Can someone please disprove my theory?

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What if autism is caused by mitochondrial dysfunction?

What if there's a linear scale of more energy to less energy?

What if that directly translates to high or low functioning?

What if everything I believe is false? What if brutality is okay if it happens to low-functioning autistics? What if I'm really not like "them" and don't have the right to say that they're human?

What if parents all know everything about their children?

What if weak central coherence is caused by not having the brainpower to have strong central coherence?

What if we only notice details because we're too tired to see the whole picture?

What if it's mercury poisoning from vaccines?

What if my mother is right?

What if I'm broken?

If what your saying is true it shouldn't be possible for someone who starts out extremely low functioning to end up doing well. As an example I was born seizuring & my mother was told I wouldn't be able to walk, talk or even sit up. I was diagnosed w/ PDD at 18 mos. but with help am now able to communicate well, actually wrote some semi-crappy poetry & now have a 3.6+ GPA while in my 2nd year of college. Besides a few sensory quirks my friends pretty much seem to think I'm as close to "normal" as any of them get for a bunch of quirky, out of place people.

Unlikely, if it was true then people who eat lots of poorly prepared cassava would be more prone to autism. This is becuase poorly cooked cassava contains cyanide in the form of cyanosugars. Cyanide stops mitochondria from working, I do not think that a casual link between cassava and autism exists so it is very unlikely that it is linked to mitochondria.

But I might be wrong, also I suspect you would have to eat monumental amounts of cassava (or be very unlucky or bad at cooking it) to get a subacute cyanide poisoning which messes with your mitochondria but is not quite so bad that it kills you.

http://www.pjbs.org/pjnonline/fin1132.pdf

No one can know everything about anything.

The rest of your post makes just as much sense.

Don't let the curbies get you down, DF.

Last edited by Asp-Z on 23 Dec 2010, 5:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Half of those are questions that are based in biology and the other half are questions based on values and ethics (since one of the questions was 3 bundeled ethics questions).

I'd say that it's possible autism is caused by mitochondrial dysfunction. Or maybe it really is from mercury toxicity or another enviromental toxicity. Those are strictly biological and epidemiological questions. Who knows?

The questions about treatment of low functioning autistics are ethics questions. You can believe that autism is caused by mercury in vaccines and still have the ethical value that brutality is not acceptable treatment for anyone and being human is the birthright of all who have certain DNA commonalities.


Your mother is right about some things and wrong about others.

No parents know everything about their children.

You are not broken.


What was the theory?

I'm more on the hyperactive side. Definitely don't suffer from fatigue. Still have the problem of locking on details and failing to understand the "big picture".

Well, it's not neurotransmitters and not "mitochondria".
Have her give the link a read.
Of course it could lead "you're broke more" by this review.

But if someone has an open mind, it would appear to be a different firmware altogether.
-more white matter
-different cortical transmissions and timing thereof.
-mini columns densities for detail processing.
Etc.

The brain is wired 'significantly different' than the controls in the study.

There is also a distinction between LFA and High functioning in this group; and it's anatomical.





http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2597785/

Thanks, everyone. (Janissy, I don't fully understand. If one believes that autism is caused by vaccines one has to also believe in curing autistics by any means necessary, which I consider a very bad idea.)

Especially, thank you for the link, Mdyar, although trying to understand it is making my head hurt. What does it mean?

DF, it basically says that the structure of your brain is significantly different from the standard, but that it's working just fine - not damaged, just different.

An analogy, one which I have given before:

A Porsche Carerra sports car cannot tow 2 tons of cargo. A Ford F-250 pickup cannot turn in 0-60 in 4 seconds - at least, not without major modifications. Neither vehicle is thought of as "broken" or "malfunctioning" - they just have different designs.

My brain is not broken, nor is it malfunctioning - it just has a different design.

DeaconBlues, thank you for trying to help. I understand that much; what I'm having trouble with is what it's saying in specifics. What do all these regions do, what are they talking about? I only know what Broca's and Wernicke's areas do, and I can't figure out the implications of their lighting up oddly with sentence thingy my brain is way fried by this.

If you believe that, then you must conclude that it is false because "everything I believe is false".

"I believe that all my beliefs are false" is self-contradictory.

Is it clearer if I rephrase it as "every belief I have regarding autism is suddenly called into question?"

But what if all of that is the ozone layer?

No, it doesn't have to mean that at all.

I know people who have a definite known cause of their autism: their mothers had rubella while pregnant with them. It's one of the few known causes of autism. However they have the same range of beliefs about autism as any other autistic people. One of them is one of the most adamant no-cure types I have ever met, and she positively revels in being autistic. The fact that it was caused by brain damage doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to her.

The lack of desire for a cure doesn't have to have anything to do at all with the perceived cause. I don't care what caused my autism. If it was vaccines I would not only not change my self-concept or my ideas about cure at all, but I would still support vaccines. Why? Because I would rather there were a few more autistic children in the world than a lot more dead children in the world. It's a no-brainer for me.

I actually have several different conditions. Some have definite (or close) causes, some others just probable or possible causes, others I haven't a clue as to the cause. Of the causes I know or am pretty sure of, some are genetic, others from physical injuries (both immediate injuries and cumulative ones, both brain and other body parts), others from medication reactions, others from medical neglect, others from particulate inhalation, and several from some combination. (Oh and mitochondria is one possible among many theories for a condition that I might share with some female relatives, it almost definitely is something in the muscular energy cycle but there are easily dozens of such conditions if not more.)

How I feel about each condition, and about my priorities about curing any particular one, has more to do with my experience of it than the cause. In fact cause has virtually nothing to do with it. And even the conditions I utterly loathe are currently a part of me and therefore attached to other parts. You never know whether pulling on one part will harm others so it's always something to be done with appropriate caution and certainly not by any means necessary. I have known many people with severe conditions that ultimately limited their lifespans who did not want cures at all, or who put them at incredibly low priority. This is a common attitude among all kinds of disabled people, not just autistic people. (Often different groups of disabled people feel like they've invented this concept. Not so.)

Ultimately opinion on cure is dictated by a complex web of factors -- personality, culture, lived experience of the condition, understanding of disability in general, relationship to body, emotion, philosophy of life, etc. It's not ever dictated only by a single factor. One reason I don't like it when people say things like "If you had my problems you'd want a cure" is because it makes it sound as if my beliefs are not decisions I make based on a complicated set of factors, but instead are determined only by my type of autism. It makes it sound like you can plug in a type of autism and get a single answer back always the same. As if there's no individual variation between us at all except of course autism type. And that's just all wrong and insulting on so many levels!

Can you see how it's the same thing if you make a particular causation out to be the only factor in beliefs about cure?

anbuend, may I just live inside your head where everything makes five million times more sense? (I'll bring popcorn! And gingersnaps! And we can TP your temporal lobe! ...None of the preceding sentences are to be taken literally.) Your way of thinking about this makes a lot more sense than mine. Why do I believe mine?

But I mean, if autism is caused by injury or illness or something, it's bad. Bad things have to be cured. You are bad if you want to stay injured. ...Why doesn't my thought process make any sense?

Why do I believe something clearly false when there is an obvious and far better alternative?

Does your theory absolutely have to be disproved for you to abandon it, or could the realisation that your theories are bad for you prompt you to do that too? Because thinking that you are "broken" is bad too. Have you considered that an undetected depression might be affecting your thought process? When your thoughts are getting you down, it might be something to consider. And as you said, "bad things have to be cured" ...