Front of the Class cast with Brad and Nancy Cohen

On the eve of Brad Cohen’s December 7, 2008 debut CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame original movie about his life with Tourette Syndrome, I decided to purchase his 2005 book, co-written with Lisa Wysocky, entitled: Front of the Class: How Tourette Syndrome Made Me the Teacher I Never Had to get a sneak peek into the wonderfully inspiring story. (more…)

If you have found yourself here after a Google search about “tics,” you may have already been to a doctor about a few chronic twitches or muscle spasms that won’t go away. After a consultation, you may have been given a diagnosis and possibly been disappointed too when you discovered that there is no known medical cure. If you are like us, and have a child diagnosed with a chronic multifocal tic disorder (tics in different locations on the body), you could have also been told by your doctor that medication, while available, does not come without side effects, and that the best treatment is to ignore the tics and carry on with your life, business as usual and hope that they fade over time.

This is basically what happened to us two years ago when we took our then almost 4-year-old son to a neurologist after he began to exhibit noticeable ticcing behaviors during the Christmas holidays. This is our story, and I attempt to tell it in hopes that other folks who find themselves reading this narrative may find a bit of usable knowledge and above all else, hope. (more…)

The decades old firestorm debate over whether or not thimerosal in vaccines causes Autism got heated up last week when Jenny McCarthy made her accusation on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The U.S. Senate has just released a report after an 18-month long investigation of the FDA and CDC concerning thimerosal levels in pediatric vaccines and the rising rates of neurological disorders in U.S. children. Their verdict: the FDA is guilty of forcing parents to inoculate their children with hazardous amounts of poisonous mercury in the name of disease control. (more…)

Are you easily agitated and a chronic insomniac, often waking up in the morning after what seems like a very short, dreamless night? Perhaps you’re one of those people that never eats breakfast; instead you prefer to race off to work or school. Do you often forget where you just put something or what someone just told you? Maybe you also have a hankering for spicy foods and a huge gut to match. If you have a hard time handling stress, find most of these statements to be true about yourself and you are often unhappy or depressed it may be due to highly under-diagnosed vitamin/mineral imbalance called Pyrrole Disorder. (more…)