[QUOTE=DSeid]
Well there’s screening and there’s screening. What I can give proof of is that screening in the manner advised by that and a similar AAP policy statement has not increased in that time. This study documents that pediatricians have persisted in being unreliable users of standardized screening. That mere 23% doing formal screening is about the same as was reported in similar studies from 1998 and 1978. And that’s for the most widely used instrument, the Denver. Virtually no one actually uses the CHAT (the Checklist for Autism in Toddlers).What we actually do is ask a few of our favorite milestones in each age range and ask open ended questions. What we’ve gotten gradually better at over the past 20 years that I’ve been in the biz (no proof to offer here other than my eye-witnessing it) is listening to the answers. The availability of early intervention services has us motivated to look more because we can do more. We want to find that which we can offer help with. But no, docs weren’t routinely screening and we still aren’t. Not as guidelines would have us do it anyway. (A separate debate among pediatricians is whether our clinical and informal developmental assessments, which have been the mainstay of pediatrics since the beginning of the profession, are good enough if we actually listen well. I think they are.)
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Are pediatricians the only people screening for autism, and are they the only ones able to give an autism diagnosis?
[QUOTE=DSeid]
And I plead guilty to the charge of wanting to maximize public health and of seeing that immunization programs have done much to that end. I am also aware of the real risks associated with vaccine programs. The mild ones are common and the serious ones extremely rare, but they are indeed non-zero. But , no, the black helicopters forget to drop off my copy of the master plan to harm children.
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Don’t be ridiculous! :rolleyes: No one in their right mind would believe that you or any other medical professional would intentionally harm children. However, there are many in your profession who don’t take vaccine reactions of any kind seriously. From my experience, most reactions are regarded by them as common, insignificant, or coincidental, and very, very few are reported to the proper authorities.
Tell me. As a pediatrician, do you believe that parents are sufficiently informed about diseases called ‘vaccine preventable’ and the real risks of vaccination, to be able to make fully-informed choices for their children? From my experience, doctors bully and emotionally blackmail parents in order to achieve compliance. If parents don’t do it, their baby will be brain-damaged or die from a dreadful disease. Parents with a new baby are extremely vulnerable to fear-mongering. And when things go wrong, the medical profession turns its back on them. They don’t want to know. Do you think it might be because they are financially rewarded for keeping their immunisation rates up, or because they fear losing their licence to practice if they stop promoting and administering vaccines?
Some doctors and pediatricians, as you know, and I am very tempted to write, ‘many’, don’t vaccinate their own children according to the schedule, or don’t vaccinate their children at all. Do you think it’s fair that doctors have the freedom to pick and choose vaccines, or delay vaccination for their own families, and yet demand that the common herd to do as they say and vaccinate their children according to the schedule?
Oh! Perhaps you should let LavenderBlue know that children are damaged by vaccination.
[QUOTE=DSeid]
As to foresam and his cite … hey, he at least tried to come up with a study. It’s a small start. True it was the Geiers, infamous for conclusion first and then make the data fit by whatever means necessary and who have profited tremendously by the vaccine conspiracy hysteria that they keep fanning. Rebuked by judges multiple times for intellectual dishonesty. But still it is a cite. Not one that shows much of anything even if we believed the data for a variety of reasons and one that is contradictory to the vast majority of other data collected. But for foresam … it’s almost like seeing Frankenstein’s Monster learn to put on a top hat. But not quite.
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When a child experiences a vaccine-induced encephalopathy, what effect does it have on the child’s subsequent behaviour?
And do you find any similarities between post-encephalitic syndrome and symptoms of autism?