10/10/2024
Autism and a Change of Trajectory
To my friends and anyone interested, I am making a change of trajectory on this account and using it to share my observations, research, thoughts, and feelings from my work in the field of autism and neurodiversity. As I practise observing the structure of my own mind and experiences, I find them uniquely suited to working in this field.
The rest of this post is just a story of how I ended up here, for anyone interested.
I was born into an amalgam of pharmacy and psychotherapy, and whilst I have been working and practising in pharmacy since I was 12, it has always been through a psycho-spiritual lens—combining the physical nature of Western medicine with the mind and heart of the human being.
I registered as a pharmacist in 2006 after doing my intern year at Alice Springs Base Hospital. From there, I worked with my Dad in our Pharmacy for several years and then ultimately ended up in Karratha in 2011.
In 2014, I had a mid-career crisis when I began to see that much of what I had been taught in medicine—since the beginning of my work life—was either a partial mistruth or an outright lie.
As my journey in medicine, health, and healing continued, I came to see that our current system of medicine is mostly fundamentally broken. It is not a system of “health” care. It seeks only to put band-aids on dis-ease, steering away from asking the deeper questions: What are the root causes? And how do we support a human being into health and greater balance?
Whilst I haven’t abandoned everything I was taught; I no longer feel that I belong to that system.
After 2014, my research led to both a dismantling and a rebuilding of my understanding of human health. Each discovery broke down old beliefs and laid the groundwork for new insights. Though I will say upfront that I know very little, if anything, about the human body, mind, and ‘heart’. I am still very much a student.
In the field of medicine and health, I can no longer accept being ‘told’ that anything is ‘the truth’ without passing it through my own internal lens of understanding. During COVID, it was through this lens that I dismantled the remaining dogma within me around the human immune system, viruses, and virology. This coincided with my abrupt departure from the pharmacy system, as I was no longer welcome to practise in that environment.
Three months afterwards, I opened Restore Integrative Clinic, where I could fully embrace a holistic approach to healing.
When I worked in the pharmacies in Karratha, all types of people would come and ask me all types of questions about the human body—from cancer to cannabis oil, autoimmune dis-ease to IBS, to chronic pain. My curiosity and desire to understand would lead me to research to the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of any conditions I came across.
This same approach carried into the clinic, and I’ve had the great privilege of working with people who come to me with many different aspects of human suffering.
Then why Autism?
After 2 years of exploring various aspects of human health, I found myself drawn to autism, a field that seemed to encapsulate all the complexity and curiosity I had encountered throughout my career. It was a condition that required a deep understanding of both the body, mind and heart.
When parents with children diagnosed with autism started to find me in the clinic, I applied my usual mixture of curiosity and research. What I observed and learnt evoked a mixture of excitement, horror, and rage.
I felt excitement at discovering a field whose complexity required more than the sum of my research and experience in many different areas of the human body. I was excited to work with such beautiful children, and parents in need.
However, my horror and rage came from the realisation that, in the field of medicine and health, there is a terrible lack of fundamental education around autism. I have observed this lack of proper information has led to terrible injustices being done to both people with a diagnosis of autism, their parents and carers.
I’ve sat with this for some time now and thought that, in my chaotic life, I would give up clinical work for a while… but I find that I cannot… and thus, this profile is for me to tell my stories.
The sum of my life experiences has led me to this field, and I feel entirely grateful and relieved to have found ‘my place’ in my career.
I humbly welcome discussions and questions on the vast topic that is Autism and neurodiversity.
