I show you again this girl’s brain. If her brain can change, your
children’s brains can change. For the record, I initially held off doing repeat
NeuroSPECT scans. I’ve had children come back, at this point, for two reasons.
Sometimes to get a repeat NeuroSPECT scan. Sometimes, as I’ve done recently, because
we have enough knowledge with the NeuroSPECT to actually say to a parent, ‘Where are
we?’. Especially an older child, not doing real well. Is it behavioral, is it still
medical, what are we adjusting? And very, very thankfully, there’s not a child
I’ve done a repeat NeuroSPECT scan on that is not either significantly better than
the first scan or even with children who are not doing real well clinically yet, the scan
has been almost normal on some of them.
The truth is, this is changeable. This is a disease process. The trouble
is that many people – I want to go back to that Yale report for one moment –
This has really begun to hurt as a pediatrician because I went into pediatrics because of
children. As I said to you, part of medicine teaches us not to be real emotional. But it
has become very hard not to sit in amazement and concern at what you guys go through as
parents. The reality is that I’ve seen parents say, ‘Well, my kid is doing well,
I’m going to stop the medicines. I don’t want to keep him on the
medicine.’.
Well, I hope by the cases I’m presenting to you that it becomes a
realization to you that unless the brain has become normal, unless your child has become
normal, you may have a child doing better, but if you pull that plug, over time they will
either fall back or stop progressing at the rate they were. You’ve got to help that
brain evolve.
And that is what I would like to leave all of you with as a statement
– that this is a medical disease. We need to start focusing the right people on
helping to treat it. If we do, I think we can have solutions in the near future.
