A of A Q&A: PEDIATRICIAN ON AUTISM, PART 3

By Dan Olmsted

Editor's note: This is the third installment of a three-part interview with Dr. Julie Buckley of Ponte Verdra Beach, Fla., a DAN! doctor with an affected child -- and some important observations on the state of our children's health and how to improve it.

AOA: I've never understood why having a discussion about vaccines is somehow imperiling public health, because it's not ALL vaccines or NO vaccines – that may be some folks' position – but what I hear from people like you is we've got to find a way to manage this and also to reformulate the vaccines so we're not causing problems And to respond, "Well, you're going to kill us all because we're going to bring back infectious diseases" just doesn't make much sense to me. Public policy debate is what happens in a democracy that leads to better outcomes. So I just don't understand why your kind of thinking is seen as so threatening.

Buckley: I think it's threatening for several reasons.

Number one, it requires a tremendous amount of thought and a tremendous amount of time. The mom who is breast-feeding today when she comes back three months later may not be breast-feeding. Now, the reality of breast feeding is it gives your baby passive immunity, and that passive immunity, in theory at least, lasts about six months after you conclude the breast-feeding time. So as long as I see that baby within six months of the time that Mom concludes her breast-feeding, I'm going to be within the time frame probably where the baby's passive immunity from Mom wanes, and this baby is now relatively vulnerable to diseases that he or she is going to be facing out in the community. But it requires a tremendous amount of thought …

AOA: In terms of which vaccine…

Buckley: … which to do and when to do them. It requires a tremendous understanding of things that when you're trying to march 40 or 50 or 60 kids through your practice every day, because that's what we do in U.S. medicine – you don't have time to sit back and analyze that. And one of the things we are taught in medical school and in training in pediatrics is that missed opportunities are not a good thing, and we shouldn't be missing an opportunity to vaccinate our children. The tremendous number of kids who are underserved and who are born in poverty and who don't have access to medicine the way that they should, then end up without any vaccines at all if they don't get marched through the public health clinics and get vaccinated.
    
This is the way we do it, like herding sheep. So from a public health standpoint I understand where there's risk and there's benefit. In the past there was a risk associated with a vaccine, and then there was a benefit associated with that vaccine, and the risks were so clearly outweighed by the benefits back in the 1920s and the early 1930s perhaps …

AOA: … with diphtheria

Buckley: … with diphtheria but with all these diseases, they said, "You know what, this risk is tremendous and the benefits are very, very good and so it's worth adopting this universally." But when you implement something universally and then you say in the true American way, a little is good, more must be better, and so let's vaccinate like crazy, and then something starts to happen that is going to turn out to have a crippling impact on our economy and on our ability to perpetuate ourselves as a society, and our ability to have young men to send to war if we decide we need to fight, and to keep going forward … If we wish to be a big old superpower, then we really need to think about whether the risks are continuing to be outweighed by the theoretical benefits.

AOA: The problem you describe, and the way you describe it, sounds like it's so big that it's hard to miss. And yet public health authorities by and large would say there's no evidence of this kind of harm and overall health problems that you're describing, and in particular there's no reason to think it's related to vaccines. Are they deliberately not looking for what they are afraid to see or what's going on here in your view?

Buckley: As a pediatrician, the concept that anything I might have done to a kid might have contributed to their developing illness rather than continuing to have health – that's a devastating thought for a professional.

AOA: As it is for parents.

Buckley: Yes, but I take care of a lot more kids than a parent, so it's an exponential feeling. And surely the people who lead and guide me as a pediatrician will not let me down. The thing that I wrestle with so terribly, and I think the place I finally came to was a place that said, if I begin to read scientific literature that I wasn't exposed to by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and by the Journal of Pedes, and by all of the mainstream journals that we get on a regular basis that are easy for us to get hold of and read – if I cannot find in that literature the science that I'm exposed to when I'm digging deeper, then I'm not going to get to know whether or not there might be something to this theory.

And I will tell you that when I sat down to read one of the studies that was touted as, see, here's proof that vaccines are not causing this problem – and the conclusion you had to draw from the study was that Thimerosal was in fact neuroprotective – I looked at that and I thought, OK, I know what happened in my home with my daughter when she was four. And I know I wasn't supposed to play with mercury when I was a little girl. So what's wrong with this study? I as a regular old pediatrician who at that time was about ten years out of residency – I wasn't a university girl and I wasn't doing a whole bunch of research, I was the average bread-and-butter pediatrician – I spent ten hours reading that study. Ten hours! I stayed up until 2 a.m. and at 1 o'clock in the morning I finally said, wait a minute, maybe this is the problem, looking at the statistics.

And I woke my statistician husband up at 1 a.m. and said, "Honey, they did this, and then they did this, and then they said this. Can you do that?" And the poor man peels one eyelid back and looks at it and says, "No, you can't do that. Can I go back to sleep now?"

It was just devastating. And I thought, my god, the only reason I spent this much time was because it (autism) lives in my house and I signed up for my kid's wedding. I signed up to be there when those grandbabies are born. And so I really want that back, because I'm not getting it today. I'm going to have to do something to get that back. She wasn't like that when she was three and a half. So it was personal -- that made me read the study that closely, and I honestly did not look at that study that closely until it was personal. And from there I start being exposed to people who are doing incredible research. I didn't know there was a journal called Neurotoxicology three years ago. I didn't know there was a journal called the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, certainly never looked at Environmental Health Perspectives.

I mean, I was doing what everybody else was doing. And so it's not that I can't learn, it's that this science is very, very hard – my God, Jill James' studies and Dick Deth's work, oh my gosh, I hated biochemistry. Give me an ear infection – I understand that.

Going back to this drawing board was very hard – it was too hard, and I needed a tremendous amount of support from very, very, very bright people who allowed me to learn at their knee.

This is very hard science. And then trying to take pure science and put it into practice real-time is another whole challenge for us and it keeps us awake at night. But I can't wait for somebody else to figure it out. My daughter is growing up NOW. I can't wait until she's in an institution somewhere and say, oh, thank God, somebody else figured it out. I've got to go back to the drawing table.

AOA: Now how old is your daughter?

Buckley: She's nine.

AOA: And her name?

Buckley: Her name is Danielle.

AOA: And what made you connect her regression into autism with a vaccine?

Buckley: We were on vacation in Iowa and she had just turned four. It was August of 2002. She was jab-jab-jabbering the whole way. And her 10-year-old cousin was with us and Danielle was jumping behind the pontoon boat into the tube with her little cousin and they were toodling down the lake at full speed having a blast.

We went home and she was signed up to start at the little private pre-school that was going to get her into one of the great colleges and we went to get her four-year-old shots and within days (my husband) couldn't get her to read with him at night anymore. She wouldn't sing "Jesus Loves the Little Children" which was her prayer every night. And when she woke up every morning it was just a moaning to consciousness, which haunts me to this day. It just haunts me.

I would go running across the house just as fast as I could and say, "Please, baby, don't cry. What's wrong?" And she couldn't really speak anymore. She had lost all her language. This was very, very dramatic. She was cool, and then she was gone. She was obliterated.

AOA: Did she have physical health issues, too?

Buckley: She had a belly that looked like it was pregnant all of a sudden and orange diarrhea that was on the walls of my house.

AOA: Was this MMR booster time?

Buckley: She got an MMR, the DTaP, and an IPV on the same day. I still remember her screaming – screaming – as we injected her with that stuff.  So she was gone, and thank god for denial as a defense mechanism. It was the teachers – it was everybody else's fault that nobody could teach my kid, that she wasn't doing very well, that she was taking off all her school clothes and rolling the toilet paper all over everywhere.

About a year later, a woman walked into my office who had just moved from out of  town. She said her daughter had autism. I said my daughter has an expressive language disorder – that's what we were calling it then. When she met my daughter she literally walked out of the office and said, "Expressive language disorder, my ass" …

AOA: How is Danielle doing now?   

Buckley: She got better. She regained 50 IQ points. She's mainstreamed. It's made me really passionate for everybody else.
    --
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.

Comments

[Kim Howard]

Dr. Buckley has real courage and is a blessing to many, many children. Shame on the Doctors who value money over the health of our children and later, the health of our nation!

[Theresa]

This is an excellent article. I think another reason that most doctors don't take Dr. Buckley's stance is that they're force-fed misinformation by Big Pharma and the CDC. The November 2007 Journal of Child Neurology contains a study that shows that the math in the original "don't-blame-mercury" study was wrong--the MATH was WRONG--yet this receives no coverage at all in the mainstream press, and I'll bet it didn't make it into Pediatrics.

[HCN]

What happened to the publishing of your interviews with the folks who work with the Amish at the Clinic for Special Children?

[Kelli Ann Davis]

Julie,

You just verified what I’ve long suspected was the major reason why the majority of doctors are not on board with us. In fact, Anne and I were discussing this EXACT point a few weeks ago:

Buckley: As a pediatrician, the concept that anything I might have done to a kid might have contributed to their developing illness rather than continuing to have health – that's a devastating thought for a professional.

AOA: As it is for parents.

Buckley: Yes, but I take care of a lot more kids than a parent, so it's an exponential feeling.

As a parent, I can say that most of us would not blame the doctors during the nineties because they were pretty basically in the same boat as us – unaware of the mercury content inside the vaccines and what this was doing to our children.

BUT now, it’s a whole ‘nother story.

This is a mainstream issue and doctors CANNOT continue to claim ignorance and reliance on their medical organizations for the decisions they make in regards to their patients.

As painful as it is, they need to confront the truth of their role in this tragedy and be courageous enough to speak up to make sure it never happens again.

Thank you for being one of those doctors.

Kelli

PS….this is another stories that needed the “Warning: Story and Mascara Don’t Mix” flag! Crud.

[Raymond Gallup]

Per.............
"But when you implement something universally and then you say in the true American way, a little is good, more must be better, and so let's vaccinate like crazy, and then something starts to happen that is going to turn out to have a crippling impact on our economy and on our ability to perpetuate ourselves as a society, and our ability to have young men to send to war if we decide we need to fight, and to keep going forward … If we wish to be a big old superpower, then we really need to think about whether the risks are continuing to be outweighed by the theoretical benefits."

We won't be a superpower because too much resources will be devoted to taking care of the kids who were effected adversely by the vaccines.
Those effected adversely like our son would never be able to hold a job let alone serve in the military.

Excellent point by Dr. Buckley!!!

Ray Gallup