This article contains excerpts from “Medical Mavericks” Vol 3 Hugh Riordan, M.D.
Dr. Ruth Harrell discovered that when a child has a 10 point increase in IQ, the family knows about it. When a child has a 15 point increase in IQ, the teachers know about it. And when a child has a 20 point increase in IQ, the neighborhood knows about it.
One such child was a boy who at the age of seven was still in diapers, had never spoken a word in his life, could walk but was unable to run, and did not recognize his parents. His IQ was considered to be between 25 and 30. After 30 days of taking the her recommended supplements, the parents reported that there was still no improvement at all in the boy. After performing some laboratory tests measuring the nutrient levels they found that nothing was showing up in his blood tests.
Dr. Harrell then doubled the boy’s recommended dosage of everything, except for a few vitamins and minerals which she decided to triple. Ten days later, the boy’s mother called Dr. Harrell on the phone and was screaming so euphorically that Dr. Harrell could not understand what the woman was trying to say.
The only thing Dr. Harrell could figure out with certainty was that the woman was ecstatically happy. She asked the woman to call back in a few hours, when she might be more calm, which the boy’s mother agreed to do. When she called back later that evening, the boy’s mother described to Dr. Harrell that her son had “turned on like an electric light.”
The seven-year-old boy, who had never spoken a word before in his life, was suddenly talking and asking about everything. He especially wanted to know the names of every small and large thing that he saw. He went all throughout the house pointing to things and asking what each thing was. “That is a desk,” or “this is a cup,” his mother would say. At one point, the boy pointed to his father and asked for the name, to which his mother replied,
“This is your father. You call him ‘daddy.’” Then the boy pointed to his mother, and she told her son, “I’m your mother. You call me ‘mommy.’” Upon recounting this to Dr. Harrell, the boy’s mother burst into tears. “I think he sees us for the first time,” she told Dr. Harrell.
Soon the boy learned to read and write. When he was nine years old, he could read and write at his appropriate elementary school level, he was moderately advanced in arithmetic, and, according to his teacher, was “mischievous and active.” He rode a bicycle and a skateboard, he enjoyed playing ball with other children, he played the flute, and he had an IQ of 90. “It appeared that, even after seven years of deprivation,” Dr. Harrell wrote, “he responded to some nutrients in a remarkable way.”