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Improving Eye Contact - The most remarkable impact of Dr. Tomato's Korean Herbal Medicine on Children with Autism
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One : Improvement of Eye Contact
The first change one will witness after starting to take Korean herbal medicine is an improvement in eye contact; it doesn’t take too long to see changes in eye contact. Soon enough, eye contact will improve in one or two weeks. In severe cases of older age, it will take one or two months. Once a person starts taking Korean herbal medicine, the effect will be quickly apparent, and children who respond positively to the treatment will achieve the ability to make eye contact like a neurotypical child. It will take three to nine months to gain stable eye contact.
Because of this fantastic effect, I often called my prescription for autism treatment “Korean eye contact medicine.” Improvement in eye contact is a definite changer in autism treatment. One of the most noticeable characteristics of children with autism spectrum disorder is difficulty making direct eye contact. Even if they do, they selectively make eye contact only briefly. To address this, behavioral treatment often involves clinicians inducing eye contact. However, trained eye contact is not evidence of improvement in autism. It is essential to restore your instinctive, natural, and biological ability to make eye contact.
The absence of eye contact does not mean that a person with autism will never make eye contact. In the visual processing of background and foreground, most people mainly deal with humans and other objects with low priority. However, in the case of autistic people, when visual information is input in a state where things and people are mixed, there may be a phenomenon in which people and objects are equally attentive. Therefore, when there are different objects and people in one space, the focus is on exploring things with much more stimulating and diverse sensory elements, which in turn causes weak eye contact with the people.
Object-oriented visual processing is a critical obstacle to social development. Where humans and objects exist in the same space, neurotypical children build information about people through interaction, whereas autistic children build information about things. If this continues, children will not understand and engage with people around them, and eventually, children will have significant challenges in their social and emotional development.
Observing their surroundings with a primary focus on living things is common to all mammals. It is a genetically coded and neurologically working instinct of humans. Autistic children have impaired neurological operability in this term, meaning they lack the intrinsic abilities to develop social skills. Therefore, the starting point of overcoming autism should be recovering human-centered vision processing, achieved by restoring the autistic child’s natural ability to make eye contact.
Remarkably, Korean herbal medicine helps restore natural eye contact abilities. Now they change from a child who observes and explores objects to one who focuses on and explores people with eye contact. They can develop their understanding of people and improve their interaction skills. Cognitive behavioral training to get a child to make eye contact teaches mimicking eye contact and does not help them develop their intrinsic social skills. Regaining inherent eye contact to establish social skills means change and recovery from how autistic people view the world to how neurotypical humans view it.
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Two : Improvement of Overall Sensory abnormality
When a child’s eye contact improves by taking Korean herbal medicine, they also undergo overall sensory rearrangement, which I call “sensory reset.” This is the process through which they recover from autistic sensory abnormality to a neurotypical child’s sensory status and moves their sensory processing patterns closer to neurotypical. This improvement is observed along with improvement in eye contact. If children recover from these stages, it will take six months, if sooner, or twelve months if later, for them to regain very stable sensory status.
Below are descriptions of neurotypical sensory rearrangements that will help you understand what they are.
First, Reducing visual-seeking behaviors
The most common visual-seeking behaviors are shaking fingers in front of their eyes and being obsessed with things that spin. Normalizing eye contact means the habit of object-centered vision processing is re-adjusted, hence a significant reduction in visual seeking. This, in turn, leads to increases in time spent observing people. However, autistic people have powerful inclinations toward a visual perception of objects. It may take several years for some trivial habits (askance, looking at the side while running, etc.) to recover.
Second, the stabilization of auditory sensitivity.
Many autistic children fear certain sounds and hardly respond when trying to get their attention. Their phobic reaction to sound will be stabilized, and they will gradually become responsive to calling.
Third, reducing oral seeking behavior and tactile resistance.
Oral seeking appears as behaviors such as bringing objects into their mouth like babies in their initial oral stage. Tactile resistance causes challenges in daily activities as they refuse to be in contact with certain things, for example, refusing to step on the sand. These are results of the hypersensitivity or hyposensitivity of the skin. In most cases, children’s sensory abnormalities will return to normal by the time they can make eye contact.
Fourth, the stabilization of the vestibular sense.
Many children with autism have a blunted response to the vestibular sense. In this case, children keep overreacting and being in a distracted state. They also tend to climb up to high places, and some do not feel dizzy when they twirl. With their vestibular sense stabilized, children suddenly experience a sense of calm and regain the typical feeling of dizziness, resulting in less twirling behaviors.
The child will also undergo various sensory normalization processes. As the sensations in the tongue restore, most children will speak more. Children who used to talk in a high tone will now speak normally, and the awkward, machine-like pronunciation will soften.
Why do these sensory rearrangements occur, along with eye contact? Because sensory abnormality is caused by inflammation in the brain stem. The brain stem coordinates sensory signals from sensory organs and delivers them to the cerebral cortex. Inflammation caused by autoimmune responses results in disruptions in eye contact and overall sensory processing disorders.
Korean herbal medicine is believed to have excellent effects on soothing this brain stem inflammation. Controlling autoimmune reactions in the brain stem, the “Korean herbal medicine for eye contact” helps re-establish overall sensation and regain eye contact. Once this sensation has been recovered, the child’s autistic characteristics will be virtually eliminated, and they will display more neurotypical behaviors and act like a typical child.
When they reach the sensory re-establishment state, they are out of autism regarding behavior and learning patterns. Without particular instructions, they will start observing how people act and imitate the acts and start social learning on their own; when the child has independently mimicked social skills, the child is effectively out of autism. They may still be somewhat behind their peers in certain aspects, not all, but there is hope that they will reach their full potential.
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Three : Improvement of Self-Absorption
Autistic children tend to be absorbed with themselves or a particular object or subject without being aware of their surroundings. In mild cases, it may result in a state of excellent attention. However, in severe cases, they often neither recognize nor respond to signs of interaction with others, leading to social isolation. I define this absorption disorder as a state of immersion that interferes with social interaction and social development.
People often describe children who exhibit excessive absorption as “out of space.” Their eyes look dull, they are paralyzed as if drunk, and they are entirely lost in their thoughts. They are often seen as overly calm and not responding to social cues.
A peculiar behavioral pattern observed in children with absorption is sudden emotional changes without reason. They burst into laughter or burst into tears without any change in their surroundings. Sometimes they get angry and irritable for no reason. The intensity of these emotional changes is so strong, and they are so immersed in emotions that they do not change easily. Words and actions that appease the other person will not bring much change. They often only respond to powerful stimuli.
They act like this because they recall specific events from their past based on information stored in their cerebral cortex without any external stimulation. This is also common in neurotypical people. However, they would not immerse themselves in the emotions as they know their imagination and memories are not present. However, children with autism have a weak sense of reality and cannot distinguish between their memories and the present. This explains how they felt about the past in the present moment. They lose contact with reality and cannot differentiate between the past and the present.
This absorption is thought to result from autoimmune reactions triggered by inflammation in the cerebral cortex. The inflammatory reactions themselves are enough to excite the cerebral cortex without external stimulation. Absorption is rarely observed in mild cases or younger children but is observed in almost all severe cases in older ages. The surprising thing about absorption is that the child appears to have an intellectual disability when the symptoms worsen. Therefore, early treatment and intervention are critical to prevent worsening.
Korean herbal medicine can help reduce autoimmune reactions in the cerebral cortex. With treatment using Korean herbal medicine, absorption disorder will significantly improve to greater or lesser degrees. The following are observations implying improvement of absorption:
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Four : Improvement of Self-Learning Abilities for Social Development
With the combination and achievement of the three effects described earlier – improvement of eye contact, sensory abnormality, and absorption – the child is now ready to overcome autistic challenges. Being free from autistic challenges means the child can develop social skills independently.
Eye contact means they can keep pace with others and observe people’s facial expressions and emotional changes in the face. Free from absorption enables people-centered information processing, hence increasing interest in people and desire to interact with people. Now they can observe people. Once they start observing how others behave and are motivated to interact with others, they can actively mimic how others act. By this time, they will be able to point and conjugate gaze. Now they will start gradually developing non-verbal interaction skills.
With the normalization of various sensory issues, stereotyped behaviors as an extension of sensory seeking will reduce. When typical autistic behaviors reduce, the child will start to find ways of initiating. Now they will exhibit less abnormal behaviors and establish themselves in regular physical movements and habits.
They will also start observing people, displaying the desire to play with others, actively mimicking other people, and using body and facial language used by others. This means they have started to learn how to interact with others.
This is an authentic change.
The autistic child can start building self-led learning abilities to interact with the world. When they have self-led learning abilities, they have turned from the autism spectrum disorder state to the non-spectrum disorder state, which means they are out of autism.
ADOS classifies this state as a non-spectrum disorder.
By this time, I declare the success of the treatment as the child is virtually out of autism. No signs of autism are observed in the child’s behavioral patterns, although the child is still in delayed development in terms of social skills. With appropriate education and training, the child can return to neurotypical.
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Five : Development of Learning Abilities by Improving Attention and Concentration Skills
When children start interacting with people and learning independently, they are virtually out of autism. However, this does not necessarily mean complete recovery from developmental delays caused by autism.
The biggest challenge in the process of treatment of autism is cognitive development delay. In many children with autism, intellectual disability is often identified through testing. Autism spectrum disorder is a degenerative disease that can lead to intellectual disability. If early treatment is successful, intellectual disability can, in many cases, be avoided, but even with later treatment, some degree of intellectual disability is unavoidable.
The most common cognitive decline is impairment in comprehensive thinking. They may show an excellent cognitive response to simple problems but exhibit compromised cognitive functions when they face complicated issues. Also, there are cases where they have high linguistic intelligence but low motoric intelligence. In these cases, they are communicable but exhibit poor responses to real-world problems.
In many cases, they experience significant impairment in the speed needed to process information. While thinking abilities are essential for cognitive skills, the speed of information processing and response is another important factor. They may find the correct answer but knowing the answer itself will be of no use in reality if it takes too long to find the answer.
Declines in comprehensive thinking, motoric intelligence, and information processing speed are interconnected and entangled, hindering the child’s learning ability and cognitive ability development. As a result, even with improved autistic features, they experience declines in learning and cognitive abilities hence challenges in returning to everyday life.
Another issue is the lack of concentration.
Most autistic children show attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. In reality, not only does hyperactivity cause problems, but the weaker concentration in learning also causes underachievement and learning difficulties.
The fundamental cause of all these manifestations is a decline in the cerebral cortex’s sensitivity and function. These can be even worse if the child has immersion disorder caused by autoimmune reactions in the cerebral cortex. Even mild, prolonged autism spectrum disorders lead to a weaker response by the cerebral cortex, hence cognitive declines.
A solution to this is improving the responsiveness of the cerebral cortex to strengthen cognitive responses. However, such treatments are unavailable in traditional medicine. Traditional Western therapies have failed to treat ADHD or cognitive development problems.
Common alternative therapies for autism, such as biomedical and vitamin-mineral therapies, have no treatments to improve cognitive responsiveness. As a result, biomedical approaches are helpless in treating Asperger’s and ADHD.
However, Dr. Tomato’s protocol presents solutions to a significant part of this problem. Once the child has regained self-led learning abilities, the treatment focuses on normalizing the child’s cognitive learning abilities. Improving the cerebral cortex’s responsiveness leads to improved comprehensive thinking, motoric intelligence, and information processing speed.
This approach applies to children who have more than severe autism and are considered to have Asperger syndrome.
