Meet Kara Ware
Kara spent an entire year making excuses for her toddler’s aggression, lack of speech, and extreme behaviors until she could no longer deny the obvious; something was terribly wrong. In December 2005, she was told her son had regressed into Autism, a condition she was entirely unfamiliar with. She was told that there was nothing she could do for her child and to take him home and medicate him. The medication was meant to silence the frequent tantrums and make her son more manageable, and she had also been instructed to enroll her child in speech therapy. Other than this, all that doctors could tell Kara was to give the child copious amounts of love and ensure his safety.
Kara refused to medicate her two-and-a-half-year-old son as their first intervention, fearful that the medication would cause more harm than good. Kara knew that her child’s behaviors were forms of communication through which her young boy was trying to convey the immense pain he was enduring. Kara felt hopeless, not knowing how to help her son, and unwilling to silence his communication through pharmaceuticals. Instead of wallowing and listening to the doctors’ previous claims, Kara decided to forge her own path in what was soon to become known as functional medicine.
Kara learned how to layer pieces to a care plan in an intelligent sequence, to heal the underlying dietary, lifestyle, deficiencies, toxicity, gut pathogens, leaky gut, vision, and airway causes of symptoms/behaviors referred to as Autism. After 10-years, her son emerged from Autism and became an independent student.
Kara learned the immeasurable value of living this Functional Medicine lifestyle with her son. Today, Kara is in her mid-forties and feeling better than ever. Looking back on what she has learned, Kara now credits Autism as a master teacher, forcing her to lead by example.
The Dandelion Effect Podcast with host Andy Vantrease
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Kara Ware has been on a 17-year journey with her son, Zachary, who was diagnosed with Autism just before his third birthday. With this news came the advice from the doctors, “There is no treatment for Autism. Medicate him to help with tantrums, sign him up for speech therapy, take him home, and keep him safe.” Suggestions like these are what more and more parents are hearing as Autism diagnoses skyrocket. But why? This question became a beacon for Kara as she sat with her toddler, who was hitting his development milestones, then one day began regressing into pain, confusion, and chaos that nobody could explain. She traveled the country seeking out specialists and alternative practitioners, learning about the root causes of inflammation and toxicity that can lead a person to present with Autism symptoms. She was not ready to accept the status quo.
Kara has joined Hope for Healing, the pediatric practice and collaborative care team of Dr. Paula Kruppstadt, MD, leading an 8-week group coaching series. The group coaching series strengthens the nutrition, lifestyle, mental, emotional, and spiritual foundation that allows the medical interventions to provide the profound outcomes we know possible with functional medicine.
Family Care Plan Blog
Family Care Plan Model
In 2006, my son was two weeks from his third birthday when I learned the dangerous levels of toxic heavy metals/chemicals, how leaky his gut was, the gut-brain axis, the opportunistic gut pathogens, the vitamin and mineral deficiencies and the high inflammatory foods I had to remove….
Parent the child. Not the Autism.
Autism has so much vengeance to it; it has so much force. I went to battle with it because that’s my personality. I’ll take a bull by the horns and I’ll wrestle it down to the ground. That’s what I tried to do with Autism, and it about killed me. I learned that if I was going to sustain this journey if I was going to SURVIVE this journey then I couldn’t fight Autism. It was bigger than me….
Autism Remission
I deliberately used the word “remission”. The word “recovery” is thrown around like candy in the autism world. “Oh, my sons recovered,” “Oh, I’m trying to recover him.” From what I can see, having been in the clinical setting for 7-years, is this really places even more stress on families. Families are feeling if they haven’t achieved recovery in two, three, four, five years, they feel like they have failed. …
A Mother’s Journey; Healing the Root Causes of Autism
Teri S. and her husband Alan arrived at my Autism Recovery Clinic in December of 2013. Their then 12-year old son refused to eat-he would scream and clear the table when she served him a meal, he was so thin Teri cried each time she bathed him, his meltdowns were so severe trips out in public were limited, he was totally non-verbal, chronically constipated, and not potty trained….