a tragedy; what happened in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea earlier today is.

Kristina Chew
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