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September, 2005
Becky’s Tip for Parents
My daughter’s Success Story is
told here on the website, but I will share a little
background. Katie was diagnosed when she was 2 ½
years old. We immediately began seeking appropriate
services. We tried our local county services,
private speech therapy with a speech therapy through
our local hospital and got Katie into an Early
Intervention Program in our school district. We
also sought out the advice of a holistic medicine
doctor that treated many allergies through
acupressure and then moved on to Chelation in order
to remove all heavy metals, specifically mercury,
from Katie’s system. While each of these services
had their place and have improved Katie’s skills in
a variety of areas, nothing has had the profound
effect that Applied Behavior Analysis has had in her
life. Before we began our ABA program, Katie was
rarely even combining two words for requesting. She
can now spontaneously produce complete and
appropriate sentences when making requests and she
has become an official greeter wherever she goes! I
asked Tracy if I could pass along some tips for
other parents on things I wish I had known when we
first started looking for help and here is where I
would begin:
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Find a pediatrician or
neurologist that is familiar with Autism
Spectrum Disorders. We began this road with a
pediatrician that told us, “Oh, that behavior is
totally normal.” and a neurologist that said,
“Sorry Mrs. Lowe, I don’t have any Kleenex.” I
have now realized the importance of a very good
doctor who understands your child’s needs. Some
of the very well known neurologists who
specialize in this are VERY hard to get initial
appointments with. You may want to consider
making an appointment with an associate or the
nurse of the preferred doctor for your first
visit and then schedule the second visit with
the preferred doctor. This may sound strange,
but it works! The associate usually has a
shorter wait time and it gets the intake
information out of the way. We reduced our wait
time to see our preferred neurologist from six
months to three months.
Becky Lowe, Katie’s Mom
 
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