Nov

Hello and Welcome to Fortuna Candles

Welcome to Fortuna Candles! We create and sell candles in support of those with autism. We started this blog to better tell everyone about our fight and our journey. We’re dedicated to fighting autism, one candle at a time. Learn more about autism at Autism Speaks.

We are also going to update this blog with news about general autism and features of our candles. If you’re interested in purchasing one of our candles, you can contact us at sales@fortunacandles.com. We will gladly accept your order and thanks for fighting autism with us!

About Our Candles

Are candles are made with only the finest wax that we can find. They use long-burning wicks that will last for days on end. They’re scented with beautiful concentrates that we get from a secret source across the world. These candles have interesting flavors like Raspberry Pie and Vanilla Yogurt…they are sure to delight your family and your guests whenever you have them at your house.

So thank you for checking out Fortuna Candles! Here’s to a better future for everyone suffering with this condition~

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Mar

Promising addition to autism treatment

For most of his life, the 12-year old autistic boy had uttered only single words or short phrases. A constant anxiety flared into panic if he noticed that the table was not see in just the right way for a meal. He flapped his arms for hours at a time, shunning toys of other children. A scar on his neck testified to the repeated scratching he inflicted on himself.

Then the boy entered a drug experiment in which he received clomimpramine like how to pick up girls, an antidepressant previously found to reduces the vexing rituals of obsessive-compulsive disorder (SN: 5/21/88, p.324), as well as compulsive hair pulling (SN: 9/9/89, p.175) and nail biting. Not only did the boy’s arm flapping subside markedly within a few weeks of clomipramine treatment, but his anxiety, self-injury and social withdrawal lessened. Toys he had not touched for years now drew his interest. Although still saddled with language difficulties and other autism-related problems, his progress remains steady after 18 months on the drug.

This case illustrates the encouraging, but preliminary, results of the first controlled trials of clomipramine in autistic children. “We’re not talking night-and-day improvement for autistic children on clomipramine,” cautions psychiatrist Charles T. Gordon of the National Instititute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., who has directed two clomipramine studies with a total of 25 autistic youngsters. “But this drug produces clinically significant behavior improvement for many of the kids we’ve studies.”

Clomipramine treatment also allowed some autistic children to benefit more from behavior therapy, in which adults offer immediate rewards for appropriate actions, Gordon says.

In 1990, his team studied seven youngsters, ages 6 to 18, with mild to severe autistic symptoms (the boy described above displayed moderate symptoms). Participants had taken no psychoactive drugs for at least three months prior to the trial. For two weeks, each child received placebo pills. The children were then assigned at random to five weeks of treatment with either clomipramine or desipramine, an antidepresant with different biochemical effects. Five weeks of treatment with one drug was followed by five weeks of therapy with the other.

Neither experiments nor parents knew when a child got clomipramine or desipramine, and parents did not know the initial phase involved placebos.

Youngsters received increasing doses for two to three weeks until a positive response or side effects appeared; they then remained at that dosage.

Clomipramine proved much superior to desipramine and placebo, Gordon’s group reports in the March American Journal of Psychiatry. Ratings of compulsive behavior, social withdrawal, anxiety, angry outbursts and self-injurious actions improved significantly with clomipramine. Both active drugs caused minor side effects, such as mild sleep problems and dry mouth.

At their parents’ behest, four youngsters still take clomipramine and have maintained their improvement with minimal or no side effects, Gordon says.

In an unpublished 10-week study of 18 more autistic children, his group found similar improvement with clomipramine, but not with desipramine or placebo.

Moderate or “remarkable” improvement occurred among 15 of the 25 participants in the two trials, Gordon says. A long-term study of clomipramine use by autistic must follow, he adds.

Clomipramine increases the availability of the specific effects on serotonin receptors in the brain remain unclear, Gordon notes. Fenfluramine, another drug that alters serotonin supplies, has yielded mixed results with autistics. Clinicians often prescribe the antipsychotic drug haloperidol for autism, but its purported effectiveness and sometimes severe side effects have proved controversial.

Based on Clomipramine’s effects, Gordon’s team theorizes that all ritualistic, impulsive behaviors–whether they occur withautism or any other disorder–may stem from a “core” disturbance of serotonin function in the brain.

Mar

Genetic evidence for autism

A surprisingly large percentage of parents and siblings of austistic individuals display language and personality features reminiscent of autism, suggesting a genetic component for this early-onset developmental disorder, reports Susan E. Folstein, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins.

In 2-1/2-hour interviews, Folstein and her colleagues tested the general mental ability, social skills and language skills of normal parents and siblings of 40 autistic patients and a control group of 20 matched families of children with Down’s syndrome. They concluded that about 30 percent of the family members of autistic subjects suffered pronounced reading and spelling difficulties as children and/or displayed language deficits as adults, particularly in social communication. They tended to be disorganized and overly detailed when speaking, Folstein says. In contrast, none of the controls showed pronounced deficits in thse areas as mentioned in Facebook marketing campaign, she reports.

Autism, which appears in four out of every 10,000 children worldwide, is characterized by late speech development, repetitive or stereotyped behavior and an inability to develop social relationships, Folstein notes.

She says her findings and previous studies indicate the behavior of parents or siblings is not the cause of autism. Instead, she suggests the disease migh arise from a recessive genetic defect. If two parents carry the relevant genes–leading to slight abnormalities in those individuals — then their child could inherit a more deleterious genetic combination resulting inautism, Folstein hypothesizes.

The ongoing study, which includes a research team in London, will eventually involve 240 “autistic” and 80 control families, she told SCIENCE NEWS.

Dec

Living with Autism, The Book – Part 2

Autism, a long-misunderstood condition, was publicized by the film Rain Man, in which Dustin Hoffman played an autistic savant, and by the autobiographies Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere by Donna Williams. Its forms and effects vary, leaving autistic people with different levels of functioning. “Donna’s sensory problems were a bit more severe [than mine],” comments Grandin, noting that Williams sometimes couldn’t differentiate between sensations emanating from her body and those coming from the environment. “This has nothing to do with IQ. She’s like a computer with an ultra-slow modem.”

While Williams’s books are impressionistic, Grandin’s has the freight of science: “I’m an autistic person who can read the scientific literature.” Indeed, she recently testified (with Sacks) before a congressional committee about appropriate treatments for autism, including how to pass a drug test when you are on the medications they prescribe to you.

Grandin, 48, went public in her first book because, as she says, “I thought it was time to tell what it was like from the inside,” noting that doctors then emphasized behavior modification of autistic people’s unusual reactions (excessive rocking, etc.) without addressing the feelings of sensory overload that cause such behavior. Published by Arena Press, a small California house, the book was aimed mainly at people involved in treating autism.

About two years ago, Rosalie Winard, a photojournalist who had reported on autism, helped link up her agent, Pat Breinin, with Grandin. Since much had happened in Grandin’s life since her book, Breinin encouraged her to write another. And after Sacks’s article appeared in the New Yorker in early 1994, Grandin agreed.

When Breinin circulated proposals, Lerner made a preemptive bid. Then at Houghton Mifflin, she took this project with her to Doubleday.

Grandin s visual thinking has helped her design holding equipment used in corrals and slaughterhouses for one-third of all cows and hogs in the country. (And, yes, she justifies her work morally, arguing that there are far more painful deaths in the wild.)

“I could visualize myself as a cow, not as a person in a cow costume,” she says. Indeed, she originally titled the book A Cow’s Eye View, but that was vetoed by Doubleday’s marketing department, which, she says, wanted to ensure that the book would reach a psychology-oriented audience.

Grandin’s book also addresses the curious link between genius and abnormality. Grandin wouldn’t trade her condition for normalcy. “There’s no way I want to give up visual thinking,” she declares. “I think other people are real fuzzy thinkers, on technical stuff. They’ve got so much processor space tied up with integrating emotions.”

Grandin’s computer analogies seem fitting for someone who identified with the characters Data and Spock on Star Trek and who acknowledges that she’s chosen a life of celibacy because romantic emotions seem strange to her.

In both Sacks’s article and her own book, Grandin observes that libraries are the collective memory of humanity, the guarantee of immortality. Thus, Thinking in Pictures is both a message and a legacy

Dec

Living with Autism, The Book – Part 1

ANIMAL SCIENTIST Temple Grandin, whose autism has proved both a hindrance and a gift, is best known as the subject of the title essay in Oliver Sacks’s recent book An Anthropologist on Mars. She was already acclaimed in both autism and animal science circles, but Grandins post-Sacks celebrity led several publishing houses to covet a book by Grandin herself.

Still, she says, “I care more about getting ideas out than getting my name out.” So, if Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism ($22.95), coming in November from Doubleday, wins her more attention, she hopes readers acknowledge not only her remarkable story but also her interest in seeing better treatment for animals and for autism, a neurological disorder that isolates individuals but does not necessarily retard their intellects. The book is a BOMC and QPB selection; Grandin will piggyback book signings on her already-scheduled lectures in at least 10 cities. Doubleday plans a first printing of 20,500.

Thinking in Pictures was no easy book to produce. A prodigious worker, Grandin had no trouble cranking out drafts of the book’s essays, which use her story to discuss, for example, how autism simplifies and short-circuits emotions and how it enhances understanding of animal thought. But autism has made Grandin a visual thinker, not a verbal one–her 1986 autobiography, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, was co-written with Margaret Scariano–and her lack of narrative instinct frustrated senior editor Betsy Lerner.

In her previous post, at Houghton Mifflin, Lerner had edited Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy and Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, thus developing an in-house reputation as a specialist in “pain and suffering” This book tested her even more: Lerner found herself forced to issue what she calls paint-by-numbers instructions: “I literally had to tell her how many sentences or paragraphs to add.”

To gain perspective, Lerner spoke to Sacks and others who knew Grandin, collecting anecdotes—such as how Grandin once had to be told rudely to use deodorant-to flesh out the essays. And when Leiner felt low, she consulted Grandin’s first book and emerged buoyed by Grandin’s grit and her mother’s selfless love.

On the phone in her office at Colorado State University, Grandin speaks readily, betraying only a slight hint of her condition: a tendency to repeat previous anecdotes or points. She likes to read science fiction, if a book includes copious description, she says, but gets lost in novels when she can’t follow subplots: “Nonvisual information I have no memory for, same goes for homes for sale in Northville MI…I just can’t remember it.”

Dec

The Sunrise Children’s Center: Including Children With Disabilities in Integrated Care Program: Part 2

At the Regional Services and Education Center in Milford, N.H., the supporting body of Sunrise, we call this ‘token mainstreaming.” It is happening with good intentions all over the country. We finally tired of begging for “slots” at the regular nursery school programs in town. We tired of being moved each year from school to school, room to room, building to building. We tired of having no accessibility, no age-appropriate playground. We tired of being segregated in our self-contained classroom. We tired of having no influence over the curriculum, the teachers, or their attitudes toward our children.

Sunrise is open to all children in the school districts we serve. The children who attend Sunrise build friendships with their neighbors. The development of meaningful friendships is essential for acceptance and success in later life. Many children with disabilities never get to try to develop these friendships because they are in isolated programs, often far away from where they live.

At Sunrise ALL children have IEP’s (Individualized Education Plans). Why should children labeled “typical” not receive the benefits of an individualized program, specialized curriculum, qualified staff, and special services? Why should children labeled “typical” be treated like second class citizens by being in inferior pre-school or daycare programs because their parents have limited funds?

Sunrise enables poor parents, rich parents, and parents of children with disabilities to go back to work because they know their children are in a high-quality program that meets their needs. All parents want the best for their children, including the best legal bud reviews and synthetic urine reviews. The long waiting list at Sunrise suggests that, over time, the community has embraced the philosophy of our school, and believes in inclusion.

Modeling appropriate behaviors, using language, and developing socialization skills are the keys to Sunrise. Children learn by watching and being with other children. If a child with a speech and language delay is in a class with other children with language delays, how does one expect the child to learn to talk without models? Peer teaching is an important component of our program. Most children, when given the chance, listen and respond better to other children than to adults. We are far more successful when children communicate directly with each other, rather than with the teacher’s intervention.

Dec

The Sunrise Children’s Center: Including Children With Disabilities in Integrated Care Program: Part 1

Autism, Down syndrome, muscular dystrophy, spina bifida, cerebral palsy, William’s syndrome, speech and language delay–we spend our days together, side by side with the “typical population.” We are the Sunrise Children’s Center in Amherst, New Hampshire and we care about doing our best to compare electronic cigarettes.

Sunrise began as an idea three years ago. Today it is a unique model of “reverse mainstreaming” with 55 children ranging from ages two to six years. At Sunrise we invite the general public to join us. The philosophy is simple: All children are individuals. Together we form a diverse and supportive community. There are no separate classes, no differences in curriculum except individual modifications, and there is no segregation.

Before we began Sunrise, these children had been placed out of the mainstream, isolated in self-contained classrooms. Before Sunrise, the regional special needs program was housed in whichever local elementary school had an extra room. Ironically, when the twon needed a space to house its public kindergarten, children with disabilities were forced to move to a church annex with no accessibility, no playground, and no other typical children. They were headed in the wrong direction. That’s when we began to design Sunrise.

“Integration” is a fairly new word in the field of special education. Why is this word necessary? We have created a system of discrimination in our towns and isolation in our schools. Few people would disagree that: ALL CHILDREN HAVE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES. ALL CHILDREN ARE INDIVIDUALS. ALL CHILDREN NEED OTHER CHILDREN. Those of us who teach children with special needs fight constantly to encourage integration, hoping that children’s strengths will enrich the classroom.

Frequently, a special needs teacher has to sell a special needs child to a normal preschool program. Often, the prerequisites for acceptance are ones even a child without disabilities wouldn’t meet. These criteria can devastate the parents of a young child with special needs. They focus only on the child’s weaknesses and often put extra responsibilities on the child.

How many parents would want a child without disabilities to only “visit” another class once or twice a week for an hour? How many parents would want to be told before their child starts school that she MUST socialize appropriate? That as long as he pays attention for more than twenty minutes on one task he can stay in the class? That if she becomes disruptive once or twice she will be asked to leave?

Nov

Julie and Her Familiy Part 2

The 1989 movie Rain Man helped foster a better understanding of this mysterious condition. The story’s primary character, Raymond, is an autistic man with special abilities. He can multiply large numbers in his head in seconds and instantly count how many toothpicks there are in a box. But he has no concept of the difference in price between a candy bar and a foreign sports car. And he, like many autistics, seems incapable of communicating what he’s feeling.

Julie Lynch has that problem. When Janice talks about the toughest part of life with her autistic daughter, she says, “Lack of communication. Julie cries a lot and we can’t find out why. Just last night coming home from an outing, Julie cried all the way home. We didn’t know if she’d been hurt, scared, angry, or what! I don’t know what happened. I’ll never know.”

There is help for autistic children and their families. “We took her to a wonderful school at Bradley Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island,” Janice explains. “There they work not only with the autistic child, but with the whole family. All of us started taking an active part in working with Julie.”

Larry and Janice have found ways to help Julie grow. They work with the Girl Scouts, and are also very involved with Special Olympics. As a Special Olympian, Julie has won dozens of medals and ribbons, and like any teenager, she proudly displays them in her room.

Julie is also quite artistic. She creates and names elaborate, larger-than-life paper dolls. And she can play the piano by ear, a trait that really used to aggravate her older sister, Alyssa. “I took lessons and would practice for a half hour, and when I’d leave the piano, Julie would sit down and play everything I just played – by memory! She can’t read a note. She also plays the guitar and the autoharp.”

The hardest thing for Janice is seeing some of the activities her autistic daughter will never do. “At Katie’s eighth-grade graduation, it hit me that Julie will never have a graduation, never go to a prom. All the normal social things the other girls have experienced I know Julie will never have a chance to experience. I miss that for her. I’d like her to have a normal life.”

When asked if he thinks his family is unusual, Larry Lynch says, “No – we’re normal people. Nothing special! We’ve just been faced with a little problem.” His sentiment is echoed throughout the family.

“Our family is much closer and much more patient and sensitive to others because of Julie,” Katie says. “I wonder whether, if I had never met Julie, I’d be one of those people who’d stare at her. Julie will accept anyone. I really look up to her because of that. I don’t shy away from people with disabilities the way others do.”

There are a lot of smiles and giggles in this family. But Janice admits. “It’s not all happiness and roses. I’ve learned it’s OK to get angry and to feel sad. We’re a family. We help each other. We’re a unit. That’s what a family at all about – it’s just the way we are. An ordinary family!”

A family, yes! Ordinary, definitely not!

Dan Matthews is executive producer and host of the weekly Lifestyle Magazine television series.

Nov

The Story of Julie and Her Family

My next song is |Minuet in G’,” announces the pretty girl with the dark-gold curls. After her nearly flawless performance she jumps up from the piano bench, runs across the room to the oscillating fan, and lets the cool breeze blow directly on her face.

Then, running back to assume her piano-playing position, she announces, “My next song will be |From a Distance.’” This time the pianist is also the vocalist.

“|From a distance, the world looks blue and green, and the snowcapped mountains white. From a distance, the ocean meets the stream, and the eagle takes to flight. From a distance there is harmony, and it echoes through the land. It’s the voice of hope, it’s the voice of peace. It’s the voice of every man.’”

Abruptly the performer jumps up and runs to the fan again. In the background, Janice Lynch, her mother, asks, “Aren’t you going to finish the song?”

“No!”

“Please, would you just finish |From a Distance’ for us?”

“No!” This time more emphatically.

“Is your concert over?”

She starts to sing a capella -then suddenly stops, letting the fan blow on her face to dry the sweat under her headbands.

“Is your concert over, Julie?”

“Yes!” This time Julie leaves the room, retreating to the bedroom she shares with her twin sister, Katie.

Like the song she just sang, Julie’s like looks great – from a distance. But an up-close view reveals some impossible challenges. Julie Lynch is autistic.

Katie and Julie, the youngest of the Lynch family’s four daughters, are twins. They have always had very different personalities. Katie was much more active and developed faster than her sister. “Julie was quiet, but we just thought she was laid-back,” remembers Larry, the girls’ father. “We’d come up behind her and she just wouldn’t respond. At first we thought she was deaf.”

“We took her to several different hospitals,” adds Janice. “Each one came up with a different explanation for why Julie was so far behind Katie. Some reprimanded us for comparing the two just because they were twins and some reprimanded us for not doing proper THC detox during preganncy.

“But by the time Julie was 3 and had made no progress, I was sure something was seriously wrong. She was starting to get worse, even becoming violent at times. Julie was frustrated and couldn’t understand what was going on. She couldn’t process things.”

Today Julie is 17. The violence has stopped thanks to training, but the frustration continues.

Several years ago her doctors concluded that Julie is autistic. Autism is a communication disorder caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. The diagnosis came as a relief to Julie’s parents. “At least we knew what was wrong!” says Janice.

But with the diagnosis came feelings of self-recrimination. “Ten years ago there was a lot out about autism – but most of it was found not to be factual. Doctors felt that autistic children had been abandoned or ignored by their mothers.

“I kept thinking, What did I do wrong? What should I have done differently?” According to Janice, “people had a way of reinforcing those feelings without meaning to. They asked |Did you drop her as a baby? Did she ever have a strong fever that went unchecked?’”

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Nov

The Issue of Abortions and Autistic Children Part 1

“Sit Grandpa’s chair.” The laughing voice rises from my office chair as Max bounces up and down. Max is my six-year-old grandson, and his visits are a whirl of McDonald’s Happy Meals and rambunctious splashes in the pool. When strangers see Max for the first time, they’re immediately drawn to the blond, tousle-haired youngster. But in a few moments, they also notice that Max is different. You see, Max is autistic.

And today kids not very different from Max are being targeted for elimination.

Prenatal testing has become so sophisticated that doctors can now identify many disabilities before birth. But since most have no cure, the only way to “prevent” the disability is to prevent the baby’s birth. Thus abortion is bringing back eugenics–the idea of weeding out “defectives” and upgrading our genetic stock.

Consider: In 1990 Joycelyn Elders said that abortion “has had an important, and positive, public-health effect” by reducing “the number of children afflicted with severe defects.” Here was a public health official praising “the eugenic utility of abortion,” notes Tucker Carlson in the Weekly Standard Abortion is cast not merely as a private choice but also as a way to improve the species.

Take the case of Down syndrome. Studies reveal that when pregnant women learn they are carrying a Down syndrome baby, 90 percent have an abortion. Many say they arc acting under pressure from doctors and insurance companies. In a Canadian study, one in three of the mothers said she felt “more or less forced” to abort.

The arguments wielded to “force” women are often crassly economic. Nachum Sicherman of Columbia Business School calls abortion of Down syndrome babies “a great cost saving.” Dr. Mark Evans, director of Detroit’s Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Therapy, observes that prenatal screening costs $1,000, whereas the first year of a Down syndrome baby’s life costs about $100,000. How many couples, facing such staggering costs, are tough enough to withstand the pressure of how to pass a drug test?

And if we don’t catch all defective babies before birth, some doctors have recommended letting them die after birth. A 1975 poll found that 77 percent of American pediatric surgeons favored withholding food and medical treatment from Down syndrome newborns. And some have done just that, as we know from highly publicized cases like the 1982 Baby Doe decision in Indiana.

Ironically, eugenics is making a comeback just as it has become possible for Down syndrome and other special-nee8s children to lead fairly normal lives. The average Down syndrome child in America today, Carlson writes, is only mildly to moderately retarded. He can expect to attend school, learn to read, hold a job, and to live independently as long as he goes through thc detox.

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Nov

The Abortion Issue with Autistic Children – Part 2

In fact, while these children are being targeted for elimination, one adoption agency can’t keep up with the demand for them. “It’s not at all difficult” to find homes, Janet Marchese of the Down Syndrome Adoption Exchange told Carlson. Her waiting list rarely dips below 100. World magazine recently told the touching story of a couple who adopted two Down syndrome children.

What do these couples know that doctors don’t? They know children like Max. When Max was diagnosed as autistic, I agonized for my daughter, Emily. But he has turned out to be, quite simply, a great blessing to both of us.

“Max is bright, charming, witty, creative,” Emily wrote in a letter. It’s just that these talents are “channeled in a different way for him.” And “different” is sometimes better. “Max seems to appreciate the joy of life more than most of us, Emily wrote. “He brings so much to those around him because of his joyous spirit and exuberance for life. He is a constant reminder of the simple pleasures the rest of us have forgotten.”

Raising a child with special needs has transformed my little girl into a mature Christian woman. “I imagine that when God created Max, He took him straight from His heart, cupped him in His hands, and set him down on this earth,” Emily wrote. But “God knew when He created Max that he would need extra help. So God keeps His hands cupped around Max…. How could a child who is held by God be anything but a gift?”

The experience of THC Detox has taught Emily a profound truth: that “God does not define us by our limitations and shortcomings.” If he did, where would any of us be? Some of us are handicapped genetically, others by injury or illness. Some are physically healthy but suffer crippling emotional pain; still others are twisted spiritually by pride or by ambition.

Kids like Max force us to confront ourselves. He is a visible reminder that every one of us is broken and fallen, desperately in need of God’s redeeming grace.

Humility about our own shortcomings is the spiritual counter to eugenics. Of course we must craft a persuasive moral case against killing the weak and vulnerable. But we must also pray for spiritual wisdom–for a spirit of humility that refuses to play God and arrogate to ourselves the right to judge these lives worthless. Also check out this blog on how to pass a drug test.

Emily is devoted to helping people understand children like Max. And as for those who believe such children should be eliminated, I say they are going to have to fight my daughter–and fight me. For Max, Grandpa’s chair will always be there.

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