LDN, STARTING, STOPPING

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LDN: STARTING DOSES, STOPPING: The majority of persons who take LDN do start

with the full dosage - in my first study we all did, as it did not occur to me

to have it start less. Most adults start with the full dose without any

problems, as well as most kids. Then I started suggesting particularly for

small kids that parents use 1/2 dose just for a couple of days to get the child

used to it slowly, but asked them to amp up to full dose as soon as possible.

Some parents do report that their child does better on smaller doses; however,

I recommend that they try to get to full dose as quickly as possible to get

through the adjustment faster and start helping the immune modulation that we

all want for our kids. Once they really give it a good try on full dose and

still have problems, then I think it is reasonable to go to a lower dose rather

than stop unless they continue to have bad effects even on the lower dose. If

someone has already been at full dose for 4 weeks and still seems to be

concerned, you might try a smaller dose and see how it works. I of course

prefer the full dose if it is tolerable, as I am aiming for immune optimization

and am not sure the small doses will do it. But, parents have to live with

their children and each must decide what is tolerable in any therapy. Kids are

all different, so doses may have to be different too.

What I do ask is that parents examine the dietary intake before stopping or

even before taking the dose down - if the negative reaction is due to the small

amount of opioid antagonism that LDN initially provides with each dose, this

means to me that they are eating foods that ultimately inflame the gi tract and

prevent them from not only optimum immune function (over 70% of immune

functioning is from the gut) but from maximizing their recovery from autism.

They are basically having a withdrawal reaction to their " fix " in many cases of

bad reactions. If parents either do not want to be that strict on the diet or

cannot because they do not have full custody of the child or for any other

reason and/or have satisfied themselves that they have indeed taken these foods

out of the diet and are still having negative effects, then I certainly think it

is understandable for them to want to cut down the dose or stop. As I have said

before, I recovered children from autism before

I ever heard about LDN, so I am not about to say that is is essential for your

child's healing. However, I can say that some way you have to get their immune

system to the point where they can handle the toxic world we live in, and that

almost always includes dietary restriction at least to start with until the gut

gets healed, and almost always some detoxification work to lower the load of

heavy metals and other toxins in the system. If you can get your children's

guts healed (diet, nutients, enzymes, probiotics etc) and get their immune

system functioning optimally (methylation, detoxification), they most likely

will recover from autism, and there are many different therapies and ways to do

these things out there. LDN just happens to be an excellent immune

enhancer/modulator for most people with autoimmune disorders, and also gives the

extra benefit of the immediate opioid social/language benefit for most kids who

take it, BUT NOT ALL, and not all at the same dosage.

In response to the query of stopping and starting, Dr. Bihari who invented

(discovered) the benefits of LDN does not recommend it. I do not recommend it

in the first 4-6 months of using it, because that is the time it takes for the

immune system to change. Stopping and starting would seem to be confusing to

the immune system until your child is stabilized, and you may be starting over

each time you stop it for over one night. Of course, the $64 question is, as

long as my child is autistic, has the immune system actually reached its maximum

functioning? THAT I do not know. As long as the child is still autistic, I

think I would want to do everything I could do to make the immune system as good

as it could get, and if my child did plateau on any particular therapy and did

not seem to be making progress after a while, I would look to other avenues for

optimizing immunity: other forms of helping immunity, more effective forms of

detoxification, (it is questionable

whether an immune system can ever work well if the body is full of heavy

metals), anti-virals (some would say the same about viruses as about the

metals), expanded methylation strategies, reassessment of nutrients, hyperbaric

oxygen therapy, neurofeedback, etc etc.

The reason I harp on the dietary stuff is that if I had to say the main reason

I have found in the nine years I have been working on this disorder that

children do not recover is that the gut healing that is #1 for their recovery

never fully gets effectively implemented. If a child is started on LDN and has

a bad reaction and the parents stop without investigating the dietary issue,

they will most likely have to face it some other way before full healing can

take place. In my beginning years, I finally saw I had two sets of kids, the

ones who were getting better and better and the ones who did not. After a few

years it became clear to me that almost invariably the attitude and diligence to

the dietary restriction was what made the difference whether a child got well or

not. It got to the point where I could predict who would get well by the way

the parent responded to the necessity to get the offending foods out of their

kids' diets, especially after I finally got it

that it was sugar just as much as casein and gluten and soy. I usually got the

best results where the whole family went on the diet so that there was not

always the issue of a special diet for the ASD child and the temptation to break

the dietary program. It gave many families the opportunity to learn that

everyone benefited from knowledge of what was good for them to eat, even

teenagers, who sometimes have become the most devout adherents to special diets,

seeing how much better they look and feel and function when eating better. AND

yes, some kids did have to go on to even more restricted diets to get their gut

healed, though I have found if parents are willing to do a 90-food IgG every 3-4

months until they learn really what their child cannot tolerate along with

getting the sugar out, the GF/CF/SF PLUS ENZYMES has worked in the majority of

cases for me as the best way to start their recovery process. Some parents

report their kids do OK just on enzymes, but studies

show that seldom can all the large peptides be addressed with just enzymes (in

spite of what certain enzyme makers may say) or even with strict diet, but that

a combination does the best. Dr. JM