If you’ve found your way here, you already know your child is autistic — or you’re close to it. That part isn’t the question.
What brought you here is the other thing. The sense that underneath the diagnosis, something else is going on in your child’s body — and that no one has helped you find it.
You’ve probably heard the same things I hear from parents every week:
“He’s too young to assess.”
“Speech delay doesn’t always mean autism.”
“Use the picture cards while you wait for the referral.”
“Give it time.”
You’ve been handed paperwork and waiting lists, and told to wait. And while you wait, you’re the one watching the sleep that won’t settle, the gut that’s never right, the good fortnight that vanishes for no reason you can name — wondering why the SALT sessions and the OT and everything you’re doing right isn’t moving the needle the way it should.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of clinical work, and it’s the reason this exists:
In a lot of autistic children, the body is carrying a biological load — in the gut, the immune system, sleep, nutrition — that keeps the brain in a state of low-grade inflammation. A brain under that load can’t easily take in and use the very input that speech therapy, OT and school support are trying to give it.
It’s not that the therapy is wrong. It’s that the biology isn’t ready to support it yet. Reduce the load, and the conditions change. The therapy starts to land.
I’m Paul Foley. I’m a functional medicine practitioner, and I work with the biology underneath autism — not to treat the autism itself, but to find and reduce what’s working against a child’s development.
Let me be straight about what this is and isn’t. I won’t tell you autism can be cured, reversed, or recovered from. I don’t believe that, and any place that promises it should lose your trust. What I will do is show you how to identify the biological load your specific child is carrying — gut, sleep, food, nutrients, immune, environment — and how to reduce it, so their sleep, digestion, behaviour and capacity to develop have room to improve.
And one thing you can put down: the guilt. The pregnancy, the antibiotics, the thing you think you did or didn’t do. It isn’t the useful question, and it isn’t where any of this starts. Agency is.
Here, I’ll write plainly — no jargon you’d need a science degree to follow — and only about things that help you make a better decision for your child in the next thirty days.
If you do one thing today, do this: hit reply and tell me the single biggest thing disrupting your child’s sleep or behaviour right now. I read every one. It’s how I know what to write next — and it’s the start of a conversation, not a broadcast.
Welcome. I’m glad you found it.
— Paul