Guest Post: A Quest for Healing by Dr. Raymond

Hi Everyone!

I am excited to be here today to bring you a guest post from Dr. Raymond.  Please help me with giving him a warm welcome.

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My first son, Jun Hyeong, was born the day before I was to defend my doctoral thesis in Chemical Engineering. He was beautiful and perfect, everything my wife, Suk Young and I could have hoped for. We didn’t know what the near future would hold for our son and for us. Expecting parents can never be prepared for their child to have a physical or emotional challenge and Suk Young and I were no exception. We were both working long hours and living with my parents who helped care for Jun most of the time and so the early warning signs escaped us until he was nearly five and could no longer go undetected. Our son showed symptoms of autism and further testing confirmed it. In the midst of our shock, upset and self-blame for not having noticed sooner and gotten Jun help, we were faced with trying to find help for Jun as well as raising our two other sons, Ji and Chae who had joined our family in Jun’s first few years of life.

Around that same time, Jun and my third son, Chae, developed severe cases of atopic dermatitis. Ironically, my career path had led me to the research and development of a skin solution to treat conditions such as atopic dermatitis safely, without prescription medicines and which was geared toward actually healing the skin barrier. My formula was in the clinical testing stage and I used it on both children with amazing success. Both boys’ atopic dermatitis cleared up and did not return.

The beauty of that success was that not only had I been able to help heal my children of an affliction, but I was in a position to offer that same healing to the world at large. After some more development and clinical testing, Atopalm came into existence and helped heal atopic dermatitis, rosaecea and overall dry chapped skin. Further experience began to reveal that autistic children had a higher incidence of atopic dermatitis and, determined to understand, I began to delve into the possible causes. The research would take a long time and I wanted to be able to do something to bring relief to these children as soon as possible. My solution was to sponsor large-scale events for autistic children and their parents at my company. A program called “Happy Happy Life” was born, a day of exercise, socializing and a barbecue for everyone.

At the beginning of the event, my team and I would check the skin condition of all the children participating, and then check them again at the end of the day. After the exercising and social interaction, we noticed that not only did the boys and girls and their parents become much happier, beginning to smile and talk due to the social connection, fresh air and community of supporting each other, but the actual condition of their skin had improved in one day.

Since then I have been working on developing an early warning system for parents of autism in children that uses the skin’s condition to measure the possibility of autism developing. If the autism is detected early enough, parents can get their child all the developmental help needed as soon as possible. I never want another child’s symptoms to go undetected for any length of time if I can do anything to prevent it. Nor do I want another parent to suffer the added guilt and self-recrimination of thinking they did not help their child when they could have.

A Quest For Healing is, in part, an account of this journey. A book is a crucial way to get a message out to the world and I wanted to tell it as a parent for other parents because we all love our children so much and only want what’s best for them. But this book is also meant to be a gift for my other two sons who have been so supportive and loving of their older brother and who have faced many difficulties because their parents were so preoccupied with their brother’s welfare that we were often absent. That is also a great pain for me as a parent and I have wanted to heal my relationships with them as well. . By sharing with them the challenges I had growing up with my own father, and how I have come to understand my own mistakes as a parent, I hope this book is a way of their understanding how much they have been loved all along and to tell them about all they couldn’t see or know these past years.

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Happy Reading!