Autism affects the brain in ways that are not completely understood. If parents notice symptoms early enough then behavioral intervention can help children develop social skills, but there is no way to cure them of disorder. One sign of autism is a child that does not smile or pay attention to other people. They are less likely to make eye contact and are much more likely to communicate by grabbing a parent's hand. Autistic children will not often mimic or even respond to different expressions or emotions, a common way that children learn basic social skills. Most autism sufferers will not be capable of living on their own as adults, although a small number are able to live independently.

The major social skill that autistic people lack is the ability to understand the intentions of other people. This is a skill that most of us take for granted. For a person with autism, being among people, even people they have known all their life, is like being among an alien race. They are not able to understand any of the non-verbal communication that makes up such a large part of human interaction.

Autism can be displayed in different levels of severity. More than a third of autism sufferers do not develop speech skills enough to be fully functional. This stunted development can be tracked from the first year of life when autistic children babble less than other children. They may also exhibit unusual gestures and vocal patterns and fail to coordinate their vocal patterns with those of the caregiver. As children get older, they are less likely to make requests or share their experiences, both signs of a lack of connection with other people.

Highly functional autistic people can have excellent vocabularies and spelling and be very well spoken. But they still have trouble with complicated language tasks like reading comprehension or inferences. Concepts like sarcasm are totally lost on them. In fact it would be difficult to even explain the concept to an autistic person in a way that they could understand.

There are treatments available for autism, none of which can provide a cure. Their focus instead is to improve the quality of life for the autistic person and their family. There is no consensus on the best methods as every case seems to be different, but some systematic treatment is better than none. With me, an autistic person can gain a certain level of functional independence and learn to approximate basic social skills.

In order to understand the reasons of this epidemic of pediatric diseases, we have to realize that all chronic conditions have one feature in common: low body oxygenation. It is always present in cancer, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and many other disorders. In order measure oxygenation of the child, one can gently the nose of the child and observe how long it would take before the child opens their mouth to breathe. Typical breath holding time of young children (up to 5-7 years old) is around 5 seconds. Such children usually breathe through the mouth and this is another definite factor of poor health.

Healthy children can easily hold their breath up to 40-60 seconds. They can have long dives under water and this is another indicator of poor body oxygenation. Low body oxygenation is produced due to chronic over-breathing. Normally, breathing of sick children is audible and visible.

Doctor Buteyko, a leading Soviet physiologist, trained about 200 medical professionals how to apply breathing retraining therapy in order to increase oxygenation of tissues and treat chronic conditions. These doctors revealed that chronic diseases quickly disappeared when body oxygenation is about 40-60 seconds. Many of his doctors were paediatricians. They found that the following factors cause poor health in modern children;

1) Women hyperventilate during pregnancy without noticing it and this is as dangerous for the health of the fetus as smoking or drinking alcohol.
2) Many hospitals do not use swaddling anymore. If a child is not swaddled until the time when they can exercise, then this child develops over-breathing.
3) Mouth breathing, as mentioned above, is another factor.
4) As it was noticed by Dr. Lapa, who was practising the Buteyko breathing method in Russia for children:

"The most serious damaging factors leading to uncontrollable growth of the depth of breathing are over- feeding of kids, over-heating and a lack of physical activity. Children's development depends greatly on their environment. The smaller they are, the bigger the dependency. That is why they often copy a character, views, habits of their parents, including their attitude to health. If mother and father do nothing to improve their health, any attempts to do something for children in this respect are taken by them as unjust and a constraint. The best encouraging motivation for kids is an example from parents, a competition with them. That means rehabilitation must be a family business."