The Movie Shelf

This is a collection of documentary movies and films (that are available online) and relevant to the topics discussed in this blog.

FOOD, NUTRITION, AND THE FOOD SUPPLY:

King Corn

Supersize Me

Food, Inc

Food Fight: How Corporations Ruined Food (Food Industry Documentary) - Real Stories
Seeds of Death (a film about the harmfulness of GMOs)

Bitter Harvest 

More info and follow up on the story can be found here:
Poisoning Michigan: Author revisits PBB crisis 30 years later

"The accidental poisoning of Michigan dairy cattle in the 1970s sparked the largest chemical contamination in United States history."

AUTISM

Autism Yesterday is a short film about kids recovering from autism with biomed treatments.

Autism - Made in the U S A by Gary Null

Wretches and Jabberers

Temple Grandin

PANDAS/PANS

My Kid is Not Crazy (this is a film being made about PANDAS/PANS)

Unstuck- An OCD Kids' Movie

THE MEDICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

Making Rounds: Medical Education Film.  This is an excellent presentation of what it looks like when very skilled and compassionate doctors go on rounds- how they ask questions to quickly discover relevant medical history, and how they use keen observation of the patients to find clues as to what might be the problem.

Off Label

Undoctored

VACCINES

VAXXED: From Cover Up to Catastrophe

The Greater Good

Shots In The Dark: Silence on Vaccines

The Hidden Truth (Australian movie)

Direct Order (about soldiers forced to take the Anthrax vaccine and were injured by it)

Vaccine Nation

Silent Epidemic; The Untold Story of Vaccines

CHEMICALS AND OTHER TOXINS

Chemerical

The Human Experiment

The Poisoner's Bible is an episode of the PBS show American Experience.  From the site:
"In the early 20th century, the average American medicine cabinet was a would-be poisoner's treasure chest, with radioactive radium, thallium, and morphine in everyday products. The pace of industrial innovation increased, but the scientific knowledge to detect and prevent crimes committed with these materials lagged behind until 1918. New York City's first scientifically trained medical examiner, Charles Norris, and his chief toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, turned forensic chemistry into a formidable science and set the standards for the rest of the country."
This show is very relevant to anyone interested in toxic exposures and the health effects that can result, as well as some of the history of government involvement (or lack of involvement) in regulating toxins and our exposure to them.

The Disappearing Male “The Disappearing Male is about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system. The last few decades have seen steady and dramatic increases in the incidence of boys and young men suffering from genital deformities, low sperm count, sperm abnormalities and testicular cancer. At the same time, boys are now far more at risk of suffering from ADHD, autism, Tourette's syndrome, cerebral palsy, and dyslexia.

The Disappearing Male takes a close and disturbing look at what many doctors and researchers now suspect are responsible for many of these problems: a class of common chemicals that are ubiquitous in our world. Found in everything from shampoo, sunglasses, meat and dairy products, carpet, cosmetics and baby bottles, they are called "hormone mimicking" or "endocrine disrupting" chemicals and they may be starting to damage the most basic building blocks of human development.“

SPECIFIC DISEASES AND CONDITIONS

My Beautiful Broken Brain is a film about a young woman working to recover from a severe stroke. It is currently available on Netflix.

Issues With My Tissues is about a woman with Vascular EDS as she works to reach her goal of walking the entire London Marathon.  It's a good window into daily life with EDS.

TREATMENTS AND THERAPIES

Dying to Have Known (film about Gerson Therapy)

The Beautiful Truth (also about Gerson Therapy)

EDUCATION

Class Dismissed is a film about homeschooling.

The War on Kids

FICTION

Awakenings

Cake

Studies that Validate the Possibility of Recovery From Autism

In April of 2025 the most recent study validating recovery from autism was published, entitled Sociodemographic and Clinical Characteristics of Children Who Lose the Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnosis from the study:
"This study retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 1465 children and adolescents aged 0-18 who were diagnosed with ASD between December 2017 and June 2021, and followed up by a child and adolescent psychiatrist. The files of a total of 50 LAD (Lost Autism Diagnosis) patients were analyzed.

Of the children who lost their autism diagnosis, "26% of the sample still had an additional psychiatric diagnosis, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and speech sound disorder being the most common. Eighteen percent of the sample was found to be taking medication, primarily risperidone."

This study shows that a subset of monitored children may lose their diagnosis, but further research to determine the clinical characteristics, symptomatology, and biological factors of this group of children will be more informative regarding optimal outcome processes."

In February of 2013 the National Institute of Mental Health published a study entitled "Optimal outcome in individuals with a history of autism" that found that recovery from autism does occur. The study was designed to find out whether reports of recovery were due in fact to misdiagnoses, and at what level these individuals were functioning after the loss of the diagnosis:

"Although autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are generally considered lifelong disabilities, literature suggests that a minority of individuals with an ASD will lose the diagnosis. However, the existence of this phenomenon, as well as its frequency and interpretation, is still controversial: were they misdiagnosed initially, is this a rare event, did they lose the full diagnosis, but still suffer significant social and communication impairments or did they lose all symptoms of ASD and function socially within the normal range?"

The study found that "Optimal outcome and TD (typically developing) groups' mean scores did not differ on socialization, communication, face recognition, or most language subscales, although three OO individuals showed below-average scores on face recognition. Early in their development, the OO group displayed milder symptoms than the HFA group in the social domain, but had equally severe difficulties with communication and repetitive behaviors."

And reached the conclusion that "Although possible deficits in more subtle aspects of social interaction or cognition are not ruled out, the results substantiate the possibility of OO from autism spectrum disorders and demonstrate an overall level of functioning within normal limits for this group."

It cannot be understated how important this level of recognition for the reality of recovery from autism is. I know some of the families who participated in the study, and can say that they were impressed at the level of detail and the open-mindedness of the researchers. This gives me a lot of hope. I just wish that the word would spread faster, as many if not most people still do not believe that recovery is real.

This article from Science Daily provides more information about the study and how it was conducted. This study is the first in a series, apparently:

"This study cannot provide information on what percentage of children diagnosed with ASD might eventually lose the symptoms. Study investigators have collected a variety of information on the children, including structural and functional brain imaging data, psychiatric outcomes, and information on the therapies that the children received. Analysis of those data, which will be reported in subsequent papers, may shed light on questions such as whether the changes in diagnosis resulted from a normalizing of brain function, or if these children's brains were able to compensate for autism-related difficulties. The verbal IQs of the optimal outcome children were slightly higher than those with high functioning autism. Additional study may reveal whether IQ may have been a factor in the transition they made."

"All children with ASD are capable of making progress with intensive therapy, but with our current state of knowledge most do not achieve the kind of optimal outcome that we are studying," said Dr. Fein. "Our hope is that further research will help us better understand the mechanisms of change so that each child can have the best possible life."

Scientific American also ran an article about this study entitled "Is It Possible to Recover From Autism?" that gives more insight and mentions another, similar study that is being done to explore autism recovery. From this article:

"This finding is not the first to suggest that some young adults with autism lose their symptoms. A 2008 literature review reported that 3 to 25 percent of affected people eventually recover. But the recent study was especially rigorous."
More about the study design "An expert diagnostician thoroughly reviewed the early records of all recovered participants to confirm that they truly had autism when they were younger, and she correctly rejected 24 reports from kids with nonautism diagnoses (such as language disorders) that had been slipped in as foils, verifying that her diagnostic technique was sound. These measures made researchers confident that the now typically functioning children had not initially been misdiagnosed. The team also set a relatively high bar for recovery: participants not only had to be free of autism symptoms, as indicated by a battery of tests—they also had to have typically developing friends and be fully included in regular education classrooms."

And, about the other study that will son be published "Catherine Lord, director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain at Weill Cornell Medical College, has been following a group of about 100 people with autism from the time they were diagnosed at age two through their early 20s. Study participants completed a large battery of tests every few years as children and again at age 18, and parents have been filling out questionnaires every year."

"Like Kelley and her colleagues, Lord has found that a handful of participants lose their autism symptoms. Moreover, she says, “their eye contact, gestures, the way they hold their body, the way they talk about their friends”—behaviors that have long been thought to be difficult to improve on—are indistinguishable from those of typically developing adults. They are also functioning well in daily life, holding down part-time jobs while attending college. The researchers fittingly refer to this group as having a “very positive outcome.” A more sizable group is considered “more able” than the remaining adults in the sample—they have no cognitive impairment and are generally doing well academically, although they still have clear autism symptoms. A paper presenting these results is currently under consideration at a peer-reviewed journal."

There has been another study published in 2014 that had similar findings to the NIMH study called

Characteristics of Children Who Lost the Diagnosis of Autism: A Sample from Istanbul, Turkey. 

 This study found that "It could be concluded that a group of children with an autism diagnosis could lose the diagnosis of autism upon early intervention. High IQ and the development of communicative and language skills at an early age could be the most powerful factors contributing to an optimal outcome."

The View From Recovery Land

This post has been in the works for quite a while.  I have anticipated writing it for so long, and there is just so much to say that it's hard to know where to begin.  For a long time, as Roo inched closer to being recovered from autism, I would tell people that recovery was a process...a big grey area, not a finish line.  Then, one week in February, things felt different and I realized that we had crossed a finish line.  He was there.  My whole body took a deep breath and I had the image of myself laying face down on the ground out of both relief and sheer exhaustion.  I announced that I would be on staycation for the rest of the year.

I had spent pretty much every moment, every bit of energy on solving this thing.  I had been fighting constantly trying to beat the clock.  So that day in February I took a walk around the neighborhood, and looked at people's gardens.  Because I could.  It was warm and the sun was out.  I saw people approaching on the sidewalk and for a moment I had the urge to share the amazing news.  MY CHILD HAS RECOVERED FROM AUTISM.  Not long before, I had been washing my hands in a public bathroom when a very elderly lady with a huge smile approached me and told me that her granddaughter had just given birth to quadruplets.  Her joy was beautiful to see, and I was happy for her blessing.  I realized in that moment on the sidewalk that my joy was not one that the world around me was ready to share.  It is too politically loaded and inconvenient. 

Recovery means many things, but it is not the end of the isolation.  We now pass for a "normal" family, whatever that is, but we are not.  And we never will be.  We have been to hell and back.  The "and back" part means that we don't really fit in in the autism community quite the way we did before.  It's an odd feeling to feel that we no longer fit in with the outcasts that autism parents are, and to mourn that.  I remember my last night at the autism parent support group that I had attended for several years, a place where I had finally felt so understood, but on that last night I knew I no longer belonged there.  My joys and sorrows were no longer understood there.  I felt so lonely when I joined the "autism club" so I was shocked at how much more lonely it felt to leave it.

If there is one thing I learned from the autism journey, it's how to strike out into the uncharted wilderness and find my own way without any trail or guidebook.  I would just do it again.  I did what any self-respecting autism mom would do, and started a support group, but this time for families of recovered kids.  There are many of us and the wilderness became less lonely.  We are a group who have worked harder than we ever thought possible, because the only thing harder than healing autism is not healing autism.  We know how lucky we are, we know that many families will never get here no matter what they do.  We have known the horror of watching our babies slip away, and been humbled by the joy of seeing them return.

Every day is an emotional rollercoaster.  I take nothing for granted, I still stop in my tracks when I hear Roo using pronouns correctly, asking "wh" questions, when he chooses to draw a picture or eat something new.  Every success no matter how small is a monumental victory and I relish it.  When he is playing with a friend, sometimes I just stand and listen.  Sometimes I find myself wondering if maybe the autism never happened at all.  Maybe it was all just a terrible dream.  I look at how wonderful things are in that moment and I can't imagine that they were ever so bad.  And then, just as quickly, a memory is triggered and I know how bad it was.  I can't breath or talk and I fight to not cry.  I know it was real and that there is a pain inside me that will always be with me, that time will never mend.  The days are filled with wonder and beauty but they are also minefields. 

Autism (and my ME/CFS, from which I am now also mostly recovered) means that we can't afford to keep our house.  Losing a house is almost a right of passage for autism families.  I suppose it's a fitting end to this journey.  Roo regressed within months of us moving into this house, so now it is time to move on.  It's time for us to focus on another kind of healing in which we go back out into the world and have adventures and fun just because we can.  As much as events in the day feel like an emotional minefield, our neighborhood is also one.  When I sit on the bench at our neighborhood park, I am taken back in time to that fall day when Roo's inconsolable toddler meltdown signaled the beginning of a long hard journey that he and I did NOT sign up for.  I am haunted by these memories and welcome the chance to move away and leave them behind.  It's a sad fact that I would rather forget most of his childhood up until now.  I also intend to make the most of what childhood he has left.  That will be the ultimate victory.

Redefining the Role of the Patient

One of the themes that is shared between my family's experience of ME/CFS and our experience of autism is a need to change the way that we have related to the medical system in the past in order to find and receive meaningful help.  When I was much younger, I used medical care the way that most people still do today- I saw the doctor as the expert and I would go to them when I thought I had a problem to see if I actually did and to find out what to do about it.  They had special training and charged a very significant amount of money on the basis that their input was very valuable and could not be found elsewhere.  This made sense to me, so I would dutifully follow whatever advice I was given.  I didn't think to question it or do my own research because how could I, someone with no medical training, ever understand what they were talking about?  Later I would discover the discipline of Medical Anthropology (and even later, that of Medical Sociology) and come to see my earlier beliefs in an entirely different light.

When we took Roo in to begin the evaluation process when he was 3 it became clear to me very quickly that these people did not have the information that we needed.  They were engaged in an elaborate semantic exercise regarding exactly what to call "what he has" without focusing on the realities of those symptoms.  I saw right through the diagnosis dance that all the show was a smoke screen for the fact that they really had no idea what had actually happened to my child and what exactly needed to be done to help him.  They ended up recommending Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy, which is what they would have done pretty much regardless of the diagnosis.  Seeing as he had intense sensory processing difficulties and no language at all at this time this hardly seemed like rocket science.

Once the facade of expertise was cracked it fell away pretty quickly.  They couldn't tel me *why* my child had such disordered sensory processing capabilities or *why* he had no language.  He did not have these issues in his first year before he regressed, so why did he have them now?  WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?  Before we even had him evaluated, our family doctor had suggested that he may have food allergies.  She had no suggestion of what they might be and we did not want to subject Roo to painful testing if not necessary.  We put him on the gluten-free, casein-free diet honestly as a wild guess and within one week he had said 30 words and his regression had halted.  Once we began the speech and OT these therapies had an almost imperceptible benefit if they had any at all.  So, from the very beginning, it was clear that if we were going to find things that were going to really help Roo we would need to take an active role in seeking those things out ourselves.  The experts did not have the answers.

This experience has been mirrored in my own health.  While the experts debate whether or not CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) is real, or simply the delusional claims of mentally ill patients, I've done my own research into what my symptoms may mean and what I can do to address them.  What I've found in both this context and in the case of autism is that other affected people are generally the best source of information because we are the most motivated to move beyond the stifling political overtones of these disorders and get to the point where real, open-minded research can lead to real results.  Affected people and their families *know* that these disorders are real and get no benefit from the endless repetition of tired dogma.  What is especially ironic about this is that all it takes is asking the question "what could these symptoms mean if we view the body as a biological entity?".  It has taken me a long time to realize that in the context of conventional medicine this is actually a revolutionary concept. 

I was excited when I found this TED talk about just this subject- redefining the role of patients in their own treatment.  The speaker says that patients are the most under-utilized resource in health care today and ends with the mantra "let patients help!".  I would go one step further and say it's not patients who should be allowed to help doctors, but rather doctors who should help patients. 

Recovery from Autism Spectrum Disorders

The extreme irony of the fact that I have a child on the spectrum (formerly on the spectrum?) is that I worked with children with autism before having my own kids.  That was during the 90s, and back then I often had to explain that no, I don't work with "ARTistic children", I work with "AUTistic children", followed by a brief description of the rare disorder that few people had direct experience with let alone even heard of.  Back then, very few people said "oh, my sister's kid has that" or "my neighbor's kid is autistic too" or "last year there were two autistic kids in my kid's class".  Times sure have changed.  Now it seems that nearly everyone I know or meet has someone with autism in their immediate circle of family and friends.

My experience working with kids with autism has actually not been of much use in helping Roo, as I was an ABA program director, and have never felt that ABA was appropriate for him.  I still think it is an excellent option in many cases, just not for my son.  That is another post.  However, the real gift that my former career brought to us is that I knew recovery was possible.  I knew that most kids with autism would see significant improvement in their quality of life from appropriate and timely intervention, and that some would achieve a level of functioning that would make them indistinguishable from their non-autistic peers in every way.  What I didn't know when I started this journey with Roo was the means by which he would experience such remarkable progress.  

Please see the post Studies that Validate the Possibility of Recovery From Autism for more information.

Below is a list of first-hand accounts of recovery from Autism:

Is Recovery From Autism Possible?  This is a recording of a presentation that was given at the 2018 AutismOne conference by Marcia Hinds, the mother of a recovered child named Ryan.  She tells her family's story of autism from getting the diagnosis, through the many steps and twists and turns that the treatment process turned out to be, up to his recovery and present life as an aerospace engineer. 

Kaylee's Recovery Story

This is a local news piece about the recovery of Lori Knowles' son Daniel-


This is an interview of a mom, Leann Whiffen, whose son recovered.  She talks about autism being a multi-system disorder that affects the GI tract, the neurological system, and the immune system.  They did both ABA and biomedical with the help of Dr Jepson, a leading DAN! doctor.  She talks about the dilemma of wanting to try whatever her son might need to help him, but at the same time being cautious and carefully researching the options.



This is a video of Leann's son Clay that shows just how far he has come:



 This next video documents the recovery of Stan Kurtz' son Ethan.  For some reason Ethan's recovery story really captivated me, even though he was so different than Roo, which seemed to foreshadow Roo's major leap forward when given the same anti-viral drug, Valtrex.  Stan Kurtz is now the director of Generation Rescue and one of my personal heroes.



 Baxter's recovery from autism:



This is a short documentary that gives more details about Baxter's story:



This is a short film called "Finding the Words" about recovery from autism.  At one point, Dr Martha Herbert, a pediatric neurologist at Harvard Medical School says of the paradigm shift from "autism is a genetic brain disorder" to "autism is a whole body, medical disorder" that it is going from "seeing what you believe to believing what you see".  This is actually the short version of a longer film.



 Joe Mohs, who recovered from autism with ABA therapy, shares his story and experiences through the site joe'slivingproof.com .  Here is Joe talking about his story...



Stan Kurtz, the father of a recovered child, set up this site to share stories of recovery from autism.

Our Journey with Autism is from a family's sweet blog.

Amanda's Journey

Daniel's Recovery From Autism (this is a webinar that will happen in August of 2014)

Hidden Recovery (a blog by a the mom of a recovered child)

Raun Kaufman is the CEO of the Autism Treatment Center of America (providers of the Son-Rise Program), and is himself recovered from autism.  I had the opportunity to hear him speak several years back, and it was amazing.  I had heard many people dismiss his story of recovery, saying that he was clearly still autistic.  I saw nothing like that at all.  Hearing him speak was deeply inspiring to me.

Autism in not Forever: Bill and Jo Krueger and their daughter Chanel.

Stories of recovery from the Dana's View site

Meet Simon- Fully Recovered From Autism is an interview with a man who has recovered, talking about the experience. 

My Bad Ass Autism Survivor Story by Julia Berle, who is the mother of a recovered child, provides some insight into the gray areas around recovery, including the idea that recovery itself may also be a spectrum.

Autism Yesterday is a short documentary about several kids who have recovered from Autism.

Reversing Autism is a short film introducing the biomed approach but includes discussion of recovery and recovered kids.

There is a TED talk that was given by a father and his daughter about how poetry helped her recovery from autism, but I can no longer find the link.