HEALTHY MANHATTAN: All in the Family

Howard Rogers is a 47-year-old IT manager from Red Lion, Penn. He’s also the father of six children, and the eldest, 17-year-old Norman, is severely autistic. “He’s got the mental capacity of a 3- or 4-year-old,” Rogers says. “He has very extreme behavioral challenges: outbursts, flares, things of that nature. But he can talk, he can go potty by himself, and he can dress himself. And those three things are huge accomplishments for a child like Norman.”

Rogers attributes Norman’s progress in large part to an unconventional program of herbal supplements (specifically, memory enhancement supplements containing ginkgo and Echinacea) and antibiotics, which he claims helped Norman focus and better retain information. Rogers recounts the experience of raising an autistic child in his new book, [Raising Superman! Autism 101] (the title refers to a family story about Norman). It is the first of two books by Rogers about his experiences with his son.

Why write a book about autism? It’s not as though there’s a shortage of literature.

Howard Rogers: When we did our market research on the book, we found that, although there’s a lot of really good books out there on autism, none of them really gave a road map to get real results, and many of them just dove into a single subject, such as a special diet, or behavioral drills. So Raising Superman! is unique in that it’s not just a book about autism, it’s for the family. It takes you not only through the discovery of autism, but it also takes you into some of the emotional feelings in terms of the guilt on the parents’ side. It talks about medical services and supports that you need for your child—not only what those services are, but how to go get them, and how to hold on to them.

We talk about medical care, dental care, the home environment, the financial aspects of raising an autistic child, why you need to get your finances in order to be the best advocate for your child, and then finally I go into the medical stuff.

And that’s why I wrote the book, really, to get the word out there about this herbal treatment, which is extremely safe. It’s something that families can work with their doctor to decide if they want to try. But that was the main reason: to get the word out there regarding these secrets and the success formulas that we came up with.

You came upon this herbal treatment almost as a last resort, is that correct?

Yeah, we probably tried over a hundred different medications, and most of them didn’t make my son better. In fact, they made him worse in most respects. I did my own research and I found a few herbal substances that were known to improve memory, and we tried those, but did not have good results first. So, what we went after was the dosage. We saw something that gave us a positive effect, and tweaked that dosage and looked at how the two substances needed to be combined to improve memory and cognitive abilities. That’s how we came up with our own treatment, which, quite frankly, I’d put up against anything on the market today for autism.

What’s the most difficult aspect of raising an autistic child that people don’t necessarily know about?

It’d have to be the supervision requirements. When you have a child with this level of disability, you can’t assume that anyone, even a trained medical professional, knows how to supervise your child. Even we weren’t prepared to provide the supervision level he needed. We can’t even take my son out shopping, we have to supervise him at home. When he goes into the school environment, he requires not only a dedicated teacher and dedicated aide, but he needs a secondary aide with him as well. It forces you to make some really hard choices as a family. We had to spend a great deal of money on fixing up our home so he could survive in that environment. Not only fencing in the yard, but modifying his room and other special adaptations. Part of what the book goes through is, how do you decide what those things are and how do you get the funding and help to do that stuff?

You devote a lot of space in the book to keeping your finances in order. What is the key to controlling your debt in a situation where you’re raising a child that re quires expensive medical care?

The first piece is understanding what the child’s needs are and identifying what equipment, supports or services are needed to address the problem. The second piece is to find out what services and financial support are in your area: things like speech therapy, occupational therapy. In many states, those services are provided at no charge to the parents. But you have to know that they’re out there, and you have to know how to apply for them, and how to fight for them when you’re turned down. Getting things like that when the child is young is absolutely critical for their development. Early intervention is key.

Also, I talk about Larry Burkett and Dave Ramsay, both of whom have programs for getting debt-free. We followed the Larry Burkett program, and it got us debt-free when our son was born, and we’ve been debt-free ever since. It takes an enormous amount of stress out of your life.

There’s been a lot of controversy about vaccines and a possible link between certain vaccines and autism. You specifically recommend against looking for someone to blame if your child receives an autism diagnosis. How difficult was it for you personally to not look for a scapegoat?

In my son’s case, he came down with a very high fever after receiving some shots. The timing was too coincidental in our specific case for me to believe that the vaccines were not part of the cause. But it’s impossible medically to prove. And I honestly feel we have to partner with the medical community, as parents, to try to find a treatment and cure for autism by sharing all the information that we have. I don’t believe that doctors or pharmaceutical companies maliciously vaccinate kids because they know it gives them autism. I personally believe that there is a link, but I don’t think it’s constructive. I don’t believe, if we get into a battle with the medical community, that it helps anyone. I do be lieve that parents need to make informed decisions for themselves whether they should vaccinate their children.

What was your overwhelming emotion while looking back at your experience and writing this book?

I felt really bad that we didn’t find more things to help our son sooner. When we found the herbal treatment he was older, and I feel he might have gotten more benefit if they’d been made available earlier. I think I also carried around a little guilt as a result of him getting those shots, and not pressing the issue sooner, and I carried that guilt around for a while. But I think it’s really important that parents move on, because I found that it stopped me from making a lot of the really hard choices I needed to make later in his life. It prevented our relationship from growing.

If you could pick one great lesson for this book to convey, what would that lesson be?

If there’s a parent out there dealing [an autistic child], I really think they need to look at this herbal treatment for their child. I believe it will help more children than any other autism medicine or treatment to date. The reason I say that is, the components of this herbal treatment are known to do what we’re claiming it does. The problem is, no one has figured out how to give it to an autistic child. We have overcome that hurdle.

What is the second book, Ten-Inch Nails, going to be about?

The first book is really a short, easy-to-read guide of the best secrets of what we found helped our child. It’s short, right to the point. You don’t have to do any interpretation. The second book puts autism in the context of a life, our lives in particular. What we went through was a heck of a drama, a battle of epic proportions. In terms of the spiritual, the emotional, the financial impacts, it really gives the reader a broader picture of what we actually went through as parents to get to where we are.