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Dear Friends,We need your help now more than ever. Since its inception - not that long ago - this site has had over 6,000,000 visitors. For a non-commercial site (that we've kept free of banners or adverstisements for you) that has had neither government nor public nor corporate funding, this is a significant achievement and speaks for the success and the importance of the much-needed information we are providing.
Please read below why your contributions are so very important to us now. If you've found the information here useful to yourself, your children or others, and you want to assist us in keeping this site on-line and updated with new sections, articles and resources, please know that we would be most grateful for your support!
We've made it easy for you to donate as little as one dollar using your credit card - securely, safely and privately - using Amazon.com's one-click "Honor System" or PayPal's "Donate" feature below.
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Since its inception - not that long ago - this site has had over 400,000 visitors. For a non-commercial site (that we've kept free of banners or adverstisements for you) that has had neither government nor public nor corporate funding, this is a significant achievement and speaks for the success and the importance of the much-needed information we are providing.When this page was first posted (November 2001), the month's statistics were the best yet for the site, in spite of the general downward trend in visits to similar sites since the 9/11 events. 36,416 people visited the site - up from 28,710 in the previous month. More than 2.1 gigabytes (2,185,134 KB) of information were downloaded from the site in November. Given that this is not a graphics-intensive site, that's an incredible amount of valuable information that we've offered the world!
Since the beginning of 2002, visitors to the site have increased each month, averaging 42,500 visitors per month and an average of 2.6 gigabytes (2,591,250 KB) of information downloaded each month. Given that this is not a graphics-intensive site, that's an incredible amount of valuable information that we've offered the world! In addition our Web-Forums now archive in a searchable index over 1,700 questions and their replies.
In order to be able to achieve this, our Webmaster, Peter Shefler, has devoted over a hundred hours of his time each month:
Not to mention - of course - paying out of pocket expenses such as phone and utility bills, computer software and hardware upgrades and repairs, as well as the actual hosting of the website.
- designing, editing, researching and formatting each of the 100+ pages on this site.
- responding to and/or redirecting the hundreds of email enquiries that come in each week from the articles and information we post.
- maintaining, updating and adding to over 1,000 external links to additional related information, research and resources.
- contacting other websites to coordinate a network of continually expanding knowledge about causes of and treatments for developomental disorders and related neurometabolic conditions (through these efforts, to date, there are over 400 different websites - many of them major ones - that link to us).
- maintaining and upgrading the software that runs our internal search features, web-hosting, log analysis, and of course, the many Web-Forums that we offer here.
- creating meta-tags that will enhance our rankings with the search engines and registering each page on a continual basis with the many search engines (to get an idea of how we rank with the major search engines, see some examples of actual queries that people used to find this site).
Although we have submitted SBIR and STTR grants to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research studies regarding treatments in the areas covered in this site, only a fraction of those monies, if ever awarded, will actually go to maintining or adding to this website itself. And although we are now beginning to search for funding from private foundations and other resources, this effort will not bring income for at least another year.
In the meantime, there are no funds currently available for the continuation or expansion of this site. This is why your contributions are so very important to us now.
Your donations will be used to:
- allow us to add additional articles and reviews of treatment modalities to the site that have actually already been written, but need to be updated, edited, formatted and uploaded to the server.
- help upgrade the format, navigation and content of the website so that it makes the material here more accessible and fully complies with the HON code of ethics for on-line medical information.
- pay for server fees that will allow us to offer more bandwith and quicker response times, in order to appropriately accomodate the increased traffic we are experiencing.
- hire a part-time assistant to handle many of the non-technical yet essential responsibilities of the maintaining the site - as mentioned in the previous section.
- add additional Web-Forums and new sections for disorders and treatments that have not yet been covered.
- engage the services of a professional grant-writer and/or fund-raiser.
- cover the legal fees for establishing this website as part of a non-profit (501-C) entity, so that any donations to this website will be tax-exempt to the fullest extent of the law.
- compensate in part the best medical experts in the field for the time needed to write cutting-edge informative articles for the site that would otherwise not be publically available.
- create on-line database forms, questionnaires and clinical instruments that can be used to assess specific treatment protocols for children with developmental delays, brain injury or related neuro-metabolic disorders (the Autism Research Institute's ATEC is a great example of this kind of service).
If you don't wish to or are not able to contribute to this website project financially, and you're still interested in helping us - and in the process, helping many other children with developmental delays, brain injury or related neurometabolic disorders or their parents and caregivers - here are some ways you can still contribute:
- If you are a professional in these fields or have expertise in Autism, ADHD, Cerebral Palsy or develomental disorders and neurometabolic conditions, you can volunteer to answer the many technical questions continually posted on our WebForums.
If you'd like to be responsible for monitoring a particular forum, we'd be glad to compensate you by mentioning your service there and offering a link back to your practice or your own web page.
- If you are a doctor or licensed practitioner, and wish to contribute an article, review or research information to this website, we will (upon acceptance) be glad to "publish" it here on its own separate page and will give you credit and reciprocal links back to your practice or web site.
Given the high volume of visitors and reputation of this site, this could be a very good opportunity for you to promote your views or your practice to a very wide audience at no cost. Dr. Amy Holmes' article, Chelation of Mercury for the Treatment of Autism, is a very good example of how much exposure this format can bring while providing valuable information to the public.
- If you have skills as a grant-writer or fund-raiser, we would be glad to enlist your services on a commission basis.
- You can purchase books from Amazon.com through our many Bookstores and Libraries. If you order these books directly from a link on this website, we receive a small commission from Amazon.com through their Associates Program.
- You can let all your friends know about this website, remembering that if only 10% of the people who visited this site donated just $1 that that alone would cover the majority of the budget we are anticipating for the next year.
Please feel free to contact us here at any time regarding the above opportunities, and again, thank-you for visiting our site. We hope the information we are providing is making a difference for the better in this world.
With Best Regards,
Dr. Lewis E. Mehl-Madrona
Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry
Department of Family Medicine
University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine
Saskatoon, Canada
Our mission is to provide the most comprehensive site available for the discussion of medical and physical therapies for the treatment of brain-injured children, hence creating a networking structure for parents and physicians alike. This website will provide viewers a new way of looking at neuro-metabolic disease, and offer a creative opportunity for involvement in the exploration of medicine and healing."
__ From Fia Richmond's original Mission Statement
How are we doing in the rankings of the major search engines?
As an example of how we are ranked by the major search engines, the following examples from one day's web-log of actual queries made to the search engines, and how we ranked are only a tiny sampling of thousands of similar requests for the information we provide and that the public is so desperately seeking:
- "autism treatments" = #1 out of 1,580,000 websites
- "mercury chelation" = #1 out of 352,000 websites
- "autism theories" = #1 out of 1,390,000 websites
- "educational therapies for autistic children" = #1 out of 872,000 websites
- "brain damage in children" = #3 out of 2,770,000 websites
- "alternative treatments for ADHD" = #1 out of 1,840,000 websites
- "stem cell research and cerebral palsy" = #3 out of 621,000 websites
- "stem cell therapy for autism" = #1 out of 1,180,000 websites
- "homeopathic remedies for ADHD" = #1 out of 171,000 websites
- "drug treatments for ADHD" = #1 out of 1,770,000 websites
- "dpt vaccine" = #4 out of 318,000 websites
- "vaccines and mercury" = #1 out of 889,000 websites
- "Dr. Amy Holmes" = #1 out of 1,090,000 websites
- "chelation" = #4 out of 198,000 websites
- "ADHD herbs" = #1 out of 889,000 websites
- "anti-fungal treatments" = #1 out of 1,180,000 websites
- "educational toys for autistic children" = #3 out of 268,000 websites
- "DAN doctors" = #3 out of 1,890,000 websites
- "risks of vaccines" = #1 out of 1,780,000 websites
- "autism treatment evaluation checklist" = #1 out of 181,000 websites
- "emotional center of the brain" = #1 out of 1,420,000 websites
- "what is secretin" = #16 out of 150,000 websites
When the site first debuted, for the query "what is secretin", our site ranked #1 out of 16,741,310 results (before the search engines stopped listing all pages from a particular site in their results). Now - as above - it only ranks as #16. Why? Because we haven't updated that page on Secretin recently!
Most websites, and many, like the Autism Research Association, update their site weekly and add at least one major article a month. Because of a lack of budget for this and other things, our increasingly popular site will soon be "outdated", rather than "innovative". Please help us keep these pages up to date for the thousands of visitors who seek information and assistance from this site each day.
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