Natasha Campbell-McBride

Download Interview Transcript  My first born son was diagnosed autistic at the age of three which threw me into a huge learning curve because I had to find a solution to his problem because my own profession had nothing to offer which was a bit of a shock for me. Having found all those solutions, I went back to the university. I completed a second postgraduate degree in human nutrition and learned many more other things. As a result, my son fully recovered. He is not autistic anymore. He is living a normal life.  I have a clinic in Cambridge in England, in the UK which is very busy with children and adults with learning disabilities, neurological disorders, psychiatric disorders and children and adults with immune disorders and digestive problems.

It was 1 in 10,000 when I graduated. It was a very rare disorder. Even I as a medical graduate have never seen an autistic patient. By the time I graduated from my medical school I have never an autistic individual. I have seen other psychiatric conditions through my course in psychiatry but have never seen an autistic child. To be honest, the first autistic child that I have encountered was my own. As I said, 20 years ago in the Western world and certainly in the English-speaking world, we were diagnosing one child in 10,000. Fifteen years ago, we were diagnosing and five years ago we were diagnosing one child in 150 which is almost a 40-fold increase in incidence. Now in Britain and some countries, we are diagnosing one child in 66.