Michael Fitzpatrick's Inquisition Against UK's Autism Trust
Managing Editor's Note: If you are unfamiliar with The Autism Trust, their "slogan" is "A Safe Haven for People with Autism." Hardly controversial.
By Teri Arranga
In today's edition of spiked-online.com, backwoods doctor Michael Fitzpatrick blasted Polly Tommey, founder of The Autism Trust, for the current campaign that seeks better supports and services for autistic individuals in the UK via meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown. ( Read the Spiked online piece HERE.) Fitzpatrick also blasted The Autism File magazine for including information about vitamins (oh, mercy me) and advertisements from "suppliers of biomedical products" (though none of them as lofty as Merck/Vioxx and Eli Lilly like Fitzpatrick's cronies' medical journals), among other things. But what is worse is that Fitzpatrick is trying to undermine the efforts of Polly and The Autism Trust to improve quality of life for autistic individuals and their families, many in woeful situations of deprivation and stress. What he did was to write an open letter to the Prime Minister of 10 Downing Street titled "If you want to help families affected by autism, you shouldn’t be inviting Polly Tommey to No.10."
To set the record straight, The Autism Trust is a registered charity (www.autismtrust.com) that is, again, asking for better supports and services for autistic individuals. As the result of a remarkable and sustained campaign in the UK - unprecedented in its scope and support - Polly Tommey will be having meetings with members of the Prime Minister's team in advance of the promised meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown himself. For Fitzpatrick to try to undermine this and to try to deny a charity the ability to do that on behalf of suffering individuals in a country deluged by autism is outrageous. How dare Fitzpatrick try to undermine the charity's work in this direction with an ill-informed rant? He does not even correctly state The Autism Trust's proposed objectives of the meetings - instead lying to the Prime Minister's office by slanting his presentation. Fitzpatrick never contacted Polly Tommey nor any other member of The Autism Trust for comment in advance.
If it threatens the Deer/Fitzpatrick camp when we want to get better services and supports for 1 child in 60 in the UK and their families, then we have touched a nerve. For example, how can trying to get decent housing and family supports threaten Deer and Fitzpatrick's current repertoire of witch hunting? Why are they so scared that they would resort to petty tactics?
The Chairman of The Autism Trust, Oliver Jones, has written to Fitzpatrick as follows:
I am both shocked and astounded having read your open letter on the Internet this afternoon. How dare you act in such an ill informed manner about a campaign that I and many others have invested significant time and effort in - when you evidently have no idea about what we are actually focused upon.
I find it remarkable that a professional person can take such an aggressive stance as you have done about The Autism Trust's campaign without having the decency or following proper protocol by making contact with any of the Trustees and specifically myself to determine the objectives and intent of our forthcoming meetings.
The Autism Trust is now also registered in the United States, and we are asking for your support in a letter writing campaign. All letters to the Prime Minister's office should be very positive, simply supporting The Autism Trust in its objective of getting better services and supports for individuals with autism and their families in the UK. We do not want to mention Fitzpatrick to the Prime Minister's office; we do not want to draw the Prime Minister's office into Fitzpatrick's petty sensationalistic brawl. However, letters to Fitzpatrick can be frank about his misconceptions, though still polite as befitting our dignified, intelligent, and highly educated autism advocacy community.
Summary/contact information:
• Please support The Autism Trust campaign: to get recognition of the importance of autism to so many people in the UK and the rest of the world today and to acknowledge the crisis that so many families are facing. We need our governments to increase their understanding of the needs of so many families, to increase the levels of financial and care support, and to make that support much more accessible. The Autism Trust is part of that solution ... that is our message.
We would recommend that any people who want to support Polly Tommey and The Autism Trust's campaign do so by writing to Gordon Brown c/o Katie Martin (Press Office in Downing Street) on email [email protected] or to Michael Ellam (Director of Communications in Downing Street) on email [email protected].
• Secondly, in respect of Michael Fitzpatrick's ill-informed letter, we would recommend that we should not seek to highlight this man in the eyes of the UK government, but, instead, we should recommend that people write to him directly. People like Dr Fitzpatrick - like Brian Deer - should simply not be allowed to undermine genuine initiatives such as Polly's - we cannot allow this censorship.
We would recommend that he is contacted on [email protected] and also by email marked for the attention of Dr Fitzpatrick to [email protected].
This campaign has been supported by thousands of parents of children of all ages with autism - basic resources and support are what we are asking for. We should not have to face the tirades of narrow- minded, self-appointed "spokespeople" like Michael Fitzpatrick who can do so much damage if given the the chance.
Parents' voices must be heard - we must join together.
Sincerely,
Teri Arranga
The Autism Trust - USA
Fiona Fox, Director of Science Media Centre who once denied the Rwandan massacre denying in 2007 that the autism rate in the UK had risen to 1 in 58 according to research by Simon Baron-Cohen. After many denials (including by Baron-Cohen) the figure was confirmed last month as a round 1 in 60 (1 in 38 boys).
http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/autism-rates-rocket/
FIONA FOX: ON SCIENCE AND THE MEDIA
My favourite bit of Sunday is when I finally get to sneak away to a quiet corner of our house and settle down to read my Observer. Last week however it ended up being the unsettling bit of my weekend. When I saw the headline I had to check that I hadn't picked up the Mail on Sunday by mistake – but there it was under the Observer masthead: "New health fears over big surge in autism. Questions over triple jab for children". This front page splash linking a rise in autism with the joint Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine coincided with a two page exclusive interview on the inside pages with Dr Andrew Wakefield, architect of the MMR scare, who is due before the General Medical Council (GMC) Fitness to Practise Panel this week to face charges of misconduct in relation to his research on MMR.
"This had better be good", I thought as I hungrily devoured the piece.
The article was based on a leak of unpublished research into the rising levels of autism. The top line was that as many as one in 58 children may have some form of the condition - much higher than the current highest estimate of one in 100.
You would think that was already a shocking enough story – but then in paragraph three the reason for the headline becomes clear. Apparently two of the seven researchers privately believe that the rise may be connected to the MMR vaccine. The claim is elaborated on in the fourth paragraph where the two researchers are named as Dr Carol Stott and Dr Fiona Scott. Though the paper made it clear that Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, leader of the research group and one of Europe's most respected autism experts, does not accept the link, alarmingly almost ten years after Andrew Wakefield sparked off a frenzied debate over a link between MMR and autism, the Observer's front page was suggesting that there is still a serious dispute amongst leading experts as to whether he was right. Predictably several papers repeated the MMR allegations the next day and countless columnists, including James Le Fanu and Peter Hitchins have cited the Observer piece as evidence that the MMR autism row is still alive and well.
One of the challenges for the Science Media Centre (SMC) was what to do about it. We were set up in the wake of media furores over issues like MMR and we know that poor journalism on public health is our territory. However we also know that the SMC philosophy (the media will 'do' science better when scientists 'do' media better) was a reaction against the culture of complaint within science which often saw top scientists complaining privately about coverage rather than pro-actively engaging with the story.
With this in mind, the SMC reacted to the article primarily by coordinating a joint media statement by 14 institutions involved with child health and vaccination to back the safety of the jab which we issued to coincide with the GMC hearing. However I did also send a note to Denis Campbell, the journalist who wrote the article and a friendly contact of ours, to make sure he knew that the SMC was unable to defend the piece to the angry scientists who were contacting us. The result was an invitation to meet with him, the readers' editor and a variety of other Observer news editors at their offices. So, with two leading MMR experts at my side, I went to highlight the concerns.
One of the main points that I made at that meeting was my belief that in science reporting the rule of thumb should be that the more outrageous the claim the more the need for the best standards of journalism – a rule which is often interpreted in exactly the opposite way by journalists hungry for a sensational scoop. I then argued that I would take this rule even further in this peculiarly sensitive and important public health issue. The claim that MMR may cause autism, made by Dr Andrew Wakefield in 1998, produced one of the biggest rows in public health for decades and millions of pounds of public money have been spent on scientific studies researching the evidence for a link. Not a single reputable study has found any and just last year the SMC coordinated a joint appeal from many of those involved in child health that the media now draw a line under this row unless and until it has compelling new evidence. Many autism experts have echoed this call and issued their own plea for resources to move from the obsession with MMR to investigating the many other possible causes - including genetics, environmental factors and so on.
Given this context, I would argue that the bar for evidence in any newspaper splashing on a link between MMR and autism needs to be much higher than for other stories. In my view the Observer really needed to have produced stunning evidence of a link between MMR and autism to justify re-running this particular scare story.
Stunning evidence it wasn’t. The two researchers cited are experts in autism but not in MMR and the study they were involved with was nothing to do with MMR. In fact it had nothing whatsoever to do with what causes autism at all - it simply looked into prevalence of autism. As such, the authors private views on MMR are neither significant in terms of public health or in any way relevant to the Observer's story. In fact I'm tempted to say that their private views as to what causes autism are no more significant than my mum's view - something on which it seems Dr Fiona Scott agrees: when contacted the following day by the Telegraph she was not prepared to repeat any private views in public and instead voiced her support for MMR and her decision to get her daughter vaccinated.
One of the news editors pointed out that that any article reporting a dramatic rise in autism would prompt readers to turn to the question of MMR. I accept that but the way to answer those readers' questions is with an accurate summary of the balance of evidence against any link. Instead, any Observer reader whose mind turned to the question "is MMR to blame?" was provided with the answer that two out of seven experts believe it is and one believes it is not - a reckless distortion of the real balance of views within the scientific community.
Ironically, if this piece had appeared in certain other campaigning papers, no would one would even bothered complaining. The fact that it was in the Observer, which has a reputation for excellent science and health coverage, made it worth challenging. The fact that senior editors invited us in and the acknowledgement by the readers' editor Stephen Pritchard the following week that the MMR allegations should not have been included in the autism story reassure me that the Observer have seriously reflected on the scientific community's concerns and their responsibilities as journalists - that should be welcomed.
xxxxxxxxx
Science Media Centre and Sense About Science (of which Michael Fitzpatrick is a trustee) claim the credit for turning the tide in the public debate on MMR:
http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/pdf/Healthwatch.pdf
Posted by: Lobby Correspondent | April 15, 2009 at 03:22 PM
Genocide? What genocide?
Serbian atrocities were not the only ones Living Marxism tried to deny. They targeted Rwanda too
Chris McGreal
Monday March 20, 2000
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,181819,00.html
Guardian
Genocide is such a hard crime to deny that those who insist on doing so usually put themselves on the outer fringes of historical debate. How many people had heard of Living Marxism (LM) before the ITN reporters decided to prove the magazine lied about the camps in Bosnia?
Obscuring the truth about Bosnia was not LM's only bid to rewrite history in favour of the murderers. It has also conducted a long campaign to deny there was a genocide in Rwanda. But while the magazine is of no great consequence, it is articulating a lie perpetuated by a host of more powerful interests, from the Catholic church to European politicians.
LM says the use of the word "genocide" to describe the orchestrated murder of about 800,000 Tutsis in 1994 is an "emotional overreaction" and an "obsession". The survivors are all but told to get over it. Eighteen months after the genocide, Fiona Fox, a press officer for Cafod, the Catholic Church's relief agency in England and Wales, visited Rwanda.
She wrote the first article of LM's campaign (Massacring the truth in Rwanda) under a pseudonym. Ms Fox describes finding Kigali airport still pocked by bullet holes from the accompanying civil war. She concluded Rwanda was "a country determined to put the evidence of what is known as 'the genocide' on display for all who visit". Most of the rest of us saw it as evidence of a poor country without the resources to rebuild in a hurry. The men who organised the genocide were well practised in denial long before the killing was over. Time and again mem bers of the Hutu extremist government trotted out the same explanations. It was spontaneous bloodletting, they said. There were crimes on both sides, as if Dresden excuses Auschwitz. And then there is the old trick of implying that the victims must have been guilty of something.
LM and the other apologists for mass murder in Rwanda have dutifully trodden the same path. "Both sides were responsible for human rights abuses and massacres," Ms Fox says. "Those targeted by government militia were Tutsis and Hutus suspected of supporting the (Tutsi rebels)." This, presumably, included the thousands of children butchered individually, by machete. And the massacres at hundreds of churches, mostly Catholic churches at that. Not to mention the systematic gang rapes of Tutsi women and girls which led the international tribunal to define rape as an act of genocide when part of an extermination campaign.
The genocide, while it coincided with the civil war and was clearly driven by the politics around the conflict, was mostly carried out by civilians against civilians far from the front. There was no "other side". There were the murderers and their unarmed, helpless victims.
In another issue, LM concluded that because Hutu extremists had failed to employ the technology of the Nazis there cannot have been a genocide in Rwanda. "The idea that the beleaguered Hutu-led government could plan and execute the deliberate annihilation of an entire people, at a time when it could not even organise to sell the coffee beans on which its economy depended, seems little short of incredible."
Leaving aside the racist overtones of such a statement, it is indeed incredible that a part of Rwanda's elite could plan and almost succeed in exterminating one in ten of the population. But that does not mean it did not happen. The genocide deniers are as diverse as their motives. Elements of the Roman Catholic church have a vested interest in underplaying the political organisation and extent of the slaughter. The more the killings are portrayed as chaotic, spontaneous and committed by both sides, the less responsibility the church has to take for the role of its archbishop, who was a de facto member of the Hutu government, and those bishops and priests who encouraged mass murder. There are still bishops in Rwanda who refuse to call the slaughter by its true name.
Similarly, supporters of the men and women on trial at the international tribunal in Tanzania are keen that the genocide be seen as a tribal bloodletting that no one could have planned, let alone prevented. It is nonsense, as proven by the verdicts and life sentences already handed down by judges who have sat through months of compelling testimony to the contrary.
Some politicians and academics in Belgium and France expend considerable energy on denying the truth of Rwanda, usually because of political or personal ties to the former Hutu regime. But much of the genocide denial has little to do with what happened in Rwanda. The international court in Tanzania is trying the largest number of men and women accused of crimes against humanity since Nuremberg. It has virtually the entire cabinet from the Hutu extremist government in its grasp.
Those who want an end to the pursuit of Slobodan Milosevic and his cohorts to stand trial in the Hague have an interest in discrediting both international tribunals. Therefore they must pretend there was no genocide in Rwanda even if it means yet again denying the suffering of Africans.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Posted by: Lobby Correspondent | April 15, 2009 at 02:49 PM
From the Guardian Newspaper
Invasion of the entryists: How did a cultish political network become the public face of the scientific establishment?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/dec/09/highereducation.uk2
George Monbiot The Guardian, Tuesday 9 December 2003 08.28 GMT
One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The "neo-cons" pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics - entering organisations and taking them over - appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment.
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners' strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a "confident individualism" without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers "about complex scientific issues".
In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation's journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.
All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group's campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.
Let us begin with the Association for Sense About Science (SAS), the lobby group chaired by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Taverne, and whose board contains such prominent scientists as Professor Sir Brian Heap, Professor Dame Bridget Ogilvie and Sir John Maddox. In October it organised a letter to the Times by 114 scientists, complaining that the government had failed to make the case for genetic engineering. In response, Tony Blair told the Commons that he had not ruled out the commercialisation of GM crops in Britain. The phone number for Sense About Science is shared by the "publishing house" Global Futures. One of its two trustees is Phil Mullan, a former RCP activist and LM contributor who is listed as the registrant of Spiked magazine's website. The only publication on the Global Futures site is a paper by Frank Furedi, the godfather of the cult. The assistant director of Sense About Science, Ellen Raphael, is the contact person for Global Futures. The director of SAS, Tracey Brown, has written for both LM and Spiked and has published a book with the Institute of Ideas: all of them RCP spin-offs. Both Brown and Raphael studied under Frank Furedi at the University of Kent, before working for the PR firm Regester Larkin, which defends companies such as the biotech giants Aventis CropScience, Bayer and Pfizer against consumer and environmental campaigners. Brown's address is shared by Adam Burgess, also a contributor to LM. LM's health writer, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, is a trustee of both Global Futures and Sense About Science.
SAS has set up a working party on peer review, which is chaired and hosted by the Royal Society. One of its members is Tony Gilland, who is science and society director at the Institute of Ideas, a contributor to both LM and Spiked and the joint author of the proposal Frank Furedi made to the supermarkets. Another is Fiona Fox, the sister of Claire Fox, who runs the Institute of Ideas. Fiona Fox was a frequent contributor to LM. One of her articles generated outrage among human rights campaigners by denying that there had been a genocide in Rwanda.
Fiona Fox is also the director of the Science Media Centre, the public relations body set up by Baroness Susan Greenfield of the Royal Institution. It is funded, among others, by the pharmaceutical companies Astra Zeneca, Dupont and Pfizer. Fox has used the Science Media Centre to promote the views of industry and to launch fierce attacks against those who question them. She ran the campaign, for example, to rubbish last year's BBC drama Fields of Gold.
The list goes on and on. The policy officer of the Genetic Interest Group, which represents the interests of people with genetic disorders, is now John Gillott, formerly science editor of LM and a regular contributor to Spiked. The director of the Progress Educational Trust, which campaigns for research on human embryos, is Juliet Tizzard, a contributor to LM, Spiked and the Institute of Ideas. Gillott and Tizzard also help to run Genepool, the online clinical genetics library. The chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service is Ann Furedi, the wife of Frank Furedi and a regular contributor to LM and Spiked. Until last year she was communications director for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The coordinator of the Pro-Choice Forum, which publicises abortion issues, is Ellie Lee, a regular writer for LM and Spiked and now series editor for the Institute of Ideas.
Is all this a coincidence? I don't think so. But it's not easy to understand why it is happening. Are we looking at a group which wants power for its own sake, or one following a political design, of which this is an intermediate step? What I can say is that the scientific establishment, always politically naive, appears unwittingly to have permitted its interests to be represented to the public by the members of a bizarre and cultish political network. Far from rebuilding public trust in science and medicine, this group's repugnant philosophy could finally destroy it.
· The sources for this and all George Monbiot's recent articles can be found at www.monbiot.com.
George Monbiot: Invasion of the entryists
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 08.28 GMT on Tuesday 9 December 2003. It was last updated at 08.28 GMT on Tuesday 9 December 2003.
UK USA UK
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Posted by: Lobby Correspondent | April 15, 2009 at 02:01 PM
I think perhaps the public would find more interest in Dr Fitzpatrick's Sense About Science than the Autism Trust. For instance, I have just downloaded this webpage from the Institute of Science in Society, posted yesterday by Dr Mae-Wan Ho ('Call for Direct Witnessess'):
"In February, 26 scientists wrote to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States, expressing concern that they are being blocked from conducting independent research into GM crops by biotech corporations, and hence the information submitted to the EPA and other regulators are biased. Earlier in the same month, the group, Sense About Science (SAS) based in the UK, which describes itself as “a charitable trust to promote good science and evidence for the public” published a pamphlet Making Sense of GM, to help overcome “misconceptions” that have prevent the public from accepting GM crops and all the benefits they will bring. It was exposed in the public media as having been sponsored and co-written by Monsanto’s former director of scientific affairs (see Corporate Monopoly of Science, SiS 42). Corporations are aiming for an absolute stranglehold on scientific research and the flow of scientific information."
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/CallforDirectWitnessEvidenceGMHazards.php
Further information is provided on the site:
"Earlier in the same month, a group calling itself “Sense About Science” in the UK issued a ‘guide’, Making Sense of GM, to help overcome “misconceptions” that have prevent the public from accepting GM crops and all the benefits they will bring. What it failed to mention was the industrial affiliations of some of the scientists involved. Worse yet, Private Eye revealed that it was sent an earlier draft of the guide, which listed Andrew Cockburn as one of the authors that was removed in the published version. Cockburn is none other than Monsanto’s former director of scientific affairs."
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/corporateMonopolyOfScience.php
Posted by: Lobby Correspondent | April 15, 2009 at 12:02 PM
Many moons ago I read a piece by Fitzpatrick on how that burger joint with the golden arches is just the bees knees for families with autism. As his child ate his cheeseburger and drank his Coke, he could scream to his heart's content with nary a bat of an eyelash by the teenage employees. I remember thinking "Wake up man, maybe your kid is screaming because of the food/drink he is eating/drinking there."
He has some interesting associations: http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=141
Posted by: samaxtics | April 15, 2009 at 10:31 AM
This man Fitzpatrick sounds a worried and desperate man.
Posted by: Joan Campbell | April 15, 2009 at 08:48 AM
Gatogorra
Dr Fitz is a director of the Pharma and funded Lobby group “Sense about Science” who promote such things as GM foods and which acts as an “advisory” organisation that will provide a ”expert opinion” to give balance to negative science stories in the UK
Dr Offit also gives him a “hat tip” in his book . He has attended several Biomed conferences in the UK but remains unconvinced about recovery stories.
Im glad hes not my doctor
Posted by: mark h | April 15, 2009 at 05:28 AM
Thank you AoA, for alerting us to this. We just sent the following to both UK email addresses:
To the office of the Director of Communications in Downing Street, and to the Press Office in Downing Street,
Thank you for your time in reading this email.
We are the parents of an autistic son, and we live in the Seattle area of Washington, in the United States of America.
We are writing in support of the charitable UK foundation The Autism Trust, which is also registered in the United States. Founder Polly Tommy and Oliver Jones, chairman of The Autism Trust, are active in bettering the conditions of families of autistic children. Community and civic support is crucial for families where this disability is present, in part due to the severe demands it makes on all members of the family, as well as the diverse range of the disability and the lack of general information about people who suffer from it.
Please extend a welcome to The Autism Trust.
Thank you,
Dr. and Mrs. James F. Blinn
Posted by: Amanda Blinn | April 14, 2009 at 10:26 PM
Fitzpatrick is crazy mad about vitamins and restricted diet, but apparently thinks Risperdal is just fine.
In Fitzpatrick's book, "MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know" (http://tinyurl.com/c2fca2 ), he goes on about DAN-type treatments being "proven useless", and does the weirdest analysis of Andrew Wakefield's theory that I've ever read. Early in the book, he writes:
"Apart from behavioral methods, evidence is lacking for other forms of intervention, including 'physical' techniques (sensory integration, music therapy, auditory integration) and "medical" treatments (hormonal, immunilogical, anti-yeast, vitamins and diet). There is some evidence to support a limited role for medication, such as the atypical antipsychotic drug, risperidone, in the control of aggressive and self-injurious behavior".
Risperidone side effects:
drug-induced mitochondrial dysfunction, tardive dyskinesia (50% of patients after five years exposure, far higher among very young, females and elderly), respiratory dyskinesia (main cause of death for chronically exposed patients is respiratory failure), fatal metabolic syndrome and diabetes, neuroleptic malignant syndrome (fatal), brain cell death, high rate of extreme, even murderous violence and self injury upon dose alteration or withdrawal (why many exposed patients can never stop taking the drugs. So much for "limited use"-- the drug is a thumb trap), arrythmias, akathesia, "autistic-like" or Parkinsonian behaviors and demeanor, reduction in language skills, "destroys the ability to love", the list goes on.
Side effects of gluten-free, casein-free diet: sleeps better, poops better, functions better, increased language skills, return of eye contact... no side effects.
We'll be hearing more from Fitzy. It seems as if he's working himself up into a yellow-press-worthy rabid tizzy to peddle himself as an Offit-ish propagandist. I'm sure Janssen Pharmaceuticals and vax makers would be happy to pay his press junket fees.
Posted by: Gatogorra | April 14, 2009 at 08:44 PM