Risperidone? Helpful or not? if so, how so?

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antipsychotics for a child of 3 years?? That one specifically makes some boys grow b00bs.

I've got a friend whose son is 16 and she just started him on it. It's helped him a LOT! However, whats a 3 yo doing to need it? She started him on it cause he's huge and tall and strong and his meltdowns were getting to be too much. It's helping him. I did put both my boys on ADHD meds when they needed them but I waited until they were about 7 or so.

What reputable dr puts a baby on meds like that? And what is he doing at 3 that you can't handle? I'm not saying you asked for him to be put on it. I'm saying that you need to grab up your baby and run far, far away from that so called dr. And throw rocks at said "dr" while you are doing so!! !

I'm all for giving kids meds if they need them, but even I can't wrap my brain around that one. Girl, for real. Take your baby and get away from that quack.

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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
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I took it for a few years, and it did kind of help me, but I stopped after last year because it was giving me nosebleeds. Once I stopped taking it, the nosebleeds stopped.

I, personally, would never give a heavy med like this to a toddler, but you can read about it for yourself: http://www.rxlist.com/risperdal-drug/in ... dosage.htm. I would suggest continuing on to the next page and look up the definitions of the side effects. Then you can determine if his current symptoms/behaviors are so severe that you are willing to risk the side effects.

You asked about other things. When my daughter was around your son's age, she had a lot of extended tantrums and some self-injurious behavior. For reasons completely unrelated to GF/CF diet (I didn't know about it), I dramatically reduced her dairy intake, and then eliminated it. She stopped head-banging and no longer had that spaced-out look on her face. She also began responding to her name. Turned out, she was not able to digest the casein in milk.

I found learning about sensory integration issues to be most helpful, because it helped me figure out what was setting her off in the first place.

I wish you luck. And FWIW, I did medicate one of my kids for his ADHD. I know what a hard decision it can be. I just recommend that parents become fully educated and well-versed before they make a decision either way, and not to trust your doctor to walk you through it. Most don't. It's up to us to do the research, and while I think the opinions/experiences of others are a part of the information to consider, we need to actually look at the drug's track record, safety, and side effects from a more removed, analytical point of view.

Something else, I'm not a big diet fixes it all person but what helped my oldest when he was 4 is we took him off all sugar. All processed sugar that is. We bought all that hippie, natural, organic food and crap. He got no candy. It really, truly helped him. It fell by the wayside when he was about 6, but by then he was able to deal with regular food. Try getting rid of sugar. Sounds simple, but it's not.

_________________
I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
My forum is still there and everyone is welcome to come join as well. There is a private women only subforum there if anyone is interested. Also, there is no CAPTCHA.

The link to the forum is http://www.rightplanet.proboards.com

@ Feralucce. I was putting a list of references in a text file ready to copy over when my laptop crashed. Will have to wait. I agree citations are needed. I do have them. Broadly, if you run a search on something like "autism neurology differences" they start to come up, both in terms of actual physical differences in the brain and in terms of fMRI and EEG variation (something I almost discovered at uni many years ago, but failed to realise the significance of, because I didn't know I was an Aspie).

@ some of the rest of you: Correlation does not imply causation.

Just because you take a drug and then "feel better" does not necessarily mean the drug made you feel better. I had a similar argument with someone who told me that she gave homeopathic "medicine" to her dog, the dog got better, therefore homeopathic "medicine" works (the best that can be said here is that is showed she had some grasp of the placebo effect). Homeopathy has been shown to be bunk, over and over again, so it's far more likely the dog got better anyway.

Let's take a somewhat more extreme example.
Increasing rates of autism diagnosis correlate with increased rates of consumption of organic food.
Increased rates of consumption of organic food correlate with global warming trends.
Global warming trends correlate with increased levels of piracy.
By the argument that correlation equals causation, pirates cause autism.

Ludicrous? Of course it's ****ing ludicrous, but it's the same logic that gave us vaccines cause autism, which is more pseudoscientific twaddle.

Is there some evidence that Respiridone decreases irritability in some individuals (by turning them into a fat zombie staring at the walls)? Yes. Is there clinical evidence it does anything else beneficial?

That would be a flat no. There may be individuals who take the drug and then see a change, but there is precisely no evidence the drug caused the change.

Note InThisTogether: some people have an allergy to cows' milk. This can cause some serious symptoms. Self-injurious behaviour is not on the properly reviewed list of these symptoms. While it is distinctly possible that your daughter has a casein intolerance (I am not going to argue with a clinician on this) the fact that she stopped self-injuring after ending consumption of casein does not mean that the inability to digest casein was responsible for the self-injurious behaviour. For a dumbed-down explanation of this see, for example http://www.allergyuk.org/downloads/news ... ort_v5.pdf

There is a roundabout, untested theory about how casein might relate to autism symptoms, but it's very uncertain at this point.

I know many parents grasp at straws when looking for things that will help, but pseudoscience and insisting that someone got better after doing X, therefore doing X may help others to get better is not helpful and may be damaging (vaccine fiasco!! !!). Okay, get unhealthy rubbish like cows' milk and refined sugar out of your kid's diet. Great. Will it do anything for autism? Probably not.

The difference is that there are studies that show that paracetamol (what you call Tylenol) does cure headaches. Now, it may be that the headache would have got better on its own but, in the case of paracetamol, it has been shown in double-blind clinical trials to work as an effective analgesic. We even have some grasp of the mode of action. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15662292

The same cannot be said of some of the pseudoscience touted around here.

I know that far too many Americans are utterly ignorant of basic science ( http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 31721.html ) but I really don't get why it is so difficult to get simple principles like this through some skulls.

I want off this planet...

Remedial explanation of the randomised controlled trial here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized ... lled_trial

NB: the RCT is the bare minimum I would expect for a decent clinical trial. It is still possible to conduct a bad RCT, either deliberately or by accident. These are, in fact, very common, especially in pharmacotherapy.