Dr Brian Udell on Low Dose Naltrexone, LDN Radio Show 17 May 2017 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.
Today our guest would be Dr. Brian Udell who is the medical director of the Child Development Center of America in Florida.
Linda Elsegood: Thank you for joining us today Dr. Brian Udell!
Dr Brian Udell: Thank you for having me.
We're really looking forward to hearing your experience with LDN for Autism. First of all, when did you first hear about LDN?
Dr Brian Udell: I heard about LDN through the, at the time it was called the Defeat Autism Now Protocol. It was called the Dan movement, which started many years ago, in the late 1960s, and that was the first time that the doctors tried to do anything medical to address the Autism that they were seeing.
First of all, it was a very rare disease. Right now in the United States, one in 68 children have it and 2% of boys. So it's five times as prevalent in boys than girls. So 2% of the boys in the United States that have AASD diagnosis. At the time, I first started I think it was one in 110 and the Autism Research Institute became the next version of Defeat Autism Now. And in that time, treatments such as this were beginning to be offered to patients. Previous to the 1970s It was considered to be a psychological, psychiatric disease and it was due to mothers and their refrigerator moms theory was the idea that it was psychological due to lack of love on the caretakers part. And that was actually first proposed by Leo Connor in 1940, and then it was popularized by a self-taught psychologist named Bruno Bettelheim in the fifties and sixties and so that really impeded any kind of understanding for years of what was going on in these children.
And so LDN in 2006 Dr. McCandless, who was a paediatrician wrote her paper in 2006 and a number of us. I first tried it in 2009 when a patient was in high dose and actually had some effect. But I didn't really recognize how great it could do for patients until about three years later as Low Dose Naltrexone when I rediscovered with the rest of the Autism Research Institute community the use of Low Dose Naltrexone in Autism.
Linda Elsegood: And why do you think that the cases of Autism have increased so greatly?
Dr Brian Udell: There can't be anything like a genetic epidemic. Would be impossible that the two terms are mutually exclusive.
So then it has to be environmental. And in any environmental issue, it's going to act on susceptible individuals. So it is genetic in the sense that susceptive and everyone when the play happened, everyone didn't die the plague, somebody was more susceptible. Very few were not susceptible but the ones that were not were the survivors. So right now we have a toxic environment and susceptible individuals. Obviously, boys are five times more susceptible than girls, so they get five times as many premature babies. There are more and more susceptible babies that are born with congenital anomalies.
Babies born with a genetic, anomalies are more susceptible, but it's that susceptibility whatever the environment is and that's the key is what it is in the environment that's causing havoc. As a paediatrician and a doctor who's a baby doctor for 40 years,
the main things that I see different in the medical environment are a baby's having a lot of reflux. Babies don't breastfeed. If there's anything that parents should attune to now is doctors understand breastfeeding and when a baby doesn't breastfeed, sometimes it's not because they have an allergy or because the mother's milk isn't coming as soon as the baby's not sucking hard enough.
And then the next thing is they have reflux. That's a very common thing that I didn't see in the previous century. And then the next thing It's one or two years of life they have ear infections, which again, I didn't see. I saw plenty of ear infections in my life, but it didn't happen in the first couple of years of life.
And so for the year infections, we give antibiotics, and for everything, we give antibiotics now. And if there's one different thing in the environment that would be the biggest thing is the use of antibiotics. And the second biggest thing is using antacids to stop baby reflux, which is just a total misunderstanding.
And I believe that that starts in the susceptible individual. Many of my cases start with that problem and then it steamrolls into bigger problems that appear in the central nervous system. But as a little baby, if your stomach is hurting all the time and you're refluxing all the time and you have a bad bacteria or organisms in your gut, then the only thing you're going to do is cry. So all it's going to present as in little babies is a really fussy baby who doesn't pay attention. That doesn't get broken until some doctor figures out that that child has been seen by an immunologist and an allergist and a skin doctor, in an ear, nose, and throat doctor.
And the paediatrician can't figure out why the kid's not talking all of a sudden. The effect that I see as being the biggest cause if there's such a thing as a cause.
Linda Elsegood: How old are children when they can be diagnosed with Autism?
Dr Brian Udell: That's a great question. I was a neonatologist, the premature baby doctor and so I saw this in the seventies and eighties a lot of drug and alcohol addicted babies. And I was also the director of the followup clinic until they were three years old for the city. And then in the late eighties and nineties, I mostly saw HIV positive babies.
And I also saw them until they were three years old for the followup clinics. Those years, my first case of Autism was 1975. I knew what autism looked like. Autism is not being misdiagnosed as previously being called mental retardation. Mental retardation is different from a different medical condition. As a matter of fact, most of the children that we see, if they really have a diagnosis of Autism, they're at least normal in many times, above normal intelligence. What happened is that I was interested in trying to help the kids that look like they had medical problems.
I forgot what the beginning of that question was.
Linda Elsegood: Well, if a parent is concerned that their baby has got that.
Dr Brian Udell: So then I started the clinic just for Autism. That's how I got into that. I was doing clinics for babies who weren't developing correctly.
And so I started a clinic in 2008 just for Autism. We would see children between the ages of two to five. The city wasn't seeing them if they were much older than three in my case but the diagnosis in 2008 was really made in five-year-olds. It was rarely made in two and three-year-olds.
I got to see more and more children, and I've seen over 2000 children now with kind of developmental delays. You start to see the second sibling of that child and then it becomes just, or the older sibling, frankly, and it just becomes just as important to me to see how early I can catch it in that second sibling.
Of course, the first question that comes up is the kid going to get childhood inoculations because that's the worry that the parent has. That's why I start seeing them so young. I've seen a good number of those kids. I believe that by the age of six months, there's a certain set that I can see.
Now, there are children who don't get it until the age of 15 to 18 months of developing perfectly, normally. And then at 18 months, things start going bad. That's what we're told. I can usually tell by the time a child is six to nine months whether I should worry and I do start to intervene.
Yesterday I saw a child, the younger sibling, and she was just under two years old. She wasn't talking, she was walking, she was making good eye contact, everything looks nice, and I wasn't happy with that development and everything else was fine in that child. So sometimes it's a little later, but I would like to think that since I was a neonatologist, I was a premature baby doctor, I'd like to think that I can usually tell by the time they're nine months old. Their tone is already very low. They're not making eye contact. They're not having a responsive eye contact. They usually have another medical problem that's been going on, either diarrhoea or constipation or some feeding problem, and they're not crawling correctly between six and nine months.
A whole book was written a couple of years ago about the earliest diagnosis and the author spent two or three chapters talking about the crawl being abnormal. So if a doctor wants to be stewed about it and really look hard, they might see it that young.
Linda Elsegood: And the military, the question. You mentioned vaccinations there. I'm really pleased that I don't have to make vaccinations.
Dr Brian Udell: I didn't say vaccinations.
Linda Elsegood: Sorry. I said vaccinations. Okay. Inoculations.
Dr Brian Udell: I said childhood inoculate. It is a hard subject.
Linda Elsegood: Yes, it is but children and parents have that decision to make. And as I was saying, my children grew up, so I don't have that dilemma anymore. But if you have a baby you have to make a decision.
Dr Brian Udell: Soon in the US it won't be the parents' decision either. In California, practically it's not at all. I don't know what it's like in other countries. Maybe in your country, it would even because of socialized medicine, maybe they could even make it more forceful, but you can't go to school if you're not vaccinated in California. Now I don't know that it's about panels for decision anymore, which is another all topic on it. But what can I say?
Go ahead.
Linda Elsegood: No, carry on.
Dr Brian Udell: There's no right answer. We were fighting in the United States alone is a $4 billion a year industry. People get murdered for less money than that. Dr Andrew Wakefield, I think the man is a gentleman and a scholar, and he's vilified.
You can't write an article about anything that has to do with Autism nowadays and not mentioned the devil, dr Wakefield, is wonderful gentlemen and just trying to help everybody. And just that alone keeps physicians like me from talking much about it. I have 10% of my patients that have a picture of the child before the vaccination and a picture of the child after the vaccination and it's a different child. And that means 90% of my patients, and I've seen, like I say, over 2000, 90% of them don't think it's the vaccination. So it's not in everybody. But as I said in the beginning, it's the susceptible child with the environmental stimulus. And for some people that could be an environmental stimulus.
Unless you believe that all vaccinations are good for all children all the time, and that would be an impossible statement. So it would beg the issue, it would beg the question, which vaccinations for which children went and no study got, and there's not even something close to that.
The best thing I can do when they put for booster shots is I can check tastes called titers.
I can check the moon immune titers to see if the children are already immune to measles, mumps, rubella for example, the MMR shot. And I've checked about three dozen so far in the last year, and every single one of those children has numbers that are flagged by the lab as extremely hot, okay.
That means that that person could kiss a person with the disease and not get it. And my question to the public health departments is, how do you give someone who's allergic to peanuts. Peanuts you don't because they're allergic to peanuts because they have a reaction to it. We are just in no man's land with this. Snd I don't know if there are listeners who think that I'm anti vacs, which I'm not. I'm 66 years old, and I had to stay indoors in the summertime because of the polio scare. That's what happened in the 1950s In the summer. It was big. And so I recognized the value of vaccination.
I also recognize the weakness of the science and just when our colleagues just keep saying the science is clear, the science that is far from clear. When they're really faced with that science, usually they'll say, well, I see what you're talking about. That's about the best you'll get.
Usually, you get people rolling their eyes.
Linda Elsegood: And when you see a small child that you think may be susceptible to having Autism, what steps can you take to try and prevent the Autism from developing?
Dr Brian Udell: Right. The first thing is finding out if they have a medical problem at the time.
So a child who has diarrhoea or constipation or frequent rashes where frequent illnesses, that kid is an immunologic, sort of a no man's land. He needs to have an immune system evaluated and gotten on a steady keel. The diet is important. When you see that, that's a child that you start to worry about, and if you can move it in the right direction.
I see these younger children, younger siblings already diagnosed autistic patients. And as soon as they show any of these signs, we address their diarrhoea, we address them constantly and their nutrition.
And if I have a question I usually get a blood count on the kids. I'll get a couple of labs when that young child, and you know, this is something in other countries, in the South American countries when I get patients from there, they do a lot more laboratory testing than the US. I don't know if the UK does it at all, but we don't know if these children are anaemic.
We don't know. And here in the United States, a huge amount of vitamin D deficiency you correct that. The women are walking around, and they say, well, my doctor told me how to vitamin D. Well, if you have a low vitamin D, your kid has a low vitamin D. It did transfer any to the kid, and they don't go outside as often.
And then you have low vitamin D levels. So that's optimizing nutrition, optimizing their health. And it makes me feel a lot better. And if I have a question, as I say, some laboratory work will make me say: "Why don't you wait a few months? Why don't you ask the doctor to just give seven at a time instead of 14 at a time?"
Linda Elsegood: Okay. Well, we'll just have a quick break, and we'll be back in just a moment.
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Welcome back! The question that parents are always asking is "What dosage do you give a child? How do you work out what the optimum dose is?"
Dr Brian Udell: One of the interesting things about Naltrexone is it's almost the same dose for everybody. So it's hard to believe that I get results in a 15-year-old or a 20-year-old and I almost get the same result in a three-year-old with 3mg after 9:00 PM.
Sometime I'd like to give it as late as I can in the night so the cream is great for me. First of all, children don't have a choice. And second of all, they're already asleep after 9:00 PM. and that's the dose. If I'm really worried about one of those young children under 18 months, and their immune system looks like it's kind of a mess, I want to see what kind of improvement we could see with naltrexone I may only start them with 1,5 mg or 2 mg every night. But the highest I go right now in a bigger person is 4,5 mg as a single dose or 3 mg at night, 3mgs in the morning, which I was surprised to get results from that.
Through the years now going up higher doesn't get us any better results. And frankly, I don't exactly understand what the mechanism is, why the second dose is helping them. I suspect it's helping more in a different sort of physiologic mechanism than the rise of endorphins because the parents will say: "If I don't give that morning dose, they don't seem the same."
That would be something that I'd love to see studied and I'm sure that what you're doing and the people that you're involved with would be great if there were some studies because as I'm saying, that 3 mg dose do take care of people who don't have autism. They have other immunologic conditions and get a lot of relief with that 3 mg dose. Higher than 4,5 mg at one time has never been helpful. And more than 3 and 3 have not been helpful either.
Linda Elsegood: And how long does it normally take before you notice that LDN is working?
Dr Brian Udell: The quickest I'll see is in the first week but depends on what I'm looking for. The original article by dr McCandless was "The use of Low Dose Naltrexone for immune modulation and mood regulation." So we are using it for two different reasons so if I'm using it right for mood regulation, we'll usually see that in the first week to say three or four weeks, and that's why a parent will continue it. Or a parent may stop it after three or four weeks, and this is rare. Most of our parents continue it, but they may stop it because what we were looking for was the mood regulation.
Now, if we're doing it for immune modulation, then I asked the parents: "How many times a year does the kid gets sick?" Usually, they get an infection or cold every other month and so I'll say: " Okay, so let's do it for three months." And then we'll look back, and we'll see whether or not, in this last three months the kid never got sick, which is what I see practically all the time. So usually the parents that see their modulation improvement that is, he stopped getting sick, keep giving it for years because they just don't want the kids to get sick. And, and the ones that are given it for mood regulation, we'll do it until some other mood problem comes along. What'll happen is that's usually for about a year, that they'll see it's working, and then they may say that's not working and there are other psychological issues that are coming in, but that's usually how I do that.
The people that have autism have a lot of different symptoms.
The three core features of autism are speech delay, repetitive behaviours and social isolation. If that speech delay takes the form of speech apraxia that is, they really don't say anything at all and they are two, three, four years old then we have only a very few protocols that have been proven to instigate speech. And those protocols are very sort of stimuli as we call. When an autistic person flaps, jumps or does repetitive things, we call that stimming self-stimulatory behaviour and I believe that a lot of that behaviour is communication. So if I can make them talk more, they could stymie less. So in order to get those protocols on board, I use Naltrexone even if the parents don't notice that there's a particular problem with mood regulation or immune modulation.
I'm using it in preparation of giving supplements that will sort of wake up the brain a lot and so I use the LDN so that they won't be so hyperactive.
Linda Elsegood: And how long does that take to notice that?
Dr Brian Udell: I don't know. I don't let it get noticed so well. I usually just do a protocol where I tell the parents the child is not speaking and are very hyperactive.
The two protocols have to do with methylation. MTHFR is a big thing that many of your audience members who know about LDN probably know about the MTHFR gene. So we excite that gene. We get that gene work harder with either methyl B12 or methyl folate, glucosamine, antioxidant products. And those products tend to make patients even more hyperactive, less attention may be even more aggressive. So I'll start the child on Naltrexone for three weeks, and then the fourth week of the Naltrexone I start whatever protocol I picked to get speech started. And I don't know. Again, I'm a clinician.
I don't do studies. I found Naltrexone to be successful doing it that way and that I'm more successful getting children to speak because, for a child who's not speaking, who's three and a half, four years old, regardless of their behaviour, the important thing over that next year is going to find some way to get them to start to talk because if they don't really talk under the age of seven there's going to be significant ongoing problems and there aren't protocols that necessarily help that.
Linda Elsegood: Okay. Are there any foods or drinks that children shouldn't be given if they are having development problems?
Dr Brian Udell: Do you live in a small village? I don't know how many McDonald's are within five minutes of you but the worst thing I hear in my practice is when a parent says: " I can't pass that McDonald's without going in."
Okay. That drives me crazy because as far as I know, the parent is the one driving, not the kid and of course, a dad can pass them. So just start a healthy diet and stop eating processed foods whether or not gluten-free, casein-free. It depends on what country you're in.
All the gluten in the United States has been exposed to a fair amount of glyphosate and pesticides. And I think the reason that so many people feel so much better when they're gluten-free, maybe is not to be the gluten, but it may be the pesticides and likewise in the children who seem to improve when they're taken off the gluten.
That's one part of it. And then the other part of it is the casein. And the feeling is that the casein can be allergenic or it can lower the immune response. And I test for that.
So when parents ask, what's the best diet, my answer is, in this century, there is the capability to tell parents exactly what diet your child should be on to not have an immune response. So the best diet starts with a healthy diet with not a lot of steroids and not a lot of antibiotics.
Over here, that's called a natural diet. If a parent wants to test for food immunity, I think it's a valuable test. The test that is usually done around the world is an immunoglobulin E test. They're testing for a scratch test or something that would cause you to get a rash or the hives or allergies, like a stuffy snuff nose. What I'm testing for is IgG antibodies, which are antibodies that your body has to get rid of it. So it's not that big antibody response to the milk, let's say, is the thing causing the problem.
The antibody response is using up energy, and these kids come in with very low tone, very low activity and the tone that seems to be the lowest is in the midline and, speech is affected. So it starts with a good diet, a healthy good diet. I can't stress enough that if I have a breastfed child that is autistic, that didn't mean that the breast milk didn't work. When I see a breastfed child who's autistic, I can tell the parents, you prevented a lot of the other signs and symptoms of autism by breastfeeding your child. So I see children who breastfeed as long as three years, believe it or not, and they may have autism, but it's not as significant as their siblings who only breastfed for a month. And the mother was more determined maybe the second time to do that. And frankly, it starts in utero. It's not just the food that the mothers eat. They have to take the correct vitamins and not too many vitamins. They can have a vitamin D deficiency, and there may be doctors that are listening or patients that hear this, but my object to any kind of drugs given during pregnancy end up in the fetus. Parents and saying:" Well, the mom has enough anxiety and it's better to give her Prozac than to have the anxiety." And I point to the 3 million years prior to Prozac that moms had babies, and there were plenty of hard times through those 3 million years, and we didn't have Autism.
So I object to any kind of medication. Tylenol during pregnancy can be a big factor leading to it. It uses glutathione, and the baby has to supply glutathione to the mother. When I started doing babies in the 1970s, people were actually telling me that cocaine wasn't going to cost harm the baby. There's no way that a drug doesn't get into the fetus, and, if it works on our brain, how can it not work on a forming fetal brain? So it really even starts with that. And then it actually starts two generations past. There are people who look at the flora of grandparents.
They're looking at smoking and the grandparents as being related to the second generation problems. So it's sort of a lifestyle that you want to live that might get us away from this epidemic.
Linda Elsegood: What about giving children cows milk?
Dr Brian Udell: At the end of his career and his life, Dr.
Frank Oskie, who was one of the premier paediatricians of the 20th century, wrote a book that I think probably got a kick out of being a paediatrician. And the book that he wrote was, "Don't drink your milk."
He felt that was causing a lot of allergies and asthma that he hadn't seen in previous centuries because he had seen the growth of infant formula in his lifetime from the 1940s. It wasn't really until the forties and fifties that women really got started using the formula all the time which is all cows milk-based.
Cows, milk protein carries a lot of potential problems of the allergic responses. And I see thousands of them every year I tested. I test thousands of allergic responses, and I would say casein, which is proteins in milk and then the sugar is lactose, and then there's water.
So I see much more casein intolerance than lactose intolerance. Lactose is the sugar and I don't think that we're intolerant, especially babies to the lactose. The best substitute, if you can't use human milk, goats milk.
Goat's milk may be number two on my best list. It's not camels, and it's not cow. Obviously, camel and cow have a lot of the same protein to our bodies.
Linda Elsegood: As children become toddlers, parents sometimes to keep their children quiet, give them what we call sweets, or you'd call candy giving children sugar. How is that affect children?
Dr Brian Udell: Dr. Flamingo was a genius.
There were studies, prospectively randomized, double-blind controlled studies it would be hard to do but it is high fructose corn syrup and that is poison.
Anything that has a number in front of it is not food.
I worry more about the high fructose corn syrup has a fair amount of lead in it. And it's not a natural food. So refined sugar has been around. I try to look at things that weren't around before. I'm old, and I took care of kids for 25 years in the previous century, and I've taken care of kids for 17 years now in this century, and there are certain things that just don't make sense to me.
High fructose corn syrup wasn't around in the old days, and we didn't have autism. And I was there when ADHD started happening until the seventies or eighties. By then, they were putting in artificial colours, artificial flavours, steroids in the animals, antibiotics in the animals.
Dr Feingold Diet which is a low sugar is a very healthy diet. I think should be followed by everyone. If you were to do a study about sugar, I would be more interested in doing a Skittle study, Skittles are these things M&Ms that were colouring one and are a lot worse for children. But a lot of times I'll have a mother who says he gets crazy every time he gets sugar. It's like, so why would you give them sugar? To me, you don't have to get a study for that.
Do you think I should give them sugar? No, I think you shouldn't. If it hurts when you do that, don't do that.
Linda Elsegood: I just have one more quick break, and we'll be back in just a moment.
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Wellcome back! And today we have Dr. Brian Udell with us and it has been amazing all the information that you've given us. So we've talked about what autism is and the use of LDN, and you also use LDN, as you were saying, for other conditions. How effective have you found LDN to be in autoimmune conditions?
Dr Brian Udell: The autoimmune conditions that I deal with other than some that cause what people call Autism, are Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, Systemic Lupus, general allergies all the time, they have asthma, some kind of reactive airway disease problem and I find it to be great at a first-line. When I give it for a lot of immune conditions, either the drug that they're on can be lowered or at least they don't go up on the drug that they're on. I mean, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis is a
pretty severe condition and my child, who has and takes Methotrexate which is a really strong drug, he finds that it, without the Naltrexone, his days are very much harder to deal with. So, I think it's an adjunct.
I think that it's not the be-all and end-all for an autoimmune condition but it certainly can be a beginning, or it can be an adjunct for kids. Some autism, we now measure these antibodies in their brain, and we're now able to measure without doing a spinal tap, antibodies binding and blocking antibodies in their brain that could be causing 5 to 10% of autism. And so even if the autoimmune condition that I'm helping is asthma, and I have a child who has autism and asthma, a lot of children who have autism have other autoimmune conditions. And so just by giving them the Naltrexone for whatever I'm getting either immune modulation or mood regulation, the parent will say that they don't get their attacks as often as they used to, or that if they forget to give it, they run out, they wish they had it. Again, I'm not specific in it because it's a clinical practice, but if sort of amazes me the worry, the concern that some people have about Low Dose Naltrexone. I think It's been a godsend for my practice.
I don't have to give it for a lot of reasons. I don't have to give anywhere nearly the amount of drugs that everybody else has to give, I don't have to give repeated courses of antibiotics because they don't get sick as much. So the LDN helps that. I don't have to give a stimulant medication because the child's focus is better or I don't have to give antianxiety medication because the kids settled down.
All these things have turned out to be great, and I practically give it to all my children, ADHD and ASD and autism because to me is so safe. The two biggest side effects that I see are about 1 in 20 of the children that get it will have a little hyper from the stuff and last for two or three days sometimes. I usually ask the parents to start it on a weekend night, on a Friday night or Saturday nights so many hyperactivity gets away by the time Monday comes around. And about 1 in 20 that the hyperactivity sort of continues weeks into it, and the parent doesn't want to do it anymore,
I'll try lowering the dose from 3 to 2 or 3 to 1,5 mgs. The number of people who don't continue it, only about 10 to 20%. Everybody else just continues to get it. And that's sort of an underlying thing that I'm always giving. And then I don't have the question of." I wish I was giving that too." because what traditional medicine does is, we drop a big bomb from the top Adderall or Ritalin or Abilify Risperidone.
We drop these big bombs from the top, and we see what's happen until the smoke clears to the patient. What I'm trying to do is add vitamins and supplements to take away foods that might be causing the problem. To me, the safety of the Naltrexone is, that is the only thing that it will stop it if they get too hyper. The only other problem I ever have in it is maybe 1% of kids will get a little rash. We ask them to rub it on their wrists and somewhere thin where it'd be absorbed. So 1% of kids might get a rash and usually the rash is due to the vehicle that they're mixing it in.
And I ask the pharmacist to change whatever the vehicle is. I don't have a problem so far in this. Thousands that I've given to children. One child who turned out that was allergic to Naltrexone because we put it in pill form and he got high and the highest went away when I stopped the Naltrexone. So I just see it as a wonderful treatment because it has such a high safety index and it works in so many cases that it's almost a crime that it's not tried more. I'm an allopathic doctor, I'm board-certified and everything.
and I can only figure that they don't try because nobody's making money off it. It's a very inexpensive thing and maybe that's the reason.
Linda Elsegood: And you were saying that when diagnosing a child, they usually have stomach upset, diarrhoea. Do you find that the LDN helps with that?
Dr Brian Udell: I don't know. I wouldn't address one without the other anyway. None of my patients who are on LDN aren't on something for their gut anyway because especially in the US their guts are totally poisoned, and they have to be on some kind of probiotic, they have to be on some kind of an antioxidant and in their gut. I really don't know if the LDN by itself helps. The only way I would ever know is if a patient ran out of the probiotics. I recently had one patient ran out of the probiotic, but continued the LDN and the kid's gut was okay when she came and saw me. So maybe it held things together, but I don't give it a chance. I like it so much.
Linda Elsegood: I was only just wondering because it's used in pediatric Crohn's and so on. So I just thought maybe it would help.
Dr Brian Udell: And that's interesting because they don't choose probiotics in Crohn's.
You'll find a lot of kids in Crohn's who aren't on a probiotic or who haven't had their gut flora checked, and they're not on maybe the correct antibiotic that they should be in their gut. They have C diff growing in their gut, and they're calling it Crohn's, you know? And so I'm glad that it could work by itself. It shouldn't be by itself in a Crohn's patient.
Linda Elsegood: Yes.
Dr Brian Udell: That's just my little opinion.
Linda Elsegood: Well, we got you as a speaker at our conference in September, so I know there are many doctors who would like to discuss LDN in children with you.
Dr Brian Udell: I'm looking forward to it. I really am. You guys have been great to me.
Linda Elsegood: But it's sharing that knowledge, isn't it? That is just so amazing.
Dr Brian Udell: I didn't know it was given to adults and you told me you weren't sure that it was giving little kids for autism.
Yeah, sharing knowledge.
Linda Elsegood: Exactly. And bringing all the people together. And the Q&A sessions I think are so much fun at the conference with all the experts pull all the knowledge together.
Dr Brian Udell: And I think the people who attend really get a sense of, they get empowered with a lot of knowledge.
Linda Elsegood: Yes. And there was one doctor who had notepads there last year and she filled two notepads with information, whether she's actually read it all or not.
Dr Brian Udell: She can do your next book.
Linda Elsegood: Yes. And you've got an hour prerecorded, which we still have to do when you have time. If you can get your PowerPoint together then tell me and we'll record the audio. The title is "Low Dose Naltrexone and the Autism spectrum disorder". Last year you had 30 minutes live, which was nowhere near long enough, so you've even got less this time.
So that means it will be turned into a video and it's available for everybody for a year to watch as many times as they like, and they'll be able to download your PowerPoint. As you know doctors love the PowerPoints to go through and check.
It's a quick way of doing it and the information you give help and guidance to doctors is amazing. So thank you very much for everything that you do and all those children that you treat. It's amazing. And last year we had the little boy who played the piano, Jacob. What an amazing little boy. He sat down and everybody just sort of stood there. I don't know whether they were expecting him to play chopsticks or something, but it was truly amazing.
Dr Brian Udell: He keeps moving along in his career.
Linda Elsegood: Can you just tell us very briefly of what LDN did for Jacob?
Dr Brian Udell: Sure. It take place when he was about four years old when I met him, and he just had a new little sister. His biggest problem was, I don't know if he didn't like her crying or he was jealous of her.
He wasn't talking. He was developing slowly. But the parents started to get scared that he was going to hurt her. He was very aggressive, abusive self-injurious on others. So when he came to see me, it was because the regular medical community used to give strong drugs to stop the negative behaviour. We don't do anything to find out why they have negative behaviour. He wasn't really autistic at the time. I saw him but all he ever did was scream and hit.
The mother wanted me to use B12 because everybody reads that B12 helps speech and I do use a lot of B12 shot in my practice, but he was so aggressive that I felt that I gave him B12 at that time he may increase the risk that he could hurt somebody. So we started him on the Naltrexone. Then his mother was not necessarily on board on that and within days he told his mother he loved her and his life turned around.
And then within a couple more days,this is obviously just one case, she heard the piano playing, and she thought it was her husband. But she thought he's not that good. And it was her son playing the piano, and it turned out that he's a prodigy. He just was listening all those years and looking, and then that's how he got it. I thought it was an amazing story.
Linda Elsegood: Absolutely amazing. And I interviewed her and she said that all he was doing was, slapping her around the face all the time. She kept telling him, "I love you, Jacob." Even though it was difficult sometimes, and then as you say, one day he just turned around, and I hugged her and kissed her and said, and I love you, mommy.
And she called for her husband to get the video camera and said:" I'm going to save it in case he never ever says it again we will have it to look back on." But it was amazing to hear him playing. It was as though somebody in their forties that had been playing classical music.
Dr Brian Udell: And I can tell you that is not uncommon in my practice. I have more talented kids in my practice now than in any practice I've ever had.
I've had several different kinds of children, and they were very good artists, musicians, speakers. One was a public speaker. He can't speak when he's by himself. He stutters, and he doesn't do things but then when he starts doing public speaking, it's perfect. It's amazing how the brain works.
Linda Elsegood: And I think the takeaway message here is if your child has been diagnosed with autism or ADHD or anything like that, or it's a development problem, then it's not the end of the world. There are things and treatments and doctors like yourself that they can consult with.
And how do they contact you, Brian?
Dr Brian Udell: My organization is a child development centre of America, and my blog that I write every week is TheAutismDoctor.com.
And it's free, and you don't have to register. My purpose is to get the word out there, just like you said in a lot of my blogs, I just want the parent to take it to the paediatrician and say, what do you think about this?
And the organization around the world that we all belong to is called The Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs which is where we train. So we go twice a year, and we spend three days, eight to 10 hours a day, three days in a row learning about the basic science and Autism from each other. So that's a good place if you're not seeing me.
Linda Elsegood: Well, thank you very much. Our time is up, and it was an honour and a privilege to have you here with us today. The LDN research trust Facebook group has almost 18,000 members around the world.
It is a great place to start your research, connect with others, www.facebook.com/groups/LDNRT
It is a closed group, and only members can see your post. Nothing is shown on your page or feeds. Posts can't be shared. We do also have the page where you can share links. It's www.facebook.com/ldnrt
Check out our books constants pages by searching on Facebook. The LDN Research Trust also has a Twitter account, and you can find us on twitter.com/ldntrust.
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Linda Elsegood:
Any questions or comments you may have, please Contact Us. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company. Until next time, stay safe and keep well.
