I was talking to my friend’s wife, who lives in Utah, while she was bouncing her beautiful new baby on her knee. She had grown up in Utah, so I asked her if she was Mormon. I’m paraphrasing, but her response was something like “Oh, hell no, I’m not a member of that cult, I’m a Christian Scientist.” And somehow in passing she said something about definitely not getting her kid immunized. :rolleyes:
I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but I had a classmate in high school whose parents were Christian Scientists. When he was about 15, he got the German measles. His mom was pregnant at the time and his baby sister ended up deaf, which I’m pretty sure was caused by rubella. The dude had some serious issues to start out with, but I think he had some major guilt problems after that fiasco.
And Hentor, there was also this article in today’s LA Times which confirms your thoughts, although the study may already be mentioned in your cites.
Ya know, Jenny McCarthy was on Larry King last night, and she had some very insightful and thought-provoking things to say about her son’s autism.
No, not really.
She was more fun to watch in her last movie, when she was waving a vomit-covered tit in each hand and screaming how unloveable she was. Oh, and then she bled all over the place 'cause she ran out of tampons or something. Horrible film.
But she was on Larry King! And she said getting shots is bad!
Isosleepy, I wasn’t referring to the vaccination debate. I was referring to the person in the GD thread who posted the claim that mercury in amalgam fillings leaches into the bloodstream, where it accumulates in the fetus, causing autism.
Both things I said in my original post are true. I have had a lot of dental work, so I have a lot of fillings, many of them amalgam. I was also induced with Pitocin, which some claim is linked to autism, as well, although I can’t find any scientific studies that confirm any link. If I chose to believe the cranks, my son should have autism. But he doesn’t.
I’m not making fun of autism. There’s nothing funny about it, and I understand that having children with autism is difficult. I am making fun of the people who absolutely swear that there is some specific causal link between, say, the mercury in amalgam fillings and autism. Of course they don’t have any information or studies to back up their claims. They just know and don’t take kindly to any dispute.
Wow. Most of the interviews I have seen she came across as reasonable but she is pushing some scary alternative medicine. “Systemic yeast infection” is one of my pet peeves, not to mention the fact that this thread brought up the antibiotic for virus issue which makes me absolutely crazy.
[rant]*I know I’m not making any money as a doctor, because I’m not seeing enough patients, but I wish people would STOP asking me how the other doctors all do it. I’ve told them over and over again, that many doctors see a patient with a cold and write a prescription for an antibiotic. Total time three minutes. I see a patient with a cold, and spend 5 minutes explaining to them the natural progression of a cold, and how it will go away on its own. The patient responds with “but my last doctor always gave me X antibiotic and the symptoms went right away”. I spend another 5 minutes explaining that the symptoms will always go away with or without antibiotics. I spend another 5 minutes explaining to the patient that I am not trying to insult the previous doctor; it is just that in the past, doctors tended to overtreat viruses and we now know better. I spend 5 minutes on each of the following three days on the telephone telling the patient that no, I won’t call in an antibiotic just because they have to fly on Friday, or attend a wedding, or some other emergency because viruses don’t need antibiotics and because the virus will be better by Friday anyway. I spend 10 minutes on the telephone with the patient after he calls to tell me that he went to the local doc in the box where they immediately gave him antibiotics (although they either weren’t able to come up with a diagnosis for why he needed them, or else told him he had bronchitits, sinusitis, and an ear infection). I then spend 15 minutes writing a letter to respond to the complaint the patient has made to his insurance company about how I refused to give him antibiotics for his sinusitis and bronchitis and ear infection and he had to pay extra to go to the urgent care where they gave him the antibiotics that cured him overnight (notwithstanding the fact that antibiotics take 2-3 days to work). I then have to explain to my staff that they won’t get as large a holiday bonus because I count on the incentive pay the insurance company gives for quality care, and I have now forfeited a large portion of that because of the complaint, This is all just to say that I do understand why doctors still overprescribe antibiotics and to say that some of us are still out here fighting, but it’s not easy.[/*rant]
psychobunny, my father-in-law was an MD (family practice), and he used to tell people “With antibiotics, a cold will go away in a week. Without antibiotics, it takes 7 days.” (He thought he was a jokester as well as a doctor!)
My dad is an occupational therapist, with experience in autistic kids from well before it became widely known. I have no doubt that autism is difficult and can be devestating for a family to deal with. I have extreme compassion for parents who have to deal with their kids every day, and as a mom I know that it must be so hard not to know what caused your child to be this way, and how we as humans tend to look for correlation. So many parents say, my kid was fine and then he got vaccinated. I know that correlation does not mean causation, but when your own kid is affected it must be hard to keep a clear head and not blame what seems obvious.
I also agree with the OP that this mother is behaving very selfishly, and I wonder what her reaction would be if it was her child that was the one infecting others.
Autism is so difficult - we don’t know what causes it, but it is on the rise for some reason. Maybe a genetic component is there that is triggered by some outside force, or maybe it is a complex combination of things, we don’t know. It seems like there is so much out there now that wasn’t around much before - we got rid of many diseases through vaccination, but now we have autism, ADHD, food allergies, etc. Is it something in our environment? Just better diagnosing?
I really do believe that vaccination is one of the best things modern medicine has ever accomplished, and I hope we don’t go backwards on that. But I do have sympathy for parents who have autistic kids and who must wonder if it is something they could have prevented. It must be awful to think something as simple as forgoing a vaccination could have given your kid a normal life, and I understand why they are sometimes a little nuts.
I saw Jenny McCarthy on Oprah too, and she said she got her information on autism “from google.” So that could explain a lot.
I too have mercury fillings, had three scans during pregnancy and an induction. My kid was vaccinated with everything going except the chicken pox (for reasons mentioned above, success rates / later infection) which had only just been introduced here as voluntary.
My kid’s healthy, in a gifted program and very empathic, which would seem counter-indicative of autism or other problems.
I know of several women who are anti-vax and their kids have no problems either (that I’m aware of). But one woman stood in front of me one day and bitched for 25 minutes about how she’d been stuck at home for three full months because her unvaccinated kids had developed whooping cough, one after the other.
Inconsiderate little brats. :rolleyes:
ETA ; just to clarify vaccination is the parents choice, just don’t bitch when it backfires. Either way. I don’t bitch about the one minor reaction my kid had, that was the risk I chose.
I wonder where the increase in diagnosed autism comes from, too. I graduated from high school in 1978 - and had never heard of ADHD. Now it seems like every third kid in school has it and wants special accomidations for it. The latest “disease du jour” seems to be autism. Is this because of better diagnositics? Expanding the definition of what constitutes autism? I just don’t know - and I wonder.
The thoughts of a person like the one described in the OP are just beyond me. “I don’t want to vaccinate my child because it’s dangerous - but you must ALL get your children vaccinated so mine won’t get sick!”
I grew up during the era of the iron lung, when Salk and Sabin wrought the miracle of the polio vaccine, and a terrible burden was lifted from parents’ backs. My older brother in fact was enrolled in some of the first vaccine trials.
I well remember the anxious days and nights as he suffered through the illness at home; my mother and father’s worried faces; how I and my baby brother tiptoed about, not understanding exactly what was wrong but knowing it was something dreadful.
My brother recovered, slowly, but completely. When it was time for us younger children to be vaccinated, my parents knew at first hand the risks of the vaccine. They didn’t hesitate to have us vaccinated, because they also knew the risks we’d face without it.
I wish the anti-vax crowd could be forced to absorb the bitch-slap of reality phouka suggested.
Yes, they can. Their parents need to sign a form declaring that vaccination goes against their beliefs and acknowledging that their child be will be excluded from school in case of an outbreak.
You are now my personal hero.
<obligatory story>
my classmate’s elbow got infected (pain, heat, swelling, redness. Classic bacterial infection). Went to the doc. Doc gave him antibiotics. Two weeks later, goes for a recheck. Things are better, but not cured. Doc says he wants to stop the antibiotics. Classmate asks why since things are better. Doc says “well, I don’t know. Tradition, I guess. Would you like to be on antibiotics longer?” After much wrangling, classmate convinces doc to not only extend the antibiotic treatment but actually gasp sample and culture the infection. Yup, it’s bacterial. And, fortunately, it’s susceptible to the antibiotics he is on. We’re going on week 5 and the elbow is better, but not fixed.
That’s very similar to a campaign from Navarrese Health Services years ago. The posters, about some common conditions and what to do, included a strip by a popular local artist.
The one for the cold showed the progression for a cold and at the end the sick guy saying indignantly “so all you have to do is wait? Damnit, even I can cure a cold that way!” while a doctor and nurse nodded enthusiastically “that’s the idea!”
Bottom: if it looks like a cold and you don’t have high fever, don’t come in until the tenth day.
psychobunny, wish I could get you a translated copy of that poster. Those things should be everywhere!
Yup. Search for online tests for Asperger’s. Almost every single one of my college classmates and friends meets the criteria in some of those. The “almost” corresponds to the younger sister who was in teacher’s school (older sister was in telecomunications enginering), the two sisters who were in business and law school, and another friend who was in tourism school. The rest of us were a bunch of engineers - good at math, specially geometry, early readers, not interested in many things that drove our “peers” nuts (90210? ugh!), loved to read, liked being alone… bunch of aspies, yup! Call the doctors in!
I don’t believe that I have autism and should be left alone with it. I believe I don’t have it
No offense, Triskadecamus, but I did not receive antibiotics when I had the measles. I have seen my medical records from the period, and my father was a veterinarian who understands the correct use of antibiotics.
I hope I don’t come across cranky atcha, Trisk, because I generally enjoy reading what you have to say, but this is rather reminiscent of my sojourn at the messageboard from which I was banned. They simply dismissed everything that did not reinforce their notions.
I mentioned that I had hearing loss from measles, and they instantly dismissed it, because nobody every suffers bad effects from the measles - it must have been from the antibiotics. I posted that I ddin’t get antibiotics, and they told me I was too young to remember. I posted that I had seen my medical records, and they told me the doctor must have done it without documenting it.
But if a kid cried after getting his shots, that was a bad reaction to vaccination (“I never heard her scream like that! Do you think she might have brain damage?” “She might - get her to a homeopath right away!”) and it should be reported to the VAERS database, followed by a dozen posts saying “my kids were never vaccinated, and they never cried and never get sick. Pro-vax parents are so brainwashed.”
On a lark, I went over to some antivaccination sites. Oh my God.
It is your right to believe strange things, but these people are just selling seminars and other products promoting (amongst other things) the truth about Shaken Baby Syndrome, the fact that the 1918 flu pandemic was caused by vaccinations and homeopathy.
I wouldn’t have put it quite so baldly as that, but yes, yes it does. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that nothing is perfect, and the fact that something might happen to our children is agonizing to any parent, but that’s the way life is. Nothing is “safe”, everything carries some risk, what intelligent people try to do is balance that risk versus the reward, and I gotta tell you, if the choice is between one in a minuscule number that my child will get autism from a vaccine and the odds children in third world nations have of DYING of stuff we can vaccinate against here in the west, I’ll take the later every time, even if I have a dozen autistic children already.
Believing non peer reviewed sensationalist bullshit over actual real scientific data does make one (not you in particular, just one in general) ignorant.
