KGS,
If they expect me to pay them to continue my association here after my free 30 days are up, they should not limit duscussion of things that are harmful to autistic children. I think my question is legitimate. I asked in an email and got no response so I asked it here.
Sorry, I should have included a whole batch of rolleyes. Neither my friend nor any of the hundreds of nerds I know who are perfectly happy to call ourselves nerds have any interest in being called autistic. And if you’ve been with a woman for ten years and she suddenly decides that because you (a computer programmer and single child born of two single children) don’t have much to talk about with her dozens of farmer siblings and cousins, you need fixing… damnit, but she should have thought about it years before!
Those online self tests, like your list, would call ANY engineer ever an “autistic lite.” I find this stupid, bothersome for us engineers (who are suddenly at risk of being “fixed”, my mother spent my childhood and my engibrother’s trying to fix us already and thanks but no thanks), and demeaning for those who actually need help, like your kid. Sort of like the difference between having the blues and endogenous depression.
Hmmm, still no answer. The lawyer must have done a good job of scaring them.
You’re the one who’s limiting discussion. One-trick ponies don’t last long around here.
Maybe there’s a reason for that.
If it doesn’t harm the children, you call it “proper chelation”. the “No true Scotsman” fallacy.
Could you admit that there might be other causes, or is your mind made up on the subject? What test did you administer to your child that eliminated genetics?
You never tested your children for mercury poison before setting them up with such a drastic “therapy”?!? I don’t mind that you have your own pet theories, but to endanger the lives of your children on such flimsy evidence?
You have no, I repeat no evidence that your children ever had mercury poisoning. You didn’t see the snake bite your children. You didn’t even see the snake. You can’t even show evidence that the snake exists, let alone that it is dangerous.
I would agree that a naive observer might see one or two superficial similarities. A clinician should not have any problem differentiating the two. PDD is no more similar to ADHD than it is to the anxiety disorders, oppositional defiant disorder, depression or the psychotic disorders.
Why, what similarities do you have in mind that make you feel like ADHD is really an instance of PDD?
Good points. I’m still curious to know what diagnostic instrument would generate a result like that.
Sorry. I have not yet received an e-mail from you. Based on the post, however, I will respond to you in e-mail.
Yeah, I’ve seen totally obnoxious flame wars erupt over “thiomersal/thimerosal.”
But those numbers don’t mean anything unless they are correlated with each other, you see. Are ALL 1% of autistic kids the children of the 10% of women who have had flu shots? I’m guessing you don’t have data that shows it…am I right?
You treated your child for poisoning you don’t even know he had?
“No testing required”?
I am simply speechless.
No, he didn’t.
And autism and mercury poisoning are NOT synonymous.
And if you didn’t have your child tested for metal levels before chelation, you are a fool.
I have sent your original posts back to you by e-mail.
I have still not received any e-mail from you. (There is nothing sinister implied, here, given the vagaries of the electronic communication–simply an observation.)
I have neither received nor seen any communication from Neurodiversity.com nor from any lawyer claiming to represent Neurodiversity.com. Your remarks were out of line for this forum regardless of any third party legal opinion.
[ /Moderating ]
Even with the conditional, this comment is too directly personal for this Forum.
[ /Moderating ]
IMHO, it’s premature to proclaim any child once diagnosed autistic “recovered” until they have made it through adolescence, at the very least. PDDs are conditions that manifest over the course of a person’s life. People develop skills, and encounter new challenges at different stages of their development. ASD children who, with appropriate education and support, become “indistinguishable from their peers” during their primary school years may very well become more distinguishable from the same peers a few years later, once the adolescent juices start to flow and social relationships and educational demands become more complicated. Parents who are eager to dump a diagnosis early on may find themselves at square one a few years down the road, if they need to prove eligibility for special educational support in secondary school.
Personally, I don’t tend to use terms like “normal/abnormal.” Whenever I hear the word “abnormal,” I hear the voice of Igor in Young Frankenstein.
I have watched one of the Autism Research Institute’s videos of “recovered children” (the one with Lou Diamond Phillips as impresario). The video shows a gathering of justifiably proud parents and their successful children smiling for the camera, but does not provide evidence that the children’s minicolumns have been reconfigured, or guarantee that those children don’t rock or stim when they’re stressed and no one can see them (to offer just a couple of examples of what you don’t see on that video).
I’m not sure what y’all mean by “dictate.” Everyone has the right to express their opinions. It might seem desirable for people to be spared the sound of voices of those who disagree with them or fail to validate their decisions, but it is not a realistic expectation.
This is an inaccurate generalization. Every family has a unique response to disability. Each family has the responsibility of determining what sort of education and medical care they will provide for their children. That being said, I have never encountered anyone who advocates “doing nothing” for any child.
One person liking a book and calling it her “bible” does not equate to a crowd. And the presence of a book in a book list or on a library shelf does not necessarily mean that the list compiler or librarian agrees with its contents. When I updated my Amazon.com listings last year, I created entries for every single book on autism that was available in the United States.
I see nothing insidious about these opinions. Amazon accepts reviews from anyone who cares to write one. You can submit one, too.
I tend to disagree with anyone who suggests that they or any group is “genetically superior.” And I don’t get worked up about teens and twenty-somethings who express a conviction that they are better than anyone else, or who express their convictions in inflammatory ways. The world is full of them. Getting worked up about that kind of thing is only productive of stomach acid.
“Relying on” for what purpose? Expansion of diagnostic criteria has enabled people who need help to get help.
This is an inaccurate and unsourced generalization.
Agreed.
I, for one, would ask about the laboratory tests that purport to demonstrate the mercury or lead poisoning. Chelation-provoked urinalysis (the chelationists’ test of choice) produces artificially inflated results. Further, it is my understanding that there are no established reference norms for provoked results.
Doctor’s Data: What’s in a Name? and Mercurial Laboratories are a couple of interesting articles on this subject. (They’re not peer-reviewed, but nonetheless offer some thought-provoking reading.) And here’s a petition launched by some Doctor’s Data customers, pleading for appropriate reference ranges so that they’re not comparing apples to oranges.
Here here.
There are numerous possible causes of autism, but of the ones you mentioned only genetics has any valid scientific backing.
There is no genetic test for autism, so you could not have ruled out a genetic factor.
Your “ruling out” the MMR vaccine as a cause of your son’s autism would not impress parents who are still blaming the MMR shot. Now, there’s no evidence that MMR vaccination causes autism, and the main study that implicated it has been retracted by most of its authors (after it was found that researchers including lead author Andrew Wakefield had been paid huge sums of money by a lawyers group hoping to file lucrative lawsuits. Wakefield and two other researchers have been brought up on charges of professional misconduct. As a result of the MMR scare, vaccination rates have dropped in Britain and measles outbreaks are taking place along with serious complications including death). However proponents of the MMR theory (like Jenny McCarthy) are refusing to give up their theory, believing that they know more than the “science guys”. What makes their ill-informed opinions and biases any more impressive than yours?
Here’s a discussion of a new study, which like other well-conducted research before it, shows no link between thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Actually procida removing it was a reasonably prudent thing to do at the time, as there was no way to be absolutely sure it was without any effect and there was, at that point in time, little health risk incurred by its removal. Saying that there was no evidence that it was dangerous in any way at those levels wasn’t saying the same thing as saying we had absolute proof of no risk and wasn’t good enough. Newer mercury-free preservatives had been developed. The data that proves its innocence has been collected since.
Wow. You must be the expert after all if you’ve been able to identify and test for all of the genes that are associated with autistic conditions when the best scientists are merely at the point of figuring out how many genes are involved and doing linkage analyses using molecular genetic techniques do develop the list of likely suspect genes. Please share this list of all the genes involved and how to test for them with us lowly physicians and scientists whose knowledge is limited to research studies and working at the benches. Then the scientists can break for lunch.
Who paid for the studies that showed the lack of an association of thimerosal and cognitive deficits and/or autism? In America it was the CDC with cooperation from various autism advocacy groups for study design (one of which who withdrew their support after the findings came back other than how they wanted). The Denmark study was funded by the Denmark National Research Foundation and the Stanley Medical Research Institute. I believe that the English study was funded by their Dept of Public Health but I do not the article at hand. Of course all those are government sources so of course they are part of the international cover-up. (They use black helicopters to pass out the plans.)
And oh a link on the pay-off to Wakefield referenced by Jackmannii
Since you are curious about who is paying for research and all.
And how much money was then spent by various governments since that pay-off on the studies that ended up proving the MMR safe? Multiple studies looking at literally hundreds of thousands of children? Money that should have been going to the basic research at understanding the real science behind this condition.
No kidding! What test(s) did you do? Did you run them yourself?