How Anti-Vaccine 'Science' Holds Back Credible Autism Research
An expert panel says there’s no rigorous evidence that digestive problems are more common in children with autism compared to other children, or that special diets work, contrary to claims by celebrities and vaccine naysayers.
This is a totally non contentious piece of work. The panel examined all credible research into the subject and decided there simply wasn’t anything available to support the idea of a things such as autistic entercolitis – a faux syndrome pushed by the section of autism anti vaxxers who believe Andrew Wakefields fake science.
Take careful note though of what they are saying:
1) That there’s no credible evidence. Parental anecdote is not credible evidence.
2) Thats autistic children may well have gut issues and that if they do they should be treated medically.
3) That special diets show no eficacy in treating autism .
The issue for me therefore is that when autistic kids have gut issues they need to be treated properly by medical staff. This means making appointments that allow for the special needs of autistic people (either first in the day or last in the day to avoid waits, quiet waiting rooms with appropriate distractions and most of all well trained staff who won’t say caustic things to parents).
A TACA representative is quoted as saying:
“I’m filled with hope after reading this report,” said Estepp of the support group Talk About Curing Autism. “I wish this report would have come out 10 years ago when my son was diagnosed.”
Ironically, TACA who support the work of Andrew Wakefield probably could have had a report like this ten years ago if the work of Andrew Wakefield hadn’t been so heavily promoted by groups like TACA.
The new report says the existence of autistic enterocolitis “has not been established.” Buie said researchers and doctors have avoided digestive issues in autism because of their connection with Wakefield’s disputed research, which set off a backlash against vaccines that continues to this day.
Quite understandably, researchers didn’t want to get involved in a field tainted by a person like Wakefield and his demonstrably false and disproven idea that MMR causes or contributes to autism. If they did, when they came out with science that contradicted Wakefield they would be subject to the same sort of hate crimes currently perpetrated against numerous other scientists such as Paul Offit who has received death threats. Who would want that?
Quite simply – if people like Wakefield admit their error and then shut up, more science will be done that will reveal more results groups like TACA may well support.
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Autism Coined and Identified: 1938
Establishment western medical known cures: 0
Establishment western medical known preventions: 0
Establishment western medical known causes: 0
FAIL.
Your problem here is assuming there is a meaning to what you just said. There is no meaning. "Western medicine ," properly identfied and hence forth referred to as " science -based medicine," is aware of many diseases and ailments for which there is no cure, no prevention, and no known direct causes. There are plenty that have some of those traits as well.
However, medicine that works and can be reliably repeated is what is called science-based medicine.
Your referrence to "Western" medicine implies that you believe that working cures would be ignored by the medicial community for some reason that I assume is related to how much money can be made off of whatever cure is discovered. This is wholly preposterous. Science-based medicine does not live in an idealized world of capitalists that refuse to even speak of things for which no profit is to be made.
Many ailments are treated for next to nothing or treated at home as the standard of care for the typical case.
Medicine that works, never needs the adjective "alternative" because if it works it's just called medicine. THAT is what you are referring to when you call it "western" medicine.
There is still no cure for autism or HIV or Herpes. One is likely a genetic disorder that is likely modified by environtmental factors, the second is a terrible virus that exists as many different viruses that are nearly impossible to wipe out, and the third is a virus that is relatively easy to kill if it weren't for the fact that some of the virus population is always in a state of "hibernation" that hides the virus from detection by "sleeping" completely dormant inside of normal cells only to randomly awake at any moment and re-infect the host.
Please explain how "failing" to cure these is somehow an indictment of science based medicine as fallacious.
Furthermore, there is NO cure for autism in ANY form of "medicine," if there were, a list of cured patients would begin building at an enormous and undeniable rate.
For instance, if ANYONE could produce a set of children that had been diagnosed low functioning Autistic and present them as full functioning non- autistic children, the entire world would shut up to listen to the doctor that cured them. That person would be the TIME Person-of-all-time (well maybe not quite) and be given the Nobel within the year. Since no one has done that and since many people in "alternative" fields and in science based fields have been working on it, I am logically correct in assuming that no cure exists. Period... Yet.
Not curing the common cold must be a big fat FAIL on whatever "non-western" medicine you subscribe to as well as science based medicine too, by your logic.
There is no venerable "FAIL" to be applied since NO ONE has had a "SUCCESS" and it only makes you look like an anti-science idiot (no offense intended, just calling it) to prentend that it is. The only true statement, colloquials aside, is to say that the research has not succeeded. It hasn't "failed" on any level. Research doesn't fail unless it's not actually done, for a truly scientific mind would say that research that didn't find the answer did intact succeed at finding what is NOT the answer.
Essentially, take your anti-science rhetoric and put up or shut up.
HIV and Herpes:
cause: virus
prevention: avoid infection pathway
cure: none, but some drugs are effective at combating the symptoms
HIV was only discovered a few decades ago. Why so much success here and none with Autism?
Autism is a DSM diagnosis, a collection of symptoms subjectively identified... *UNLESS* there is a 'better' explanation, e.g. Rett's Disorder. You can look this up in the DSM or google the DSM and read the diagnosis criterion.
Oh ye master of science should know that since Autism is an arbitrary classification, its symptoms have no obligation to be caused by a single source. Also you are keenly aware that all the symptoms are a form of neurological impairment. In fact, mercury poisoning can be 'mistakenly' diagnosed as autism in children . After removing the mercury via chelation they are often 'cured'.
It will also be review for you that the Journal of Health and Place published a study ("Environmental mercury release, special education rates, and
autism disorder: an ecological study of Texas" 2005) showing an astonishing correlation of neurotoxic pollutants and the diagnosis of Autism. Of course you also know that correlation does not imply causality, but can see the obvious causal link between neurotoxins and neurological impairment.
Thus, that current research is aimed heavily at genetics, which is completely contradicted by the rapid rate of increased Autism diagnoses is clearly misguided, one must ask, is there no way to fail in your world of research?
Also, you must have been joking about alternative therapies not working because they are called 'alterative'. Certainly 'altertivate' is not a magic word that causes something to not work.
Finally I must know why your profound scientific background fails to include any reading of Lovaas, who claimed a 47 percent success rate with ABA therapy and Autism recovery. Though his statistical methods were sub-optimal, and his real world success rate should be lower, it is definately not non-zero. That is, there is no doubt that some children recovered.
"that current research is aimed heavily at genetics,"
AND many other factors. No straw men please.
"which is completely contradicted by the rapid rate of increased Autism diagnoses"
Ignoring that I've rebuked your premise for a second: How so? A genetic cause may simply be a vulnerability to an environemental factor. No contradiction at all.
"one must ask, is there no way to fail in your world of research?"
Bad methodology, not doing it, and ignoring critiques are great ways to fail in my world of research. Not finding a cure is absolutely not a failure, and is usually classified as a success in learning what doesn't work.
"you must have been joking about alternative therapies not working because they are called 'alterative'."
You have it backwards my friend. They are called 'alternative' because they haven't been proven to work, not the other way around. Medicine that works is just called ' medicine ' with no necessitate for the operator 'alternate'. If it WORKS, it is adopted as 'medicine.'
Look up Tom Harkin's baby NCCAM. It is a government body set up specifically to 'validate' alternative medicine . Senator Harkin has been on record complaining that NCCAM has done nothing with a couple billion dollars and 10 years except prove that alt. meds don't work! The closest alt. med has come to a scientific validation is with acupuncture that showed a statistically significant result above not doing it at all, however the "fake" accupuncture (ie placebo accupuncture) showed the same results as the "real" accupuncture.
"[Lovaas ... ABA ...] That is, there is no doubt that some children recovered."
ABA is a phsycological therapy treatment, NOT alternative medicine! It is extremely intensive therapy, but it is still behavioral modification therapy. It does not pretend to be based on what causes autism but on how to get a HIGH functioning autistic patient to levels that would make them a functional student and member of society .
Also, it is not an "undeniable" fix for autism and it's efficacy as an autism treatment is questionable. However it is not frowned upon as behavioral therapy for autistic children
http://www.autismspeaks.org/treatment/index.php
You previously acknowledged that ASD is a subjective diagnosis and can be misdiagnosed easily or simply be something else and then you use a physcological treatment program (that can be used on any child with a mental disability) to demonstrate a succesful 'treatment' when you should have put two and two together. Had you done that maybe you'd have noticed that ABA is not a medical treatment. If autism is subjective and prone to false diagnoses, then a behavorial modifcation treatment will inevitably work on a statistically significant group of high functioning study patients as some are not severe or are misdiagnosed in the first place. Any behavioral modification program of this nature should show positive results even in perfectly normal children so the successful cases are only successes for ABA as a therapy and not neccessarily an 'autism' therapy.
The problem with the analogies is that ASD is not an 'is' or 'is not' disorder, it has varying levels of severity. So, any treatment must show very high success rates in order to be considered as a 'cure' (or anything close to that) for any spectral disorder.
For some reason you can acknowledge that Autism is a set of symptoms arbitrarily lumped together but you insist that somehow it should be considered as a valid research population. That this research against an imagined diagnosis is somehow relevent or valid or meaningful.
Headache is not a disease or disorder. It is a collection of one or more symptoms. If you to try to find the source of headache by studying a population of people with headaches you are highly unlikely to succeed for lack of a strong enough correlation with any given phenomena.
Some headache can be caused by trauma, toxicity, bacteria, viral, and fungal infection, allergy, genetics, tumors cancerous and not, diet , malnutrition... Autism is the same thing as headache in that is it a collection of symptoms, albeit only more complex, and intransient. Nevertheless, it is just a collection of symptoms. If the same 'research' methods were applied to headache, I could hit you on the head and say that your headache cannot be shown to be caused by trauma, because I could hit someone else on the head and they might not get a headache and someone can get a headache without being hit on the head. Maybe you're genetically inclined towards feeling pain. Headache is a symptom with underlying cause. In the same sense, Autism and other ASDs are far more likely symptoms of something else than actually the diagnoses that have been arbitrarily fabricated to describe them.
If I adopt your mindset, an arbitrary designation like Autism actually has some real world significance instead of being a purely cultural fabrication of otherwise unexplained symptoms lumped together for convenience. If I don't, a lot of things become more clear. The symptoms for Mercury poisoning and Autism can be exactly identical. Not every time, in fact it requires a lot of co-incidence, but mercury poisoning can, in some cases, be indistinguishable from Autism. It therefore follows to conclude there is mercury induced Autism, not mercury poisoning that looks exactly like Autism until we do a tissue analysis and decide its something else. Armed with that knowledge, a scientist would conclude that the symtoms of Autism can be caused by mercury, but quite rarely. Therefore, there must be at least one other possible cause of the symptoms of Autism, and most likely many. Therefore, Autism is not a particularly useful marker for research subjects, rather, we should be finding and understanding the sources of different forms of developmental, neurological impairment of which some cases are called Autism.
Thus, instead of looking at the phenomena of Autism, Asperger's, Hyperlexia, etc, we should be looking at neurological impairment and what causes it and try to eliminate the sources of it. If you had read the Health and Place article with an understanding of statistics and an indifference to "Autism" as anything other than symptoms of neurological impairment, their correlation between neurotoxin pollutants and incidences of DSM style diagnoses (which, in the analytical mind, are largely just collections of neurological impairment), including Autism is astonshing, unquestionable, and profound. The causal link would be that neurological damage from neurotoxins causes neurological disorder. Now, whether or not environmental toxicity acutally causes the thing we call 'Autism' within a confidence level that is acceptable for causality, is irrelevant. If we look at whether or not there is neurological damage identified as a result of exposure to industrially produced neurotoxins, there is no doubt. This would be an excellent candidate for one of multiple explanations for the increase in neurological damage observed in children .
Back to alternative. Just because something is labelled alternative does not mean it will work or not work. Just because something is prescribed by a doctor does not mean it will work or it will not work. Just because something is a placebo does not mean it will work or will not work. The one thing I can say, is that the track record of dangerous side effects is largely monopolized by prescription and non-prescription drugs and AMA/standard/establishment/whatever medical treatments. And the rate of being dead wrong about things is not soley the domain of alternative care. The most core, established medical practices regularly turn out to be dead wrong. Tylenol being the preferred non-prescription pain killer also made it the leading cause of acute liver failure. How long did it take to figure that out? Alternative care, like say, meditation and other medical exercises for pain (oh that's not 'alternative' anymore?) when its wrong, is generally less dangerous.
Also, my wife was an ABA therapist. I have personally seen kids go from extremely low functioning Autism to normal, typical children - not fitting any ASD diagnosis, kids fail to make any improvements even starting from high level, and everything else in-between. With such awesome variation from a well tracked methodology, this should be profound evidence that Autism is the wrong way to look at things, that we should be looking at neurological impairment and building up it causes with evidence and objectively based, testable classifications. Also, back when my wife was a therapist, ABA was reviled, alterative was the nicest name for it, and some doctors called it child abuse . For *decades* it was considered at least alternative, if not sheer quackery. Its marginally accepted, at some level, now.
I have also seen kids with alternative care, such as diet and various supplement/ medicine combinations recover from a diagnois of 'Autism', some improve but not recover, and some not recover at all. Perhaps those that recovered were spontaneous - self healed, perhaps the treatment was effective, perhaps it was a combination of both. However, there are many cases of 'Autism' diagonses recovering without explanation, at least from a medical perspective. I have seen a child diagnosed with Autism and, after time, no longer able to be diagnosed as such. Of course, if you were to say the child had neurological damage, and at least some of the damage healed, which mitigated at least some of the symptoms he or she had previously, it suddenly makes a lot of sense.
Finally the notion that HIV is somehow worse by any measure than what might be called "ASDs" but should be called the massive increase in neurological dysfunction, disorder, and damage in children is beyond absurd. Maybe you should watch a three year old bang there head against a wall until they bleed, scream for hours, bite themselves and their parents, and other things I really can't even say on this blog. And when you go to a doctor with HIV there is something they can do. When you go to a non DAN doctor with a kid with Autism, who doesn't embrace ABA, you're screwed.
" HIV was only discovered a few decades ago. Why so much success here and none with Autism?"
I'd wager on three reasons. First, HIV and Herpes are viruses that are not subjective diagnoses and are therefore targetable, unlike autism . When you can see your enemy, you are far more likely to be successful. Second, HIV is deadly and leads to long slow painful deaths usually inflicted by otherwise harmless diseases that the immune system is incapable of warding off, unlike autism, and is therefore easier to generate insterest in study. Three, HIV and Herpes are STDs and are therefore communicated, unlike autism, and they also affect our procreation putting them REALLY high on the list of priorities.
Apples and Oranges. Hell, Alzheimers would be a better comparison than this. Maybe you should reread my post and realize that I never implied that HIV and Herpes are mysterious in origin or diagnosis. I was specifically stating that they are uncured diseases to which you acknowledged. Give the "FAIL" thing a rest.
"In fact, mercury poisoning can be 'mistakenly' diagnosed as autism in children ."
Not by those experienced with autism or mercury poisoning. Mercury poisoning is not identical to autism and comparing the two makes it obvious. Furthermore, as you've repeatedly said, autism is a subjective diagnosis so it isn't unfathomable that a diagnosis of an ailment that is not objectively determined will lead to false diagnoses, even if one to one comparisons are not possible. However, mercury poisoning has visible symptoms of various skin disorders... And it can be objectively tested for, whereas autism can not.
"Journal of Health and Place published a study"
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=111
Ok, so I misspoke, there IS a way to fail at research while actually doing it. But it's called bad science . Not finding a cure is not a "FAIL", but bad science is. Palmer's studies are prime examples of rigging a study without even realizing it. Had he accounted for more variables and consulted anyone with some statistical expertise, the claimed conclusions wouldve been very different. However, that would not have supported his preconcieved narative that Mercury causes autism so it's understandable that Palmer wouldn't have been so rigorous.
"but [you] can see the obvious causal link between neurotoxins and neurological impairment."
Which is exactly why utmost scientific rigour is required when attempting to research the disorders associated with the brain. This correlative likelihood is what creates a confirmation bias so clearly demonstrated by every study that shows positive results from a mercury-autism link. Due to this confirmation bias factor, criticism of published (or unpublished) studies must be closely considered. When a critique is offered, it has consistently shown major flaws in these studies, like the Palmer studies.
For anything calling itself "research" to denigrate the parents of children , I scratch it off the "decent" list.
We've gone down this path on so many topics, I can hardly believe anyone would print an article that claims "Parents don't know their child". Please get some wisdom. From Natives to Euro to Hispanic......parents around the world know their children and what hurts or helps their child.
We'd be smarter to start asking parents the upfront questions of what does help and what does harm your children.
thanks............mowalker