case_history_and_successful_therapy_of_toe_walking_231

therapy_toe_walking1

John Ratey's book relating behaviours to exercise

I caught a small part of this short documentary on CBC lastnight which shows good outcomes in students with ADHD/ADD and other behavioural issues in a school setting and the use of daily physical excercise.  The theory comes from Dr. John Ratey, a doctor and professor at Harvard Medical school, and showed compelling evidence from a school program in the US as well as one recently instituted here in Canada.

As I watched my attention turned, as it usually does, to can some of the principles being used here apply to autism?  I think the answer is an obvious YES.  Not only would the exercise help with the many sensory needs (perhaps this is a major part of the positive impact) but the result is increased attention, calm, and reduced bad behaviours.

A very brief search on Pubmed did not turn up anything specific to exercise and ASD, but I will keep looking and I may see if I can pick up Dr. Ratey’s book.  It seems like there really is nothing to lose.

My list of sources is far from extensive yet I find it staggering that in the roughly 5 days the site has been aggregating content their are over 1100 posts! I actually find it hard to synthesize all that information and I had not expected the number of stories to be so prolific. I am sure that if I removed blogs from the aggregator the numbers would be reduced but I think they are an integral part of the autism discourse and demonstrate the depth and breadth of the discussion on this subject.

I will likely be continuing to add more sources as I continue to work on the site and fine tune some aspects but jump on over and have a look and sign up for the RSS feed so you don’t miss anything

I would not begin to pretend that I have read all of them, but I have read a fair number of them and I do hope to continue to read more as I think that continuing to be informed is incredibly important. I hope the naming convention is fairly self explanatory, but if you can’t find something you are looking for I can search a duplicate cache of documents that I have indexed and share the results. We are very willing to help people find the information they may be looking for, assuming that it is a subject that we have some documentation on, so please do not hesitate to use the contact us link on our mainpage.

Comments, as always, are welcome.

Funny wiring. The author describes the book as follows:

My personal experience in living and working with a child with autism (my daughter) from diagnosis through adolescence up to adulthood. The book presents and delves into all aspects of the syndrome, focusing on the strategies and methodologies I found helpful in coping with and addressing the language, learning and behavioral challenges that children with autism present to parents and teachers. I also discuss at length what is going on neurologically in the autistic brain…

It is worth noting that google can be a great resource for books. They index a large number of books and provide large portions of the text for reading online. Some searches I found useful besides just searching for autism are:

Works by Simon Baron-Cohen