From Despair To Detox
Allison Williams
Christopher’s Mother

We all have a story, often they are remarkably similar, and ours began on 8 October, 1996 when our son Christopher was born by C-section in Bermuda. A difficult labour, but a perfectly healthy, bouncy baby boy … all 8lb 11ozs of him! Shortly after birth, and without our knowledge, he was given antibiotics, apparently because I had a temperature during the labour, a precaution we were told.

Life was near perfect; at age two months he had his first DTP and he almost instantly developed colic, at four months DTP 2 and he had his first ear infection and then antibiotics. I’d stopped breast-feeding by this point. He’d been on a cows’ milk formula for 2 months and as the colic had not improved I changed to soya. He improved dramatically within 48 hours. Today, Christopher is dairy free once more. From then on our little guy seemed to be developing just fine, in fact we worried he was a little ahead of himself! He had several ear infections during that first year; all treated with broad spectrum antibiotics. At nine months he had a big one which landed him in hospital with suspected meningitis. He was given intro-muscular antibiotics, each injection equivalent to a week’s oral course. By his first birthday he looked desperately ill …

He perked up after that but at 14 months a double ear infection knocked him for six and he was given an extended course of the, by now, dreaded antibiotics. In the middle of that he had his MMR and we began to lose our little boy.
At 18 months he was withdrawn, didn’t look up when we called him and had stopped making sounds and using words. He had diarrhoea and was terribly unhappy. He was diagnosed with autism at 26 months – that’s another story! By then we were living back in the UK, trying to start a new business and life was difficult to say the least. We had his urine tested up with Paul Shattock in Sunderland but the results didn’t show Christopher had a gluten problem. In fact Paul said on paper Christopher didn’t seem autistic.

Then in January of 1999 I met Hugh, our hero. Hugh is a homeopath; he’d only treated one autistic child before but he gave me hope and everything he told me made absolute sense. I was more than willing to try. We began by detoxing Christopher of all his vaccinations, a time consuming process as some had to be repeated, but the results have been amazing. Christopher was aggravated by DTP and MMR; sometimes that wasn’t pleasant at all. He would scream, have a raging fever, black gunge oozing from his nose, but then each time he would improve and we would see bits of the boy we’d once had. After the 2nd MMR detox his diarrhoea disappeared and has never returned. He’s completely toilet trained during the day now. It only took three days for it to click. He’s so much more sociable, he attends mainstream nursery as well as a special centre for observation and assessment and he is beginning to use language again. He sits at a workstation for 15 minutes now and happily sits for snack time and registration at mainstream nursery. He even answered ‘yeah’ to his name being called the other day. He’s playful, his sense of humour is returning and his play skills are slowly improving.

We are continuing with specific remedies aimed at his hearing (of the human voice) and his repetitive behaviour, which consists of tapping objects. So far so good; the problems have not disappeared yet but they are becoming less and we’ll keep working on them. Homeopathy has been a lifesaver for us; it seems like such a natural way to help Christopher and it works! I truly feel if we cleanse his system of the toxins that helped to cause his problems, while strengthening his immune system, we will get our little boy back. There are, of course, many theories out there about how to help our children. I firmly believe in some of them and indeed do try them, but my main aim right now is to get my little boy back to the perfect state he was in before antibiotics and vaccinations so rudely got in the way.
We have also been trying the homeopathic secretin for about 10 days now. It’s a little too early for us to really tell, but there seem to have been improvements in certain areas, although they may well have happened anyway. Personally, I feel that the earlier homeopathic intervention we used has had similar effects to that of the secretin. So if you are thinking of trying homeopathy, make sure you find a good homeopathic doctor, one who will take the time to really know your child and build up a clear picture. It takes a little time but once you do, the rewards are endless.