Autism, Developmental Disabilities, and Alternative Therapies

Do you homeschool a child with special needs? I ran across an interesting article from Eparent, http://www.eparent.com/welcome/alternative.htm , about treating autism, PDD, hyperactivity, and various other developmental disorders. The article suggested that parents who don't know where to start "proceed in an orderly fashion through nutritional therapies, to body therapies (craniosacral and reiki, especially), through educational and behavior therapies, and through Chinese medicine...I use the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist and the Autism Behavior Inventory on a regular basis also to document progress. With any therapy, conventional or alternative, accurate data are needed to prove that the treatment is worth the expense and the side effects (if there are any). Fortunately, the majority of the alternative therapies have no side effects."

We homeschool a child who has special needs and is medically fragile. We have used various supplements (fish oil, amino acids) as well as methods from Communicating Partners, http://www.jamesdmacdonald.org/ .

What do you think? If you have a child with special needs, what have you tried, what works, and what doesn't? Please don't respond to this question if you are advocating a therapy in which you have a financial interest.