Weekly Wrap: The Modern Treatment of Autism
By Dan Olmsted
It was frustrating, but in a weird way fascinating, to sit through the House subcommittee hearing on the federal response to autism this week, and to hear Tom Insel lecture members of Congress – he called it a “teachable moment” – about the scientific method, why duplication is actually replication and must never, ever be second-guessed by laymen, even the ones who sign his paycheck, and how “exciting” – I really got tired of that word – all the advances in the field have become.
He even noted that there were 30 percent more abstracts this year than last at the IMFAR conference, as if this unnecessary proliferation of entities (see Occam’s razor) was a good thing, rather than evidence that the autism industry is in self-perpetuation mode and dipping a finger in every honey pot on offer.
Why, it’s a model for scientific research, Insel said of federal efforts on autism. No one has ever brought more interagency coordination to bear on any medical problem, ever. Stand by for cause and cure! But first, we all must get out of the way and let real scientists do their work.
Partway through I began thinking of another pompous, pointless, profoundly mistaken exercise that nonetheless reeked of authority and expertise. It’s a book Mark Blaxill and I have written about, titled The Modern Treatment of Syphilis, published in 1943 by Hopkins professor Joseph Earle Moore. Here’s what we said about it in our own book, The Age of Autism:
“Up to the very last moment before the arrival of penicillin, syphilis experts claimed extraordinary progress with ever more sophisticated applications of heavy metals (mercury very much included) and fever therapy. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Joseph Earle Moore’s Modern Treatment of Syphilis included a chapter on the virtues of mercury treatment with numerous unattributed statistics and extravagant claims about the benefits of heavy metals and the dangers of leaving syphilis untreated.”
More about mercury in a minute, but the point here is how gasbags with credentials and completely wrong ideas can hold sway right up to the moment when their whole enterprise collapses.
I think Insel is about there. “The science is moving so quickly,” he said. No it’s not. The Government Accounting Office report he was so dismissive of, with the help of Rep. Gerry Connolly, a real bullelly, nailed his misguided obsession with genes, the genome, genomics (however you pronounce it – clueless subcommittee Chair Mica wasn’t sure), and his fatuous claim to be looking for the environmental triggers now clearly driving the autism epidemic.
Everything is converging on the second trimester of pregnancy, he said, as the moment when something goes wrong. No, it’s not. It’s converging on the first two years of infancy when, as so many parents testify, many children regress in clear response to vaccination.
Even in that narrow prenatal window, Insel said, “what the culprit or culprits are we still don’t know.” Yes, we do – one of them is surely mercury flu shots during pregnancy.
That’s the irony about Joseph Earle Moore and his syphilis book, running on about the wonders of arsenic and mercury treatments the year before penicillin made his work irrelevant. Medical mercury, as we’ve shown, triggered the worst kind of syphilis – general paralysis of the insane, an affliction as awful as it sounds – but medicine never acknowledged it. Once penicillin came along, they just added the wonder drug to their “march of progress” and ignored the centuries of death and destruction caused by their own ”modern treatment.”
Similarly, Insel brushed off the gallant Rep. Posey by asking how long we want to go on “banging
Insel did say that a big sibling study of 35,000 families is due in three months. It will look at the autism rate of subsequent unvaccinated siblings in families with a vaccinated autistic child (that is, parents who in the government’s opinion were stupid enough to believe vaccinations made that first child autistic and didn’t vaccinate the rest of their kids). He offered to sit down and go over the results with Posey, who ought to bring a bodyguard, a lie detector, a B.S. deflector, and a Geiger counter to the meeting.
I do feel a bit more sanguine about the hearing than some I’ve talked to, possibly because I don’t have a child who’s affected by this ongoing inanity. From a journalistic perspective, a lot got on the record, including Sallie Bernard’s recent article on the environmental basis of autism from which Posey read a substantial excerpt.
Once again, he mentioned “international scumbag” Poul Thorsen and the hand he had in studies that were just “meta”-reviewed to show no link between vaccines and autism.
Best of all, Insel was shown once again to be the best and the brightest the medical and scientific establishment has to offer on the modern treatment of autism. That is not a compliment, and I don't think the hearing was the teachable moment he was imagining. But it certainly was a learnable one.
--
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.
Onewayforsome, I know of doctors who treat autistic children who have already said that when the first child is vaccine injured, the parents don't vaccinate the second and the second child is NOT autistic. They've seen many examples of this. If that study says something different then it's just another fraudulent study, another lie. What's going on is what I consider crimes against humanity and the perpetrators should be put into guantonimo bay, but since the lunatics are running the whole asylum at the moment, it might be a long wait before that happens.
Posted by: Susan | May 28, 2014 at 08:36 PM
Some detail on here court numbers etc (not new news 2011)
http://www.justice.gov/usao/gan/press/2011/04-13-11.html
MMR RIP
Posted by: Angus Files | May 26, 2014 at 05:16 PM
Vaccine Science has been a slippery slope from Day One. It has been about profits from day one. And it has been about smoke screens and a million sociopathic tactics since Day One.
Once the powers that be decided that denial was the response they would take to the damage from vaccines, instead of:
-- figuring out who was vulnerable and why their threshold was lower
---undestanding what that meant and what they should fix
-- Fairly compensating and apologizing if not honoring the 'collateral damage" to their profits, our children ---
they slid down that slippery slope into a great abyss. From this abyss, which each group stays in for their own warped and black and white reason, (journalists because pharma pays for ads, doctors because of the ridicule of their peers, parents because they mistakingly and guiltily think "my kid didn't get ____ illness, so maybe it's okay your kid got autism", special ed depts who minimize our struggle and focus on the 3 parents who pretend their child has ADD to get the extra time on the SAT, or who feed autistic 3 year olds M&M's like a dog to get them to behave, but don't even question why they are there . . . There are so very many good people in every one of these categories--the parents who have survivor guilt and reach out in kindness to my son, the journalists and doctors who risk their careers to speak the truth, the special ed teachers who fight their administration to get our children what they actually need . . . There are so many very good people out there, but the ones who started it and keep the lies going are in the abyss, and they will do anything they can to pull everyone else in it in order to protect their image, their profits, and their lies.
Posted by: Anita Donnelly | May 26, 2014 at 11:42 AM
Barbaraj
It is all incredibly merky. I think it was implied that this person had in some way been duped by Thorsen. Another interpretation is that the whole culture is completely criminal.
John
Posted by: John Stone | May 26, 2014 at 10:55 AM
John Stone, that IS interesting! Who were these people, was it a perk for designing the outcome wished by those "asking" for the research? could this have been a payoff ??
Posted by: barbaraj | May 26, 2014 at 10:28 AM
Also, the Federal authorities have already dropped the case against whoever it was who enabled Thorsen to embezzle all that money.
Posted by: John Stone | May 26, 2014 at 04:38 AM
Bob, I've been reading the online magazine comments this weekend.The same group hiding under masks continue to promote Thorsen's study , while condemning Wakefield and his. When faced with the facts, Thorsen was submitting invoices for portions of the study NEVER completed, they didn't blink, kept on calling his the best study to prove thimerosal has no connection to autism. They said the Denmark courts have already dropped his case "so there", yet with a two second google search it's found that "dropped case" was for tax evasion, totally unrelated. The readers don't understand this agenda led research is a lie, no more than they get that the same handful of "commenters" run to do their pharm damage control at any mention of the truth, and that is, vaccine causes autism .
Posted by: barbaraj | May 25, 2014 at 11:43 PM
@ onewayforsomebutnottheonlyway
...Vaccines can be the "icing on the cake," the wrong ingredient and the wrong time, etc. However, there are increasingly more and more environmental dangers (e.g. our food supply) that is so toxic to our digestive system (the immune system) that a genetically predisposed individual may still develop brain damage unless and until we stop poisoning ourselves...
Food may be laced with various toxins, but given that no-one has a blueprint of your DNA our bodies may very well be adapted to naturally excrete these toxins.
It may be the vaccines that trigger the Autism behaviour and all the more reason to screen or test our babies prior to vaccinating them?
Elizabeth Gillespie
Posted by: AussieMum | May 25, 2014 at 10:09 PM
Anita, thanks for asking my advice. I looked around in PubMed with various keywords, and found an article from 2011 that is free online. Its citations might lead to answers for some of your questions. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21746727.
Have a look at Dr. Sarah Buckley’s website at http://sarahbuckley.com. She herself is Rh negative, and avoided problems with her 4 births by not severing the umbilical cord until it stopped pulsating (circulation to and from the placenta had ceased). Clamping the cord causes capillary hemorrhages at the maternal/placental boundary. This is how Rh+ blood gets into the maternal circulation. Other incompatibilities like ABO have been identified, but also only cause problems when even small amounts of fetal blood get into the mother’s circulation.
I think some of the problem with vaccines, especially neonatal hep B, is an additional insult on top of impairment of the blood-brain barrier from the stress of oxygen insufficiency.
Do you have pictures of your baby swimming, and later pictures when he just floated? This could provide important information. Your story, and mine and so many others are tragic. Yes, we have to find a way to stop this. We need something much better than the IACC of the past 10 years.
Posted by: Eileen Nicole Simon | May 25, 2014 at 07:49 PM
Redeal the cards...
Insell has the Autism pack dealt again to suit Thorsens original game plan.. ..
Pharmas cash cow!!
MMR RIP
Posted by: Angus Files | May 25, 2014 at 05:12 PM
@dr simon:
What if mercury shots in pregnancy lead to difficulties in labor? Has anyone linked that or attempted to? What we actually need is access to databases at a friendly medical practice that could easily at least see if this were a trend with the right tools. The answers are there. I wonder if hippa laws were warped to prevent finding these correlations.
I got rhogham and a flu shot during pregnancy and I think that is why my sons birth was difficult which I can certainly agree may well cause even more issues such as those you mentioned. Perhaps a woman who can't go into labor at 2 weeks post partum even with pitocon is a sign of maternal or fetal mercury toxicity right there. Thank you for continually reminding us of the birth issues. For me their reluctance to call for a c section even though I was a 39 year old with my first child until there was distress was not helpful. And this was Stanford. So my son continually got bombarded by mistakes (was in the icu immediately after the first hep b shot--but I still didn't connect tr dots) would recover from the pummel and then get hit again at each "well baby visit" u til the MMR changed him from a baby who swam in infant swim class to a baby who just floated. That was when we stopped the shots and that was when the direction started going toward healing not more and more insult. The point is that all these insults lead to the next one and there are synergistic issues. Thank you Dr Simon for your continued reminders that our pregnancies start out so robust that it can take assault after assuailt before autism appears. My son like so many was way ahead of markers prior to his MMR which was coupled with 3 other shots. But then the house of cards slammed down. We have got to find a way to stop this. We have got to find a way to stop this. We have got to find a way to stop this.
Posted by: Anita Donnelly | May 25, 2014 at 12:50 PM
Insel has teflon all over him. His Performance, along with others like Marshalyn and the gang is pathetic and a waste of time and money but they will be allowed, nay encouraged, to continue the tragedy.
I wish Jefferson would weigh in on the new Australia meta study.
Posted by: Jen | May 25, 2014 at 12:18 PM
Insel has shown himself to be utterly indifferent to to the quality and integrity of research time after time (for instance he keeps on touting bogus British adult autism data as evidence that autism is not rising). Next time won't be any different.
Posted by: John Stone | May 25, 2014 at 04:29 AM
I would not be too quick to think that the sibling study will not show exactly what they want it to show…
Remember, it has been about 15-20 years now…almost two decades of pretty nasty stuff going in to our kids and ourselves.
The reality is there will likely be a genetic predisposition…autoimmune disease, asthma, hypothyroid, etc. So, even though many think an unvaccinated sibling should not have autism symptoms if vaccines were the cause…is missing the point. Vaccines can be the "icing on the cake," the wrong ingredient and the wrong time, etc. However, there are increasingly more and more environmental dangers (e.g. our food supply) that is so toxic to our digestive system (the immune system) that a genetically predisposed individual may still develop brain damage unless and until we stop poisoning ourselves.
There are too many vaccines and they are not being monitored. But it is not the only thing causing this epidemic.
Posted by: onewayforsomebutnottheonlyway | May 24, 2014 at 10:34 PM
Many military parents thinks the anthrax vaccine given to the father before birth caused autism.
Tom Insel was baiting us all when he said - if this study showed no link can we then put the vaccine thing behind us.
Hell no, you don't witness what I have seen and just put it behind ya.
But go ahead and do the study -- let us see how much it matters once you have a generation of parents fully vaccinated giving birth -- some of us wants to know how bad is the damage and if this genie can be put back into the bottle.
Posted by: Benedetta | May 24, 2014 at 08:59 PM
No matter what the form of modern illness, government and grant applicants are never interested in cause or cure, only treatments. Treatments that can be patented and sold ad infinitum. As long as government protects patent holders from liability, there will never be any truth. Going to the government for answers, protection, reparations or hope is like asking the offending abuser to please stop because after all, it is wrong to mistreat people. All talk should be directed toward repealing the injury act. They imposed the law, they can remove it. Everyone would have a fair day in court where evidence mattered, where testimonials mattered.
Posted by: Cynthia Cournoyer | May 24, 2014 at 08:40 PM
How come nobody questioned why they were listening to thorsen.. I thought he was wanted?
Posted by: bob | May 24, 2014 at 08:39 PM
Really interesting article and interesting comments. I find Victor's remark about how the results of the sibling study seem to be already known--no link--very intriguing. That just sounds suspicious and unscientific.
Posted by: Lisa | May 24, 2014 at 07:23 PM
Dan, thank you for bringing Insel’s mid-gestation proclamation up for discussion. He cited the report of “patchy disorganization” in the brains of 10 of 11 cases of autism and in 1 of 11 controls. For the past 3 years I have asked the IACC to discuss the finding of abnormalities in the brainstem auditory pathway in 9 cases of autism, and experiments with laboratory rats in which the same abnormalities were found following prenatal exposure to valproic acid (VPA).
The IACC never discusses comments submitted by stakeholders. They lied in their report to congress claiming collaborations with stakeholders.
Difficult birth is the environmental factor reported more often than any other in children who develop autism. In the experiments with monkeys on asphyxia at birth from more than 50 years ago, damage of nuclei in the auditory pathway was found, and maturation of the cerebral cortex did not follow a normal course in the asphyxiated monkeys. The areas of “patchy disorganization” reported in the recent paper cited by Thomas Insel should be compared with the disorganized growth of the cerebral cortex of monkeys whose brains were damaged by asphyxia at birth.
In addition to asphyxia, mercury, lead, alcohol, methyl bromide and carbonyl sulfide (herbicides), alpha-chlorohydrin (pesticide), carboplatin (chemotherapy), soman (nerve gas), and more all cause prominent damage of the inferior colliculus in the midbrain auditory pathway. I will continue to try to point out evidence that damage (or malfunction) within this auditory nucleus should be investigated as relevant to failure of language development in autism.
Ms. Eileen Nicole Simon, PhD (thanks Zed)
Posted by: Eileen Nicole Simon | May 24, 2014 at 07:11 PM
I'd like to know they acquired these 35,000 families. Does anyone know anyone who was ever contacted?
Posted by: maurine meleck | May 24, 2014 at 06:57 PM
I have this feeling now that the 'only' reason they are doing this study is to confirm/defend the Dr.Thorsen autism research in Denmark exonerating vaccines. The CDC/Insel really wants to use this new research to defend themselves against the questioning by Congressman Posey.
Posted by: VictorPavlovic | May 24, 2014 at 05:49 PM
I really love your advocacy, but reality is that the government doesn't help anyone with any illness. Look at cancer, MS, etc. So, in reality, our hope is the American way -- to pursue the freedom of choice in docs and therapies.
The government is not going to do anything to reduce autism. I know this because it has done nothing to reduce any illness, other than those that kill immediately. Unfortunately, autism is just part of the problem. Finally, a news channel publicly mentioned the high rate of those on disability. It's about time. We can not go on as a world, with so many being chronically ill. All from the same causes, of course, toxins and nutrient deficiencies. Yes, in America, even the rich have nutrient deficiencies because the government won't require accurate nutrient testing and the med schools still tell docs it doesn't exist.
Unfortunately, I meet people all the time, who keep waiting for medical personnel to heal them. They aren't going to. You have to do the research yourself, and then find a doc that knows how to heal. It's the only thing that works for my family.
If we were to go to a system where we pay ourselves for docs instead of insurance companies, the docs would finally work for us, and actually do something fruitful. There will never be another way, never. The docs are the real problem because they choose to give vaccines to children who are ill and such. As long as the laws state docs can not be sued as long as they do what the FDA says they can do, there will be no change. Policy needs to change. People follow policy only. Therefore, most docs do not treat the patient, they treat governing regulators by factorily following guidelines by those not practicing and making money off of what they tell the docs to do. This is why the system isn't working.
Only policy changes will make docs care to think for themselves. But, here in America, we can choose to use those docs who are thinking for themselves. They exist. You will have to look hard to find them. And unfortunately, we blindly trust docs, never doubting any of them, until it's too late.
Posted by: HeidiN | May 24, 2014 at 05:46 PM
Congressman Posey did pretty well but perhaps he might want to yield his time to someone from AoA to ask questions of Dr. Insel for him.
The non-vaccinated sibling study of 35,000 Autism families should be very interesting unless they have figured out a way to corrupt the data.
Posted by: cmo | May 24, 2014 at 03:58 PM
Am I the only one who noticed that the female PhD on the panel was entitled "Ms"…when it should have been "Dr", like the other doctors? Maybe it sounds like a small thing, but (whether it was intentional or not) it might explain why Connelly was so demeaning toward her.
(After all, in a sexist mindset, we can't have women overriding a man's judgment.)
Ask Jenny.
Posted by: Zed | May 24, 2014 at 12:14 PM
So very frustrating. And I wonder is this it now? Has this congressional committee done everything it's going to do? Or was this information gathering, and more to come?
It was nice to catch a glimpse of you and Mark when the camera showed the audience, and to know that you would be reporting and engaging in continued advocacy, reframing the issues as they should be.
Posted by: Twyla | May 24, 2014 at 11:48 AM
John, we are am in agreement. I am definitely not buying their 'second trimester' schtick -- at least not in the majority of cases. Really -- how does it sit with regressive autism? We have an infant brain that was damaged prenatally, and that infant is born as a healthy baby reaching all milestones, but only to regress later at the precise time of immunization? With the VCA debate, I find the best practice is to stick with Occam Razor rule. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
@VictorPavlovic
Yes, I think the time is fast approaching that we should expect all their studies to be utter garbage, and as they have shown time and time again. Humouring them will only be detrimental to our cause.
Posted by: Greg | May 24, 2014 at 10:03 AM
Thanks for the write up. After I had watched Insel's dog and pony show, I wished that Posey, who was awesome, could have picked up on the 2nd trimester idea and asked Insel whether vaccinating a pregnant women during the second trimester (whether w/a flu shot, or rhogam, or tetanus, or whatever) could affect the outcomes. And I have to wonder if the data of second trimester stuff is coming from information collected only since the flu shot has started being given to pregnant women, or does it go back farther than that, and is or would there be a difference in numbers found if they were compared.
The elapsed time has given them the ability to produce autism from pregnancy and deflect from the effect of post-birth vaccine damage - in fact, to continue to ignore it since they have now found, i.e. created, autism from the womb. When the majority of autism cases can be defined as originating in pregnancy, then we'll see movement on the definition of autism - it will break out of the confines of the psych community where it is being safely guarded until the time is right. But it will be defined as a congenital medical condition, which by then will coincide with new-to-the-market epigenetic treatments from pharmaceutical companies in this "exciting" (never tragic) new time for science. Once "gestational autism" becomes the new norm, some doctors here or there may start applying those treatments for it off-label to the children of remaining divergent parents who still believe that their now adult children suffered from "regressive" autism. And if the pharmaceutical companies make any treatment products that are even relatively successful with less side effects, the stupid new parents will say "autism? who cares where it comes from, we have a treatment for that." If their luck holds out, they'll be heroes. Then, and only then, will there be a glimmer of hope of them announcing that, in retrospective, maybe neurotoxins in vaccines caused some serious damage. So many loops in the slinky to still ride out.
Posted by: Jenny | May 24, 2014 at 09:29 AM
Victor,
Yes, Posey surely knew that new Australian study being touted by Insel was a rehash of all the old junk - Thorsen was emblematic of the whole thing but the criminal hands of the CDC were virtually all over every one of those studies: Verstraeten, Andrews, Price, De Stefano...
John
Posted by: John Stone | May 24, 2014 at 08:47 AM
Excellent Dan, I find it interesting that he already is so confident that the non-vaccinated sibling study will prove that vaccines don't cause autism that he will sit down and review it with Congressman Posey once its available, does he know the results already? Looking at past studies that he cites as definitive proof of no link, I doubt that this one will be any different.
Posted by: VictorPavlovic | May 24, 2014 at 08:40 AM
The "second trimester" ploy has also been going on a long time and yet doesn't seem to yield any results. I am sure we are overdoing the ultrasounds and the move to vaccinate pregnant women against everything is obviously going to accelerate the problem.
Posted by: John Stone | May 24, 2014 at 08:30 AM