A of A Q&A: PEDIATRICIAN ON AUTISM, VACCINATION & RECOVERY

By Dan Olmsted

Editor's note: This is the first of a three-part interview. I first met Dr. Julie Buckley of Ponte Verdra Beach, Fla., at the NAA convention in Atlanta. The formal sessions had ended for the day, but as usual some interesting discussions were going strong at the hotel bar. It was too crowded and noisy to have much of a conversation, but I picked up enough nuggets from Dr. Buckley that I wanted to hear more. So the next day we sat down in an empty conference room and had a proper talk. She touched on many key topics, from the relative health of never-vaccinated kids to the struggles of DAN! doctors helping children with autism recover. Sometimes, those children are their own.
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AOA: How did you get started down this road?

Buckley: I had a very small and growing neurotypical practice when my daughter regressed, and then I figured out what we needed to do for her and then began working with other children and working with kids with autism. And very quickly my autism practice really outstripped my neurotypical practice. But the people who stayed in that neurotypical practice were those who were already very interested in not vaccinating, or who had siblings of children with autism, or parents in the community who for whatever reason didn't want to vaccinate their children, and knew that I was not going to scream at them at the top of my lungs – that if that was their wish, I was going to abide by it.

AOA: That sounds a lot like Homefirst, the medical practice in Chicago that welcomes people who choose not to vaccinate, and says it has seen almost no autism in never-vaccinated kids who were born at home. So what are your observations, given the diversity of kids in your practice? What do you see in terms of health outcomes for vaccinated versus non-vaccinated?

Buckley: I use an electronic medical record that has in it a subsection that has you fill in the blanks, more or less, for developmental milestones, and it is fascinating to me how many kids, when they are unvaccinated, are very, very quickly – within two or three months – moving leaps and bounds out in front of the expected normal developmental milestones.

AOA: Give me an example of those developmental milestones for non-parents like myself.

Buckley: Usually you'll have a child sit by themselves (if they're early) by six months and they must be sitting alone by nine months. You sit them up there and they are able to stay sitting. I've had babies who are four months old who are sitting up by themselves and are doing a very good job of it.

AOA: These are the unvaccinated children?

Buckley: These are the unvaccinated children. From Day 1 they have no hatred of what's called tummy time. Tummy time has become a phenomenon in the United States where babies "have to" have tummy time to exercise, to work on picking up their very heavy heads. And I have kids who could care less about tummy time (because) they're very happy to be on their tummy. Their trunkal tone and neck tone and their ability to pick up their heads is never compromised, so it's never a problem.

AOA: And these again, just to be clear …

Buckley: … are unvaccinated kids. My unvaccinated kids at 12 months are not saying one or two words, they're saying 20 or 30 words and they're putting two or three words together. What they do in terms of their verbal communication is tremendous. I had one in my office on Wednesday afternoon right before I came up here, it was his 18-month-old well-baby visit. He has never been in my office for sicknesses, ever, and at 18 months he is able to stand on two feet and jump, with his two feet off the ground. That never happens in anybody less than two years old. So it's unparalleled. And as he is standing there doing jumps, and playing, he is pulling books off the bookshelf and opening them up and turning the pages and telling his mother five and six words sentences and phrases about the things he sees in this book, which 18-month-old children don't typically do. And he's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and happy and just running around the office. But I've never had the child in my office for a sick visit, he's never been ill, he's never been on an antibiotic. His mother is home with him, so he's not a child who's been in a daycare setting, but he's got two older siblings who go to school. So the exposure to illness is very much there. But this family is very careful about supplementation, about giving vitamins. The kids don't get sick. The kids are very, very healthy.

AOA: And you as I understand it have a general observation about the length of colds between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Tell me about that.

Buckley: When I graduated from medical school, which was 1991, and when I finished my residency in 1994 down at the University of Miami, my textbooks said, and I was taught, that viruses were something that would last from two, three, four, five days at most. If you caught a cold, whatever, it was going to be a couple of days long.

Well, in the early '90s I began my medical practice, and most of my clinical exposure to practicing primary care pediatrics was through the emergency room, because it was an indigent area, and the children never had a cold last for two or three days, they always had a cold that lasted for a week to ten days at least. And they always ended up getting superinfected – bacteria grew into the secretions they had because of viruses -- they always had fluid inside their ear, and they ended up needing antibiotics because they developed an ear infection, they developed a sinus infection, they developed something else, a bronchitis, pneumonia, they started wheezing – whatever it was.

And they were so much sicker for so much longer and they always needed antibiotics to get better. So it's 14 years later and I'm in a practice where I have a tremendous number of parents who have opted not to vaccinate their children, and I'm fascinated by the fact that these kids are rarely ill, and if they are ill it might be for one or two days, and the parents never even call me. I can walk away from my practice and be gone for three or four days and have no concern that a practice with several hundred children in it, who are regular old kids, and more than a thousand kids with autism who are in my practice and local to the area, that those children are not going to need me to check their ears for an otitis while I'm gone.

AOA: But the kids with autism – let me play this out and assume some vaccines they got played a role in them getting autism, then the implication of what you're saying (is that they should be sicker) …

Buckley: I'm fixing them. Once I've had those kids for six to 12 months, and we supplement, and we work on restoring their methylation capacities and we've worked on restoring balance to their immune system, they don't get as sick as often either. They do tremendously well. But it just amazes me that a regular old unvaccinated kid is someone I may never see in the first several years of life for sickenesses. That's unheard of.

Part 2 of this interview will run tomorrow.

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.

Comments

[Sandy Gottstein]

I found this "tummy time" point very interesting. I have long wondered about the "fact" that SIDS increased if babies sleep on their stomachs and whether or not this is "normal". It seemed to me that something must be very wrong if merely sleeping on their stomach can lead to SIDS. Of course, I always suspected that very wrong thing might well be vaccinations. And now there is this interesting piece of information that may well support the notion that vaccines make babies weaker and possibly more prone to SIDS if allowed to sleep on their tummies.

[M. C. Hendricks]

I am one of those many parents w/non-vaccinated children who are now 14 and 18. My children were rarely sick and if so, it was because they ate too much candy at Halloween or ice cream. My kids were both born at home w/midwives and I can count on one hand the times they've been sick. My son had a sensitivity to dairy early on which we kept an eye on and mostly eliminated in his diet. You should never give a child dairy or eggs before the age of two and even though we didn't, he had a pre-disposition to dairy sensitivity.

They have always ate mostly organic food and lots of clean water. My daughter has never liked drinking milk, which is an inferior source of absorbable calcium. I never worried about her and she is now 18, 5'7" and 135#. My son has mostly outgrown his sensitivity to dairy, which I also had as a child. I was never allergic to anything until I had a set of vaccines in 1st grade. Within 6 mos. I was allergic to dairy, wheat, corn, eggs, nuts, chocolate, dust, pollen, molds, grass and animals w/asthma too. 5 years of allergy shots didn't help much and I later realized I had to be responsible for my own health, not place authority w/a doctor who knows nothing, if little, of nutrition. As an informed parent who has done her homework, I give testimony at our state capitol on vaccine-related bills. The deck is obviously stacked in favor of the drug cos. who pack the hearing rooms promising campaign donations in exchange for a desired vote. My own representative has told me, prior to a bill's hearing, that he has already 'promised his vote and can't go back on his word'. Basically, the hearings are just a formality to give the impression that citizens actually have a say in the matter. However, there is progress being made and our quotes are often mentioned in the paper and our elected senators/reps. take notice, although belatedly so and only under pressure from their constituents. People need to make themselves heard by showing up, writing letters, calling in their votes for or against a bill, etc. It does make a difference. If you don't know your rights, you don't have any.

[Holly Maclans]

Now all we have to do is tie IQ to vaccinated and unvaccinated children and maybe we'll see a flood of converts.