No, you would not. If you had been the parent of Zachary or Hamish you would not have given your other children the polio vaccine.
You poor thing! I suspect you weren’t an infant at the time. I’m not referring to adults arms swelling, I’m far more concerned about seizures and vaccine-induced encephalopathy leading to permanent brain damage.
Yes, you’re right some poor children are born with damaged brains (I personally wouldn’t call them “defective”) because they have genetic diseases such as tuberous sclerosis, or Fragile X, or they were oxygen-deprived at birth, or their mothers drank alcohol during pregnancy, but other children are born healthy, develop normally, and then their brains are injured by vaccination.
So, will you allow her to spread her harmful propaganda, or will you do something about it?
Do you believe that parents should be fully-informed before they consent to vaccination, or do you believe they should be treated like sheep, lined up, and vaccinated?
It is only through fear of diseases and the promise of protection from what they believe to be “safe” vaccines, that parents get their children vaccinated. If they knew that their children were being repeatedly injected with neurotoxins, they would think twice. If they knew that doctors know next to nothing about the neonatal immune system, or the developing brain, and that they do not know where the injected ingredients end up in the human body or which organs they target, they would think twice. Doctors don’t give parents the opportunity to find out, they prefer their patients to trust them and be compliant.
Once again, parents should take responsibility for their own and their children’s health. I, myself, would rather take my chances with the diseases, than risk harming another of my children. There is more to having and maintaining good health than sticking needles into babies.
I agree with this, DSeid, but recognizing different features of both disorders is quite different than confusing one disorder for another. Sure, if you’ve got a speech delay, that typically suggests PDD over ADHD, but not entirely. Attentional issues are involved for both, but in very different ways. Socialization issues are also involved for both, but again in very different ways.
Ultimately, though, you adhere to the criteria. You’re not going to see someone meeting the criteria for PDD for whom you think, “Gee, this could be ADHD.” If you find that they meet the criteria for ADHD, you’re not going to confuse that with PDD. Again, this is not to say that, if they meet criteria for one disorder, they won’t have any features of the other disorder. There’s also no prohibition against meeting criteria for both disorders.
You still seem really hung up on the doctor thing, huh? Why is that, I wonder? Surely you couldn’t still be having difficulty figuring out the purpose of the manner in which I used the title in the other thread.
But if I’m “verbally abusive” to you, what bearing does that have on anything to do with anything else? Do you walk around pestering random people with stupid questions throughout the day?
I have not diagnosed a toddler with PDD, but young children? Sure! Why on earth not?
The problem with wandering about “fighting fraud” is that all you folks in the mêlée of the chelation/neurodiversity/autiism-as-art-movement/whomever-I’ve-left-out wars have made all of this very personal and, to an outsider, we see far less reliable information and far more bickering and libel with a serious paucity of science from anyone involved. As you may have noted to the actual responses to all the participants in this multi-sided feud, very few posters, here, are actually being taken in by any of the positions presented. (This, I am sure, includes people ignoring the really true version of the information, but if we’re ignoring the “bad” stuff, then it is less important to swallow the “good” stuff.)
We’ve been presented a whole raft of claims, charges, counter-charges, slurs, and insults and what has been offered as “proof” has relied on blogs and web sites and personal anecdotes. Just as the police dread being called to a “domestic disturbance,” we are not keen on trying to tease out the truth from the snarled tangle of personal invective that we have encountered, here.
Given that few (as in, probably zero) posters, here, are going to stop treating their autisitic kids in a responsible manner, particularly when the only appeal for change originates among people we are more and more regarding as loons, I doubt that it is all that necessary to battle them to the death on a message board.
I don’t know exactly why the Mod did not respond to you. It might have been a matter of slow e-mail or a case of believing that his comments in closing the thread provided enough response to your question or appeal. However, as he noted in closing that thread, what showed up on our doorstep was not a discussion of questions or facts from an event reported in neutral news sources, but a full blown personal war that will move from one blog and message board to another until the interested parties finally die off–and we have no need or desire to have this board sucked into the hostilities.
For my anecdote: my kid clearly has ADHD. It was recognized when he was three-and-a-half, although we held off seeking a formal diagnosis until he was five, when he was about to enter school where it would matter a lot more.
However, my son is also troubled by a number of significant other issues. While there have been tentative probes into Aspergers over the years, every psychiatrist and psychologist who has considered that possibility has backed away from it and he has never been diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition. As noted, while there have been many issues that led the pros to look at Aspergers that have paralleled issues with his ADHD, the way that such issues are displayed are quite different.
From a diagnostic standpoint as well, it makes good sense to wait, since the demands of the classroom evoke any possible ADHD in often dramatic ways.
Ultimately, what I do is walk parents through my diagnostic thinking. I highlight specific features that might go one way or the other, but point out how their functional manifestation for their child suggests it is more attributable to one disorder or another. I indicate how in the constellation of all symptoms that the child is showing (particularly when they meet full criteria for one disorder and not another), one disorder better describes that constellation better than another.
Ultimately, however, I conclude that the diagnosis is secondary to treating what we see, so if a child meets criteria for one disorder and has features of another disorder, I describe how all those behaviors need to be addressed.
Concerned Parent
Yes, I would have. Maybe I would have checked the vaccine they were using. Maybe use something other than live vaccine. There are several alternatives and I would have got the job done because polio is nothing to mess around with if you don’t have to. Seriously though, people have contracted polio from live vaccine before. This is not new and not unexpected. Also, where did that vaccine come from? I’ve been to India many times but wouldn’t recommend it as a good place to have ANY medical treatment done.
Well, can you give me a percentage? Yes, I’m perfectly willing to admit that vaccines will injure some people, whether they are children or not. I’ve had (mild) reactions to them and am perfectly willing to admit that there are some children who can also have reactions, some of them more extreme. This doesn’t require proof. So what is it, 1% .5% what? It’s damn sure less than the number of fatalities and crippling conditions that result from NOT being vaccinated. I would call them defective. That’s what they are. Maybe it doesn’t sound compassionate or sufficiently PC but the bottom line is that they are defective. “Damaged” makes it sound like someone did it.
Well, at the moment I’m MUCH more concerned about your harmful propaganda. A bunch of admittedly deranged people saying they are happy with their disability and don’t want to be cured/treated really doesn’t impact me much. The neurodiversity thing claims that autistics can function just fine. Well, smearing shit on the walls and random screaming doesn’t sound like it to me but it’s their life, let them prove it. As far as I’m concerned they’re all lunatics and anything they say has to be considered as coming from a mentally deranged person. The whole mess of you people are either deranged or so divorced from reality that you have no credibility at all.
No, I feel that parents should inform themselves. In a lot of cases, particularly where they are going to school or other public place, yeah, they SHOULD be lined up and vaccinated. It’s a public health issue, not just the fate of your little darling. Same reasons most cities don’t allow someone to put an outhouse in his back yard or start a feed lot.
Concerned Parent
I’ll agree that doctors prefer patients to trust them, who wouldn’t? This is just human nature. OTOH, I’ve never had a doc get pissed at me when I asked them a question. My own experience has been that they generally get a kick out of explaining something as long as they have the time. I’ll also agree, wholeheartedly, that patients should inform themselves and make decisions regarding their health. Part (a BIG part) of informing yourself is to go ask someone who knows what the hell they are talking about.
You and yours have this hard-on for the medical profession that really isn’t justified. They aren’t the ones that gave you an autistic child. They did nothing either way about that.
You make a good list of the things doctors “know next to nothing about.” I suspect you’re wrong on a lot of that but one thing I am reasonably certain of is that they know a hell of a lot more than you. Now, you can take medical advice from someone who has studied it for anywhere up to 10 years or so in school, or you can get your medical advice from some quack on the Internet who in real life is a plumber or something.
Maybe I should thank you. I could start selling “Magic Herbs from Saudi Arabia” guaranteed to cure autism. Those idiots would probably buy them.
Yeah, that is what our docs also have said, which is why he rarely has an official diagnosis from year to year. (Makes it a bitch dealing with insurance with no official diagnosis, however. )
Yeah, that’s often a pain in the ass part of the equation to deal with. There are always the dreaded Not Otherwise Specified diagnostic categories, which would properly reflect a situation where some of the features of a disorder are causing impairment even though full criteria are not met. However, sometimes those don’t resolve the third-party payer problem.
Upon reflection on the matter, I regret some of the comments I’ve made. I apologize for the mean spirited language I’ve used here. I have become more frustrated with the course of the discussion than I should have.
In light of what Hentor posted, I propose that we close this thread. It has gone quite far afield from my original point, and I have no hope of bringing it back. If anyone wants to continue the discussion, they can open a new thread on the topic, maybe in GD.
)