Total Load Theory: The Hidden Causes Behind Autism, ADHD & Child Development Challenges with Patricia Lemer

SHOW NOTES

🌐 Website:  https://patricialemer.com

📘 Books:
            ✦ Outsmarting Autism
            ✦ Encyclopedia of Autism
            ✦ Total Load Theory 

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  Featured topics include autism prevalence, total load theory, environmental toxins, vision therapy, reflex integration, lifestyle interventions, and vaccination myths.

00:00–02:00 — Introduction to toxic load & autism discussion

02:00–05:00 — Autism rising: prevalence & misdiagnosis myths

05:00–09:00 — Physiological causes & environmental stressors

09:00–15:00 — Technology, screen time & lifestyle changes

15:00–22:00 — Food quality, chemicals & glyphosate

22:00–30:00 — Behavioral optometry, eyesight vs vision

30:00–39:00 — Sleep, ADHD misdiagnosis, school readiness

39:00–47:00 — Vision therapy in-depth

47:00–55:00 — EMFs, toxins & environmental impacts

55:00–01:05:00 — Hope & recovery stories

01:05:00–01:15:00 — Vaccination myths & research

01:15:00–01:20:00 — Practical lifestyle advice & closing

Total Load Theory: The Hidden Causes Behind Autism, ADHD & Child Development Challenges with Patricia Lemer

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:05)

Hello and welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. My name is Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Well, today we are talking about toxic load and what happens to individuals, in particular children, when toxic load is exceeded. Really, we could be talking about any one of us, and we could be talking about any particular disease. This is, as my podcast and my book talk about, also is a question of balance. Identify and minimize as many of those stressors or toxic loads possible and build resilience. 

Well, my guest today is Patricia Lemer. Now, Patricia is a licensed professional counselor. She’s an educational diagnostician and co-founder of Developmental Delay Resources. Now, for over 40 years, Patty has been at the forefront of understanding and supporting children with developmental and learning challenges through an integrative and whole body lens. And that term lens is interesting because I’ve learned so much in this episode today. 

I’m going to share with you a quick spoiler alert about behavioral optometry, something I have known nothing about, but we cover in this episode. And we also cover reflex integration therapy. There is so much we cover. Now her book, she’s written, as I said, Outsmarting Autism and her newest book, Total Load Theory, the Missing Piece in Health and Healing.

Today we’ll explore the growing prevalence of autism, a shocking statistic really, and developmental delays with what’s driving this epidemic. Kids are the canaries in the coal mines. So whether you have a child or not, I think you want to be listening to this episode and how Patricia’s total load framework helps families find hope and healing. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Patricia Lema. Welcome to the show, Patty.

Patricia Lemer (01:59)

Thank you.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (02:02)

Patty, we’re talking about autism and neurodevelopmental issues and they seem to be increasing at alarming rates and I know you’ve been in this for many decades. How big are these neurodevelopmental problems and what do you think is driving the rise?

Patricia Lemer (01:59)

Well, it depends on whose statistics you listen to. But I can tell you just about every time I tell somebody what I do, they say, I have a what a cousin, a nephew, a next door neighbor who has autism. So latest estimates are about one in 30.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (02:44)

1 in 30, I mean you are based Patty in the state in America and that is the epicenter of neurodevelopmental problems. But one in 30 is quite a staggering. How has that changed over the years? If we go back 20 or 30 years, know, what was the

Right.

Patricia Lemer (03:10)

One in 10,000. And then one in 2000, 3000. And every year when the statistics come out, we get much higher incidence. And people say, oh, we’re much better at diagnosing it. That’s why. And it’s not true. I’ve been in this field forever. And then they say, well, we missed a lot of people. They didn’t diagnose more and more people are coming out and saying, I’m autistic. I’ve always been autistic. But that’s not the kind of autism that we saw on normal kids who regressed, who stopped talking, who stopped relating altogether. And that’s the autism that I know. And if you have a PhD and are a little quirky and you want to say you have autism, okay, but. That’s not who I would love to talk about with you today.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (04:18)

Okay, yeah so that is an important one because that is the reaction. Oh we’re good at diagnosing and I’ve even got autism too, you’re right. How do we describe the autism, you’ve just briefly mentioned it, but describe the autism that you’re referring to that comes into this 1 in 30 number.

Patricia Lemer (04:36)

These are people who probably won’t be able to be fully independent. These are people who have language issues, serious sensory processing problems, problems with communication, both verbal and nonverbal communication and socialization. But what I have gotten very interested in and passionate about are the underlying medical issues that are concurrent with these behavioral and psychological issues. finally, we are getting people to understand that people are autistic because they have physiological problems.

Not that they have physiological problems like digestion because they have autism. The thinking has been backwards for many, many years. And we know that when we address these foundational physiological problems that some of the developmental and psychological and behavioral and learning problems disappear.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (05:57)

Wow. So these underlying medical problems which predispose people to the manifestations of autism, I mean this is to the point of what’s driving this rise. What are some of those underlying medical problems?

Patricia Lemer (04:36)

Well, the world has changed. You and I have watched it change. I’m gonna be 80 years old next year. And I’m proud to say that because when I was in school in the 60s and when I went to work in the 70s, we weren’t talking autism. We were talking learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, and maybe some mild anxiety and depression, but not to any degree like we’re seeing today. And my book that is coming out soon will, includes not only autism, it’s my fourth book and my three previous books were focused just on autism. But I realized that the same underlying foundational problems that we’re talking about with digestion, with metabolism, with nervous system dysfunction, sensory processing are in this other disorders to a lesser degree. So I bit the bullet and I took it all in and said, let’s talk about them all. Let’s put an umbrella over all of these disorders and talk about them in one giant breath.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (07:47)

Yes. Well, know, similarly, congratulations because, know, I think that is… I would celebrate that. I always get annoyed when I hear people talk about getting older because I think as far as I know, it’s still the best alternative, you know, and for you here to be publishing your fourth book at the age of 80. I get the sense you’re just getting into your stride now and you’re just getting good at what you’re doing. So this is why I was so looking forward to talking to you. And the book’s title, Total Load Theory, gives a little bit of a hint as to what we are talking about. Can you explain what that means? Can you break those loads down for us?

Patricia Lemer (08:30)

So, total load theory is an engineering term that I borrowed and it describes why a bridge collapses. Engineers look at this bridge and the 18-wheeler went over the bridge and it collapsed. Do you blame the truck driver who overloaded his truck? Well, he was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And prior to that, there were umpti ump other 18-wheelers that stressed the bridge. There was weather that stressed the bridge. There were boats that hit the moorings of the bridge and stressed the bridge. So, as you have written about, stressors add up. And when that bridge collapses, it’s the total load of all of those stressors that made it collapse.

And the body’s like a bridge. It has a threshold. And as each of these individual stressors add up and it goes over the body’s personal threshold, all of a sudden you get symptoms and then you get a diagnosis. So what’s changed in our lifetime? Everything. We’ve…

I remember when we got our first television and prior to watching television, we actually played outside until the streetlights came on. And we know the history from television to computers to handheld computers that you can even put in your person in your pocket. I remember the computer that took up the entire room in my freshman year of college. So we have technologically changed enormously and everybody knows that. But today’s kids laugh when you say something like, well, my first computer took up a whole room.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (10:44)

Yeah, yeah.

Patricia Lemer (10:45)

Our childhood has changed. Children are not getting home cooked meals. They’re not getting enough sleep. They’re not moving and getting enough exercise. And all of these are food for the nervous system, for the body, for the brain that today’s children are lacking. And so these symptoms tell us that something’s off. And we’ve got to both take away some of these factors and add in factors that are missing, whether it’s nutrients that we have to add in and take away some of those junk foods, or whether it’s screen time that we need to take away and put in more exercise.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (11:47)

Yeah. gee, now Patty, we have opened a can of worms here because I know we are talking about autism and neurodevelopmental problems but in fact, we could be talking about any disease that we or any of the many chronic preventable keyword there, preventable, chronic degenerative diseases like heart disease, cancer, autoimmune and neurodevelopmental problems. This is, this is the model that I know I’ve used for over 40 years clinically and clearly you you’ll approach this as well. I think it’s so interesting isn’t it talking about technology because on the one hand we have demonized the sun like we have to be so careful about this thing that literally gives the world life but apparently all of these devices and all of these computers and technology that we’re surrounded with, no problem at all. No problem at all.

Patricia Lemer (12:53)

I wish, I wish. And none of us can live without them today. No. They are our foundation for communication. You’re not allowed to call anybody anymore because you’re interrupting them. So you text them or you send them an email, which then nobody reads anymore. It’s just text. So we all have to use this technology and understand the backside of using it too much and inappropriately and especially for developing brains. And you bring in the diseases of adults like heart disease and chronic illness. But what I’ve focused on a lot is how this applies to what we’ve previously called mental illness. And the mind and the body have a connection. And to think about anxiety and depression and obsessive behaviors without thinking about what’s going on in the body is ludicrous. We have to think about how well fed that body is and whether the food comes on a plate or through the atmosphere unseen, as it does with our technology, we have to think about the good and the bad of those potentially nurturing foods.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (14:30)

Now, know, I mean the key factors I suppose we could look at are the physical aspects, emotional aspects and environmental aspects of this load. Let’s break down some of them now for our listeners and let’s start perhaps with some of those. You mentioned food and physical, you know, let’s talk about that.

Patricia Lemer (14:57)

So the physical ones are things that I talk about in a chapter on lifestyle. And in my first two books, I didn’t write about lifestyle. And I realized that people were going out and getting expensive therapies while they were drinking Cokes and eating Twinkies. And we have to think about what choices are we making daily? Are we eating real food?

Or are we microwaving boxed and prepared and frozen foods? So we want to look at the quality of the food and we could spend hours on this subject alone. But we also have to look at our products that we buy for cleaning. What are we washing our clothes in? What are we washing our dishes in? These little tabs that we’re now putting in our dishwasher, we’re finding, putting a nice layer of plastic all over our plates and silverware. Not so good, because then we eat it. And what is in, what are the chemicals that are in our cleaning products, in our body products, our shampoos, our lotions?

All of them have unpronounceable six syllable names to them, which are in my book. you can also use vinegar and water to wash a lot of things very successfully.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (16:44)

Yeah. I mean, I think the problem is and I think the vast majority of people assume that if something is on the supermarket shelf, if I’m buying it for my laundry or my personal care product or it’s a food for consumption by me, it’s been tested. And that is just a letter. That’s just people you and I who have been following this story for many, many years are aware of the fact that that simply is not true but for the vast majority of people particularly when they go in and ask their doctor, their expert doctor, what do you think? well there’s no problem with that, stay out of the sun, stay out of the sun that’s dangerous but the products up and down the middle aisles of the supermarket, look that’s not too bad, it’s not too bad.

Patricia Lemer (17:38)

Well, I think you in the UK and in Europe have more banned chemical products than we do. And I know that in Europe and some other countries that glyphosate, which is an herbicide used to grow food is banned. And so a lot of people in the United States who think they have problems with gluten, which is the protein and grain and, find that they can eat wheat products when they go abroad. And that’s because it doesn’t have glyphosate in it, which is wreaking havoc with our guts in the United States. don’t know that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (18:30)

Well, you know, know, I’m based in Australia, by the way, and I agree with you that that Europe and now that, thank goodness, UK has extricated itself from those horrible European standards, which say the precautionary principle, you know, you need to be sure it’s safe. That’s part of what Brexit was all about to get out of that kind of regulation. Australia is more aligned not as bad as but very closely aligned with America. So we still are great exponents of glyphosate. It’s a very big part of our agricultural story.

Patricia Lemer (19:02)

Really? I wasn’t aware of that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (19:05)

Yeah but Europe you’re right. Europe exercises the precautionary principle which says manufacturers have to prove that it’s safe.

Patricia Lemer (19:13)

Well, that’s not true in the U.S. Money talks.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (19:19)

Money talks, money talks. It’s so interesting also to you talked about Twinkies and Coca-Cola and all of that. In Boston, the Tufts University have just brought out the food compass. And if you wanting some shocking evidence-based medicine, the Tufts University food compass would shock you, I think. Are you aware of that, Patty?

Patricia Lemer (19:45)

I haven’t seen it, no, but I did an internship at Tufts and my daughter went to Tufts. So we have a close relationship with that university.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (19:56)

Okay, your background is, I didn’t even ask, but tell us a little bit about your background that’s got you into this point. What’s your…

Patricia Lemer (20:05)

Well, I studied undergrad a major of psychology and mathematics. So I did testing. I did diagnostic testing and I knew that I wanted to be a detective. I wanted to look at the why of what was going on with people. And I did that for a lot of years, maybe 35, 40 years. Unfortunately, I was given the wrong tests.

I was giving IQ tests and achievement tests that only told you the outcome. It didn’t tell you the why, but I developed a system that combined with a history taking questionnaire and spending a lot of time asking questions that I could look at those outcomes and say, hmm.

Is your child drinking a lot of milk or have you had a leak in your roof? Maybe you have a mold problem in your house. Or have you had your child’s eyes examined beyond the clarity of eyesight? Have you looked at the relationship between the eyes and the brain, which we call vision? And these people looked at me like, well, who should I go to?

And I developed a real beautiful network of experts in each one of these fields who I could send them to and be the case manager and ask them, what have you done in the last year? And they would come back and show me their child’s progress based on the interventions that they had pursued.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (21:58)

Hmm. I love this detective story because one of my mentors was a doctor in America called Dr. Janet Travell. when I know. Do you know her? I did too. She was she was President Kennedy and President Johnson’s doctor in the White House. And I attended a one week program with her in 1989 when she was 92 years old.

I was lucky and she said something to me that week was more like Zen and the art of medicine or healthcare than any course I’d ever attended and she said to me as we were driving to and from her course because anyway I got to know her and she said Ron if you ask your patient the right questions they’ll not only tell you the answer but they’ll tell you how to fix it.

You know, they’ll not only give you the answer, but they’ll tell you how to fix it if you know which questions to ask and understand what they’re telling you.

Patricia Lemer (23:03)

I’ll never forget the little boy who I asked, he was about eight, and I said, do you ever see two of something? Do you ever see double? He says, you have two heads. And his mother nearly jumped out of her chair.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (23:23)

How old was the boy when he said that again? Okay.

Patricia Lemer (23:24)

Eight or nine and she said you never told me you see double and he said you never ask.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (23:33)

Wow, yes. See that’s a big topic because I have a grandson who’s seven years old and really I believe his vision is really affecting him in a way that we’re still trying to work out. Talk to us a little bit about that aspect of it. I’m intrigued.

Patricia Lemer (23:49)

You’ve hit on one of my favorite subjects. As I got into this diagnostic work, I saw so many kids that had vision problems. And I was very lucky. I was living in Washington, DC, where a lot of some of the pioneers of behavioral optometry lived. And I discovered behavioral optometry was a special branch of eye science that looked at function by looking at physiology. And they had put together an amazing number of very clever tests that could tell whether the two eyes were working together as a team or whether I was looking at you with one eye. You can’t tell which eye I’m using and what my brain is doing with the information that is coming in.

So sometimes the information comes in like this and the brain is going, what, what am I supposed to do with that? And what it’s supposed to do is come in like this where the two eyes are sending the brain the same signal at the same time. So it can make an efficient decision on what to do with that information and how to store it.

And behavioral optometry changed the whole way that I practice. And if your grandson is in Australia too, we can help find him somebody to evaluate not simply his visual acuity, but how his two eyes work together and in concert with the brain. And the best part of it is that you can do something about it. And just like you can learn to read and learn to run and learn how to skip, you can learn how to use your eyes together with an intervention called vision therapy. And vision therapy is a non-medical model approach. And so of course, if you are well-educated, would have your child’s eyes tested by an ophthalmologist because they’re the real eye doctor, but they will tell you he sees fine. He doesn’t have glaucoma. He doesn’t have a detached retina. And if he’s having trouble focusing or interpreting what he sees, that’s talk to the school. And the school doesn’t know what to do about it because they’re looking at the end product, at reading and writing, and they don’t know what to do. So they tutor him. And if he hasn’t learned how to read, are right, more reading and writing tutoring isn’t going to make it happen. So you have to fix the underlying problem.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (26:55)

Now, is is another word for this dyslexia?

Patricia Lemer (27:01)

Great question. Dyslexia names the symptom. Just like bipolar disorder names the symptom. Obsessive compulsive disorder names the symptom. Dyslexia means you can’t read.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (27:18)

Yes, okay. Yes, and I noticed you inserted that word non-medical because when the kid can’t read and is getting restless in class because he can’t read, then the medical intervention is, he’s very disruptive. He has trouble attending attention deficit disorder. Go on, tell us. Yes, which is perfect. I mean, it’s

Patricia Lemer (27:38)

And answer the why question.

there’s another-

we can medicate him.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (27:42)

Perfect medical model, it’s the medical model, which as I’ve often said on my podcast, Patty, is a great financial model. It’s a great business model. It’s just not a very good health model. And that goes a long way to describing our healthcare system. But here we are talking about children’s behavior in general. And I mean, this is different from our initial autism discussion because this is this is a long way down the track where they get to the point where they can’t function in a normal way. But this is a little lesser, isn’t it? This is on their way to being diagnosed with ADHD. They could well have visual impairment.

Patricia Lemer (28:26)

And I actually wrote a brochure that the Optometric Extension Program Foundation published called Attention Deficits, a Developmental Approach. I wrote that 20 years ago. And it takes the DSM definition of attention deficit disorder and it lists all those symptoms. And then I have four columns of what it could be the cause of those symptoms. So a developmental vision problem, a sensory integration problem, food allergies. 

And then the fourth one is a typical kid under seven, because another one of those stressors is that schools are making developmentally inappropriate demands on the students. To sit still and pay attention in kindergarten is abuse. It’s torture. Those little bodies need to move. And little bodies develop at different rates. So you might have a seven-year-old in first grade whose body still isn’t ready to sit still and pay attention.

And to ask him to do that and to ask his eyes to be able to move from the page and move across the page and move from the teacher’s face to the page isn’t physically possible for him yet. And so those unreasonable demands are part of the stressors on this poor little kindergartner.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (30:17)

I would add another one there and that is the sleep routine that we put out. Yeah, yeah. Go on.

Patricia Lemer (30:19)

Absolutely. I’m glad you brought that up. They’re not getting enough sleep. They’re going to bed too late because two parents work and they want to see their kids and maybe even have dinner together. Imagine that. then the school bus comes sometimes when it’s still dark out and they’re not getting their eight to 10 hours of necessary sleep. And what happens during that sleep?

Time is so important to developing brains. It is the time when the body takes out the garbage, the cells heal, you make poop so that the child can defecate and get rid of the toxins, that he is breathed or eaten and all of that has to take place during darkened uninterrupted by screen time for at least eight hours for developing brains.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (31:32)

Yes, you are describing what I believe is what is referred to as the glymphatic system which only kicks in if you get into the deeper levels of sleep. it’s even you know there’s a whole story there. The interesting one is I think there was a study done in Minnesota about starting school an hour later and the results revealed very surprisingly that they actually improved life expectancy among children because the biggest killer in children is suicide and you know when you’re not sleeping well depression hyperactivity mental disorders are all diagnosed so starting school an hour later had a dramatic impact.

Patricia Lemer (32:20)

That’s, I’m not surprised at all. Another study with extending sleep time was they took a group of kids with ADHD and they increased their sleep and found that they no longer qualified as having ADHD.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (31:41)

We actually have done a program with respiratory pediatrician, Dr. Jim Papadopoulos, who shared a statistic which said half the children diagnosed with ADHD have an undiagnosed sleep-disordered breathing condition.

Patricia Lemer (32:57)

I’m not surprised. Not surprised. And in my book, can I show my book?

Dr Ron Ehrlich (33:05)

Yes, please do. We’ll have links to it of course, total load theory. Yes, Yep, can see it very clearly, don’t worry. All coming through loud and clear and you don’t have to worry, Patty will have links to it afterwards. I’m still coming back to you, I’m intrigued for a very selfish reasons about this behavioral optometry and because so many parents, I’m not just talking about my seven-year-old grandchild but I can see that so many parents would have kids that might be a little quite a bit older than that, that has gone undiagnosed, unnoticed.

Patricia Lema (33:47)

Absolutely. And when you think about trying to get through life where your brain is not getting efficient information from your eyes, how anxiety producing that can be. if you don’t have the two eyes working together, you don’t have depth perception. And so even something as simple as going downstairs can be anxiety producing. And so.

The organization that you want to talk to is COVD. It’s like COVID, but it’s just four letters. And they changed the name of it after COVID. But the website is covd.org. And if you go into covd.org, you can put your country and your address.

And it will give you people, can tell it how many miles away you’re willing to go. So you can find somebody close by who can do an evaluation and determine whether this is a load factor for a particular child. And then as we said, work with the family to remediate it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (35:01)

Is that done via exercise or by a proper set of glasses or a combination of the two?

Patricia Lemer (35:07)

Great, great question. So there are a lot of tools of vision therapy. And in my book, I describe the Piaget developmental cycle moving from motor to motor visual to visual motor to vision alone. And that’s the way our body develops expertise. So babies are just motor.

So if somebody is at a very low level, you do motor movement and your eyes go along with the body when you move. But the motor is the boss of the body. motor and motor visual, there’s this great wall of China where vision then clicks in and says, I’m going to direct your body.

I’m gonna be the boss of your body. And it’s a difference between a child, a toddler aimlessly walking into a room and ending up at the block table and saying, I love blocks. And the child who walks to the door of the room takes visual inventory, there are the blocks and purposefully,

goes to the block table. You know those two kids, right? And one is developmentally at a lower level than the other. And then the final step is where the child is at home. And he says, mommy, when I go to school, I’m going to play blocks. I’m going to build a huge castle. And I’m going to go to that block table right away.

He can see it in his mind’s eye. And that’s what allows you to think and conceptualize and organize and make meaning of words. You can see your grandson and thinking about, is he motor visual or is he visual motor? And what we want him to be is visual motor where the vision drives the motor and then automatic in the visual where he can automatically when he’s 16 drive home from school without his GPS and kids today can’t get anywhere without a GPS they have no idea how to get around because they didn’t do it with purpose it’s a it’s one of my favorite subjects

And when I write about the senses, I write that vision must become your dominant sense. You must be able to visualize to be an efficient learner, to read with comprehension, to write that essay that your teacher asks you to write in third grade. What did you do over the summer? Write me an essay. How do you do that?

You taste it, you smell it, you feel the sand, you know what it was like to swim in the ocean, and you can make words that describe that. That’s a very high-level concept that requires a good solid foundation. So I gave Vision its own chapter in my book because it’s so misunderstood. And in English, we…

Use eyesight and vision synonymously. And we even talk about school vision exams when they really aren’t vision exams at all. They’re eyesight tests. B2020. La de da. Does that help them read? No. Does it help them read with comprehension? No. Because you have to have vision to be able to do those things.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (39:23)

Wow. wow, Patty, that’s just, well, thank you. Thank you.

Patricia Lemer (39:31)

I’ve given this talk on vision many, many times and I have on my website, patricialemer.com, I have several videos of the vision talk. How are vision and eyesight different? What is a good vision exam look like? How can we remediate vision? What is vision therapy? Is it ever too late? No.

This is a missing link in our developmental disorders, especially autism and attention deficit disorder and anxiety.

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Dr Ron Ehrlich (41:22)

I think that is just look that’s something we have not covered on this podcast before and Chiwiz as a personal thank you I appreciate it but I’ve from so many people listening to this they must be thinking I’ve never even thought of that I never even had it put like that motor motor visual visual motor visual that’s how we should that’s what we’re aiming for.

Patricia Lemer (41:52)

Where you can organize and conceptualize without moving. Because your brain, it’s all up there, it’s stored and it’s in little compartments. What’s her name? You know, people who say, I don’t ever remember anybody’s name. That’s a sign of a vision issue because you didn’t align when you were introduced or that person said, hello, that’s blonde hair and green glasses and, whatever the person looks like, you didn’t hook it with a name.

I’m real good at names. I remember names. I can even tell you what his test results looked like 40 years before. And parents say to me, how do you remember me? Because I have good vision and I have terrible eyesight.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (42:43)

Interesting. Okay, that’s an interesting statement worth unpacking. You have good vision, but you have terrible eyesight.

Patricia Lemer (42:50)

Right, but it’s I have corrected eyesight. My acuity, how clear it is. Without my glasses, it’s not clear. But the medical model knows how to correct your eyesight. But they haven’t bought into how to correct your vision.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (43:10)

I thought and vision the difference. So interesting. interesting. Listen, coming back to this autism ADHD anxiety, is this a, do you see this as a continuum like, know, badly exposed, know, not too badly exposed. might just be a bit anxious, really badly exposed total load. You’re to be ADHD really badly exposed. It’s going to manifest itself as autism. Is this part of the continuum?

Patricia Lemer (43:33)

It is, but it’s not linear. And you know, that’s it’s kind of circular. It’s not, you know, if you have one exposure, it’s this and then at three to five, it’s that and five to seven, it’s that. There’s a lot of factors and the timing of the exposure and the resolution of the exposure is very important. And that’s true of the remediation as well. And I often encounter people who’ve done all the right things to help their kids, but in the wrong order. And so if you’re trying to teach reading to somebody who’s had mold exposure and who’s got faulty digestion, his body is turning inward. His body is saying, I don’t have the energy to listen to you and to try to learn how to read right now because my body’s still trying to digest my lunch and trying to deal with those spores from the mold that are popping in my lungs and I’m having trouble breathing. So those things take priority. And I often have teachers say, roll their eyes at me and say, this is too complicated. I can’t deal with this.

I’m not a science major, but fine. Find somebody who is and at least make the referral and rule out what’s going on physiologically. There’s so many things going on right now. As you say, the world, we’re living in a toxic world and the toxins from our products, the toxins in the air indoors is worse than the toxins outdoors.

I grew up in a dirty city, a steel city, Pittsburgh, where we could write our name on our car with our finger in the dust. And it’s worse today than it was then because you can’t see the dust. It’s these little particles that were breathing. And then we have the electromagnetic fields from the 5G towers that are springing up everywhere. And these are agitating our nervous system too and the nervous systems of the growing brain. And if you’re sleeping with your cell phone under your pillow, like many of our teenagers are, and you have a computer and a TV in your bedroom, and you haven’t turned off your Wi-Fi at night, your brain is getting zapped all night, all day.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (46:27)

Yeah, it’s interesting that aspect of it, isn’t it? Because we are walking electricity. a human body, a human body is walking electricity. Mean nerves, obviously, but every cell is electrical in its exchange of nutrients and ions, etc. And it’s functioning at tiny, tiny, tiny currents, but it’s enough to give us human life.

And yet these radiations that we’re exposing ourselves to are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of times higher than what drives our body but we dismiss it as irrelevant it’s just not even a f***. Yeah.

Patricia Lemer (47:09)

Because we can’t see it. But it’s doing a lot, a lot of damage. And if we have mold or we have infections like Lyme or Strep, those bugs don’t like those radiation rays either, and they get agitated and they put off toxin.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (47:30)

Yeah, yeah. Wow. It is. Look, it’s complicated. I think there is a good news story here, though, and that is with knowledge comes power. And I know that when we talk to Professor Mark Cohen, who I’m going to re-release the episode, he did a thing on 10 toxic truths about technology, about environmental toxins. And, you know, it was very, very depressing.

It’s very complicated. But the good news was that if you made informed decisions, you could reduce your toxic load significantly by 70, 80 or 90 percent.

Patricia Lemer (48:08)

That’s the only reason I wrote the book. Yeah. Because it gives you solutions and it gives you solutions in the right order. You’ve got to the body has got to feel safe. And if the body has been agitated at a young age, if there’s been trauma, if there’s been abuse, if there’s been neglect, any of those things are going to carry through and affect later learning and behavior. And so there’s a whole chapter on getting to safety, getting that body to feel safe. You mentioned the lymph system, but the vagus nerve and the whole nervous system has to get regulated to some degree before any of these therapies are workable.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (49:06)

Now, Patty, you mentioned that you used to measure IQ, you know, when you started out and you were very big on that and people would be familiar with EQ, emotional quotient, but I have this thing called HQ which is your health quotient and the quotient is a formula which says your health quotient is equal to your own health plus your awareness of the issues affecting your health and that is the measure.

That’s a measure of your health quotient. I found a really good way of testing a person’s HQ and it’s three letters which you just say those three letters and you listen to the response and I’m going to test you now and I’ve got a pretty good feeling you’re gonna pass with flying colors but I’m gonna put this out to my listeners as well. Here is a test of your HQ. I’m gonna say these three letters.

R.F.K. Jr. Okay, there’s five letters. R.F.K. Jr. Now, I would love to hear your response to his impact on the American health system and that segues into a discussion about vaccinations as well. Go on, tell me what you think of R.F.K. Jr.

Patricia Lemer (50:24)

And I love him well enough that I call him Bobby. I do.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (50:31)

Yeah, do you know him? well, let me just say I didn’t doubt for a minute that you would say that. And you have a very high HQ, clearly.

Patricia Lemer (50:43)

I have followed Bobby from the start. If anybody wants to get to know him well, they should read the biography called The Real RFK Jr. And it’s a fascinating book. He’s brilliant, he’s tenacious, and he will not give up. And I was working for him when he was running for president.

And I think the decisions he has made so far to take the fluoride out of the water and to look at the vaccination schedule and hopefully to get pharmaceutical ads off of television sooner rather than later, I just support 100%. And Children’s Health Defense, which is the organization that he founded, is a co-producer of my book, their insignia here is at the bottom. And Mary Holland, the CEO of CHD, is a good friend of mine. And so I am grateful to CHD, I’m grateful to Bobby, I’m grateful to the whole movement. And I’ve lost a lot of friends over this, I will have to tell you, and relatives who don’t speak to me.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (52:11)

Yes. Well, that doesn’t look. is what I mean about HQ. My definition of HQ is your own health plus your awareness of health. So when I say those three letters and a person, in fact, the vast majority of people, it has to be said, say, complete not a complete not a what he’s doing to the American health care system is just appalling. My next question is, do you know anything about the American health care system that you are defending?

And invariably the answer. Yeah, they did. They did. Now, Patty, we’ve covered so much here today, but I wanted to just finish also with something that people give people hope because there is hope. There’s a good story here. And I know you’re, you know, very passionate about recovery. This isn’t just articulating the bad news. This is saying this is and this is what the podcast is about. It’s about empowering people.

They drank the Kool-Aid. And I wondered if you might share with us maybe one or two stories or the protocols that are involved in recovery.

Patricia Lemer (53:21)

So recovery is a kind of a tricky word. Improvement, up to what point? What is recovery? When a parent says, I’ve recovered my child from autism. You know, we all have quirks. We all have digestive problems once in a while. And we have quirky behavior. So how one person would define recovery might be different from another.

Recovery to me means that someone can function independently and have a life that has meaning, hold a job, have friends, get married, maybe have children, function in the world in an independent fashion. And so when we’re working with two-year-olds or five-year-olds or even 10-year-olds, it’s hard to predict what those people are going to do down the road, but we want them to be able to learn according to developmental milestones, be with their peers, not be in special education, and to be able to reach their maximum potential, whatever that is. 

So, of the thousands of kids I’ve worked with over the years, I would say a majority of them have recovered skills and recovered function to some degree, whether it’s 10%, 25%, 100%. All of them have been able to recover skills. And that’s remarkable.

Is it because they went on a gluten-free, dairy-free diet? Is it because someone put a pallet expander in their jaw when they were young? Is it because they had reflex integration therapy? Many parents do a lot of things at once, so it’s hard to know which thing we can credit for that recovery.

But just like things add up total load, it’s unloading that total load one stressor at a time that results in recovery to some degree. So the kids that I know generally are in the elementary to high school level, age level.

And they gradually are able to join their peers in mainstream classes. Many of them go to a post-secondary school placement. Sometimes it’s a community college, sometimes it’s a college. Many of them have relationships. They have girlfriends, they have boyfriends, they date, and I know a bunch of them who have gotten married and had children. And so this is true recovery when you have people like Ron Kaufman and his parents founded the Sunrise Program. He was the son, S-O-N, of the Sunrise Program. He was severely autistic. His parents were told to institutionalize him.

And he ended up going to Brown University, one of the most prestigious colleges in America. And he is now married and he runs his own autism treatment program. Now he’s, think in his forties and I don’t know at what age someone would have called him recovered, but it is documented that he was severely autistic.

Man in Australia who has added the AI component to my new book. His son was severely autistic and he was diagnosed at three. He’s now 11 or 12. I’ve seen him. He is just so typical and so delightful that I don’t think anybody would question that he has recovered.

He certainly has no signs of autism.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (58:21)

When you say severely autistic, this is sometimes nonverbal, severe behavioral difficult in behavior, in noise, in sound, in light. There are all sorts of triggers and these and I mean I’m guessing that this is about reducing the toxic load. Peeling away the onion one layer after another.

But also, I guess we talk also about nutritious food and all that. that, I mean, even with young children who aren’t autistic, and I have seven grandchildren, so I know that, you know, they are getting nutrition, nutritious food into them is not always quite as easy as the one, yes, you need to feed your children nutritious food. well, that rolls off the tongue very easily, but… getting into their, getting it onto their tongue is quite another story isn’t it?

Patricia  Lemer (59:12)

It is. And I have this whole section on picky eating in the book. Picky eating is a whole hour long talk because my co-founder for developmental delay resources, Kelly Dorfman says half the job of picky eating is the child and the other half is the parent. And if you’re afraid your child is going to starve to death if you don’t give him that peanut butter sandwich or those chicken nuggets then and you’re still buying goldfish crackers shame on you you’re part of the problem and we need to help you become part of the solution.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (59:53)

I remember talking to one of our leading pediatricians, integrative pediatrician Lila Mason, who said to us that picky eating, well, you know, offering a child food about 20 times is what you need to be doing before you actually officially accept that they may not have been eating rather than give it to them once, no, they won’t eat that.

Patricia Lemer (1:00:13)

Yeah, forget Brussels sprouts because he turned them down last week. I wouldn’t even think of doing them again.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:00:21)

What would you say, I mean, okay, we could spend an hour and maybe I love getting guests back. Patty, I love getting guests back. And what would be a couple of things that you would say to a parent who has a picky eater?

Patricia Lemer (1:00:34)

Be stalwart. You are not a short order cook. This is not a restaurant. This is our family and tonight what’s for dinner is what is on your plate. And if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. This is what we’re eating tonight. And maybe you’ll be more interested in it it shows up on another night. Brussels sprouts may not be your favorite, but the rest of us like them and I cook them and maybe the next time you’ll smell them. You’ll put your tongue on them. But you don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to tonight, but keep an open mind about them. And the parent has to act like a parent, not like a short order cook. And you can’t be worried that the child is going to starve. Because I’ve never seen it happen in 50 years. No child has ever starved.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:01:38)

Yeah, yeah, well you also mentioned reflex integration therapy and gee I know we’ve covered a lot of interesting things that are new to me like the behavioral optometry story, my goodness that’s one, but tell me briefly about reflex integration therapy.

Patricia Lemer (1:01:54)

Well, a person is like a computer and contains these programs called reflexes as soon as the baby is conceived. And over 100 reflexes are like 100 programs in the computer. And the reflexes have three purposes. First they emerge, then they are and they have a purpose, a purpose in two areas, and then they integrate. And so, you know, if you’ve ever fallen, what your reflex is, is you trip, you put out your hands to catch your fall. That is a reflex. And there are over 100 reflexes that encourage development.

Why does a baby crawl? Because a reflex has emerged that gets those arms and legs moving. How do we get the baby down, the spiral down the birth canal? It’s a combination of reflexes that get that baby moving. And when the baby’s finally near the exit point is when the mother pushes.

But the baby had to get a long way down for it to be able to emerge. So reflexes are important in development is the first and to get from helpless in the womb to outside in the world. And then from being just lying there to turning over, lifting its head moving its eyes, sitting up, and eventually becoming ambulatory. Those are all reflexes at play that make that happen. If we don’t impede that movement with crazy stuff that we do like seat belts and devices that prevent the movement that allows the reflexes to emerge.

Once a reflex is used, like to get through the birth canal, then it integrates and it’s like dormant and it’s waiting for a crisis to happen. And then it protects us. So that reflex that allows you to catch yourself when you’re falling has been dormant in you, just waiting to protect you. And it’s an amazing sequence of events. And the queen of understanding reflexes is a woman named Svetlana Moskitova. She’s a Russian living in the United States and she has an institute and she’s written a book about reflexes and autism. 

And she’s a genius because she totally understands these two areas, the developmental purpose of reflexes and the protective role of reflexes. And after some tragedies, like her first one that she saw was a train accident, a reflex re-emerges in a well-functioning adult to protect you from that trauma. And so Svetlana has been brought in.

Like in the United States at that Sandy Hook massacre. I don’t know. Remember that when all those children were murdered and the first responders are in fighter flight and their reflexes have reemerged to protect them from going mad. so Svetlana has been brought in to help.

Reintegrate those reflexes during trauma. People were brought back in Pittsburgh after the Tree of Life murders in the temple because they were traumatized and we can get these first responders back to normal functioning by reintegrating these reflexes that have re-emerged to protect us in a tragedy.

Many of our young people have had trauma. And so there’s still, and we talked about this with a nervous system, and I’m glad you brought that up because we’re really back where we started in this conversation with reintegrating the nervous system. So you can do a reflex evaluation. Svetlana does about 22 dozen reflexes she evaluates, and then she has a very complex reflex integration program. 

Reflex integration is a tool that’s in the tool chest of a lot of different professionals. So if somebody’s looking for that kind of therapy, it might be an optometrist who does it because reflexes are involved in eye movements. It might be a speech pathologist because reflexes are involved in talking.

It might be an occupational therapist. And they’re the most likely because they’re one profession whose education includes education on reflexes and their purpose and their integration. And the biggest reflex that we know is crawling. It is a reflex that gets that kid moving ahead on the ground and is unstoppable, but it is not fully understood how that happens. And so when you take a developmental history, did the baby crawl? well, he commando crawled or he went from sitting to standing to walking, he never crawled. 

Those are all red flags because those reflexes that are important in getting that baby from helpless to ambulatory in the first year are then important in learning to read and write and do mathematics. They’re all part of the learning process. And if you see a kid with his head down and his legs wrapped around the chair when he’s reading or writing, he’s working against that reflex that wants to overtake his voluntary action. And it’s fascinating to watch how kids recover when you integrate their reflexes and help them function more voluntarily.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:09:26)

Patty, let this we I knew we would have synergy in our discussion. And this has led us to the visual part as the whole icing on the cake for me. Listen, if we let’s finish on a positive note, because many. OK.

Patricia Lemer (1:09:51)

We go positive? You want you mentioned talking about vaccinating. I think we should.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:09:51)

Yes, yes, sorry. Thank you.

Yes we did and I thank you for pulling me up on that. I want to talk about vaccinations. Go on.

Patricia Lemer (1:10:04)

So I have a whole chapter on the myths surrounding vaccination. It’s a very important chapter in the book because it’s these myths such as vaccines have saved the world and that immunity from vaccination is better than immunity from getting a disease. These are two of the myths, of the 10 myths that I talk about in the book.

The truth about vaccination has been censored because of money. And it is very, very important that people understand the real truth. And if you want to read a fascinating book, read this book called Turtles All the Way Down that was written by Israelis. It’s a…

It was written anonymously and Mary Holland of Children’s Health Defense discovered it in Hebrew in Israel when she was visiting. And she and my editor from my book, Zoe O’Toole, edited the Google translated version of the Hebrew book. And we still don’t know who the original authors are, but it gives you the real facts of vaccination and in my book I have the 10 top misunderstandings, myths of vaccination and the truth of what really happens when your body gets vaccinated not only with pathogens but with adjuvants and expedients which are fancy words for additives that are put in the vaccines to make them more powerful without the addition of more pathogens.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:12:02)

Can you share it? Mean, if you want to list out the 10 myths, if you can, but give us a couple.

Patricia Lemer (1:12:05)

I gave you a couple that vaccine, that immunity from a vaccine is better wrong. Natural immunity is forever. Vaccinated immunity is temporary. The biggest myth is that vaccinated children are healthier than unvaccinated children. And there’s been 30 studies now that the McCullough Foundation has published, which shows us, and Paul Thomas is behind this, that vaccinated children are much, much sicker than unvaccinated children. They have not contagious diseases, but chronic disease. They have asthma, they have allergies, they have eczema, they have all kinds of mild diseases and conditions for which they take medication and which make, zap their body of the energy that they need to learn and behave well. And it’s just, it’s sinful that these myths have been perpetuated and written off as crazy people talking. These myths are well, documented and people need to read them in my book and in Turtles All the Way Down.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:13:45)

Yes, we’ve done a program on that book, Turtles All the Way Down. I’ve read it. I think the two most interesting aspects that I found was the idea that a pharmaceutical product is safe. The gold standard is a randomized double blind control trial. So you test the drug against a sugar pill because sugar pills, but they don’t. They tested against another vaccine.

And say there’s no difference in the response. So if the response to both is bad, then because there’s no difference, then it’s said to be safe. So that is a shocking statistic which people may want to defend. I don’t know why you would, but very few, if any, vaccines have been tested against the placebo. None, none. So that’s number one. And number two, the study which says vaccines are

None?

Comes from the Institute of Medicine report 2011 which looked at 130 or 40 symptoms and found yeah there were reactions to 10, there were poor reactions to 15 but 130 of the adverse reactions had insufficient evidence in fact no evidence and therefore because there was no evidence the conclusion is there is no adverse reaction. I mean it’s just

Patricia Lemer (1:15:15)

If you ever met a family of a vaccine injured child and knew that child prior to vaccination and after, you would think twice about vaccinating.

And there are safe ways of vaccinating. And that’s what Bobby is looking at. when you people don’t know that children by the time they enter kindergarten in the United States get 70 something doses of pathogens and often as many as seven, eight or nine at a time. That’s insane. No wonder we have vaccine reactions.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:15:59)

Yeah, but but as I said, the shortcut to measuring a person’s HQ is just to ask what do you think of RFK? You try it. You try it, Patty. It will work for you, too. I knew what your answer was going to be. So I wasn’t setting you up there. Listen, can we’re going to finish on a positive note because we need we need to give people hope.

And there is hope. With knowledge comes power. That’s the purpose of this podcast. That’s the purpose of your work and your book and your book. you know, can you leave our listener with a couple of, you know, what should, where should they go? What should, apart from obviously reading your book, what are some of the things that they should be focusing on?

Patricia Lemer (1:16:42)

They should be focusing on the quality of what they’re eating, how much sleep they’re getting, how much movement they’re getting, and what their relationships are. They should have positive relationships. It’s almost your book verbatim. I loved reading your book and I didn’t know about it and I’m grateful that you asked me on the show so I had the opportunity to read it. And look at your lifestyle.

And we can get 50, 60 % benefit by just changing some of our lifestyle practices. And it’s very hard in today’s world because you look like a heretic when you say you can’t go to McDonald’s. I’m sorry, I won’t spend money on McDonald’s. And when you sit in the IEP meeting and say to the school.

Psychologist, I will not put my child on medication because you can’t handle him. Let’s work together to figure out why he isn’t learning, why his behavior is problematic. You have to be educated. And my book, all 600 pages of it, do that job for you. They educate you as to what might be going on and work with your doctor. Find a doctor who listens and will include you as a team member and not diss you because you’ve looked up something on the internet and said, did you learn that from Dr. Google? That’s not somebody you want to work with. You want to work with someone who is respectful of you and understands perhaps your hesitancy to give seven vaccines in one day.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:18:40)

Well, Patti, that’s good for us to finish on and thank you so much for not only joining us today, but for sharing your knowledge and wisdom through your many books and your work. And please continue to work for many, many more years to come. You’re just hitting, you’re just hitting your stride. can tell you’re just getting really good at what you’re doing. So keep doing it for a lot longer. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Patricia Lemer (1:19:01)

It’s an honor. Thank you.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (1:19:02)

Well, there it is. Isn’t it so interesting? And there is so much in this episode and clearly so much in Patty’s book. And we will have links to her book, which has an interesting AI component to it. and it covers so much interesting, so much ground that is worth exploring whether you have an autistic child, a child, or you are just somebody on a health journey wishing to reduce your toxic load.

There is a lot to be learned here. hope this finds you well. Until next time, this is Dr. Ron Erlich. Be well. 

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This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.

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Disclaimer:

Podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.