Can autism get lesser?

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Oh, and the mercury-autism link has been disproven by the CDC, FDA and WHO, and all have been backed up by independent researchers.

Oh and one more thing zendell,

the MMR vax saved my life. So don't even try to tell me vaccines are dangerous, because they're not.

Side effects happen, but they're EXTREMELY RARE.

The QuackWatch site isn't perfect, but any incorrect information there does not support medical treatments or procedures which are not backed up by solid empirical research. As the saying goes, an absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence.

I know someone who actually went through chelation for genuine lead poisoning tested for in the perfectly ordinary way you test for lead poisoning, through an ordinary doctor, that she got through old pipes in her house. It's far from harmless, it's supposed to be used only in documented cases of heavy-metal poisoning for a reason. It puts an extra strain on the kidneys, among other things, from what she said. I can't remember the rest but she doesn't remember it as a pleasant or non-dangerous time in her life.

Heavy metal poisoning is a frequent problem in birds, because they are much more sensitive to metals than humans are. However, because of the dangers of chelation (very similar to the dangers in humans), they can only go through it a certain number of times before it gets considered more hazardous than the heavy metals are.

I'd think you'd be the first to admit that just because something's approved by conventional medicine, doesn't mean it's harmless. There's a lot of things that should only be used as a last resort, when something is life-threatening or close to it.

Additionally, none of the symptoms described in that Nystatin study you cited (which I haven't yet had time to further check the background on) are autistic in nature. I find it highly disturbing, though, that you seem to think that anything that happens to improve health in people with health problems should be tried on autistic children. (That'd include antibiotics, by the way, along with a number of other drugs that are even more dangerous to throw around at random when they're not needed.) If "this treats health problems" means "this should be tried on autistic children", then autistic children should be randomly given (without any testing to see if they'd benefit, of course, or any symptoms shown beyond being autistic) assorted combinations of antibiotics, corticosteroids, anti-fungals, beta blockers, diuretics, anticoagulants, beta agonists, antihistamines, muscle relaxants, calcium channel blockers, and if they survive we could probably think of more. More seriously than that, there's lots of drugs that help people with health problems (many of them conflicting with each other, and many of them being really bad for healthy people), throwing them randomly at autistic people isn't a good answer.

(And as a note, I have a whole lot of health problems, anti-fungals have only ever helped me with yeast infections. I just got through a month-long course of an anti-fungal recently and the only difference is I no longer have the fungal infections, despite me being far more of a prime candidate (from the symptoms listed) for this whole "anti-fungals cure everything" idea than the average autistic person.)

Wow, a lot of posts since I started posting that one.

The important thing to note about that "third most fatal cause of death in the USA" thing is that only one of the five things described in there is not preventable.

For those who didn't go and read it, the five causes of death that were added together to create the whole "iatrogenic causes of death" thing were:

* Non-error, negative effects of drugs (106,000)
* Infections in hospitals (80,000)
* Medication errors in hospitals (10,000)
* Other errors in hospitals (45,000)
* Unnecessary surgery (12,000)

And the data are from studies of hospitalized patients (and given how much it takes to get a person hospitalized, that generally means severely ill or recovering from surgery to begin with).

Infections in hospitals are a real problem, but the solution isn't "Conventional medicine is evil," it's more like "There are physical conditions in hospitals that make the spread of infection more likely. Let's look for them and see what we can do about them."

Medication errors in hospitals are also a real problem. And they likewise need to be dealt with the same way. (And these can be physical problems in hospitals, these can be funding-related problems hiring trained workers, these can be related to the dehumanizing atmospheres in hospitals that render patients indistinguishable from each other to many people, and all of these need to be dealt with.)

Same for other errors in hospitals.

Same for unnecessary surgery (and that includes doctors needing to be firmer about people not getting unnecessary surgery, because there are people who go for unnecessary surgeries all the time because they want to, not because their doctors force them to).

That's 147,000 of these deaths (58.1% of them) that should be possible to greatly reduce if they're seriously looked at and changes are made, without throwing out the entire idea of conventional medicine with them. Some of them can frankly be funding issues (I was once told to keep a staff person who had Alzheimer's and kept mixing up potentially meds in potentially lethal ways working for me, because they couldn't find anyone else). Most doctors don't want their patients to die (those who do shouldn't be practicing).

And additionally, I'm not even sure how many of those non-error, negative effects of drugs are actually non-error. I've had to fight doctors who wanted to give me doses of asthma medications so high that I knew my body wouldn't tolerate them (and I know someone whose mother died because of a similar situation). That's called an error, last I heard. But the asthma medications themselves were necessary (just not at that dose) and I would have died without them too.

And that's another thing -- there's a lot of drugs that can kill a person but can also cure them or pull them out of a near-fatal situation. I'd be guessing a lot of patients in hospitals are on those sorts of drugs, a lot more people than are being treated with drugs outpatient. And that's a scary balance to walk, and I imagine some people are killed by the disease, and other people are killed by the drug, and both of those happen way too often. But you can't blame conventional doctors for trying. I don't hold them on a pedestal or anything, but I really don't think most of them want their patients to die.

But anyway, only one of those causes of death is even plausibly "because of conventional medicine" in any standard sense, the rest are because of people screwing up (and last I heard, alternative doctors screw up all the time too), but they're all falsely added together as if they're the same thing. And that would put it down to the sixth cause of death, right after accidents (unintentional injuries) in general, and in between a bunch of serious diseases (that might even be the ones being treated during those deaths).

Additionally, speaking of serious diseases, I put Alzheimer's in as far more serious than autism. Because it kills people. I'm reminded of a meeting of the Tourette's syndrome association I saw on a video once. Tourette's is one of those things where some people want to be cured and some people don't. One person in the meeting said that he had to put it in perspective. Because his brother had recently had leukemia and almost died, they didn't know whether he was going to survive or not. Tourette's on the other hand isn't inherently fatal (any more than autism). And that there are some real priorities that need to be put in place. I have a friend who was discussing this with me and we came up with all sorts of things we'd put above autism on the priority list for cure, just among medical conditions we had alone -- epilepsy, asthma, etc. (all of which can actually kill people), and below those we put things that routinely caused extremely severe pain. Even if I wanted to cure my autism (which I don't) I hope I would not put it at the same priority as a fatal disease at least.

The thing with quackery fads is that it's easy to burst on the scene the way Cantrol and it's quacks did, with the NEW CURE, because people tend to have more faith in the new thing that in the old thing when it comes to treatment (it's a known phenomena that needs to be controlled for in studies, one reason why they do double blind placebo controlled cross-over protocols).

so everyone who thinks they have a problem or does have a problem that has hung around a while, especially, and isn't responding to what mainstream medicine is offering (a frequent problem) says to him or herself, "I KNOW, I'LL TRY THIS!" and a few of them will "improve" because they are expecting to get better and a few will get better because of "regression toward the mean" or the idea that many chronic problems like allergies come and go, and if you try something, you might take it when you are about to go on an "upswing" and attribute your "upswing" to whatever the new thing is.

So statistically you'll have a few people who feel 'WONDERFUL! because of PRODUCT X" or "Dr. Q's therapy du jour!" and they'll be willing to give a testimonial. So that the people who feel worse or the same on PRODUCT X feel like they must have done something wrong. They didn't take the right dose at the right time, or they forgot to take it with a meal or at bedtime...

The people who feel worse after taking product x usually don't go around advertising that fact, they just move on to PRODUCT Y, then PRODUCT Z.

There are some disorders that are notorious for being easy to "treat" because they are constantly having these fluctuations in "better" and "worse". The disorders and diseases that don't have this cyclic nature don't attract the quacks so much. Like you don't find jars of creams or pills for broken legs or blindness or lung cancer so much. But you will for allergies and arthritis and "low energy".

It's really amazing to see how parents claim that drops of water have made huge differences in their kids. But for some reason homoepathic thimerosal never took off. Jacquelyn McCandless tried it out, she didn't think it worked too well.

This is because autism is one of those "chronic" problems with a cycle, that can be dramatic in children. Autistic children as all children really, have spurts of growth and development and then slow periods or regressions. Typical children start out with some abilities and lose them (the ability to hear and mimic certain speech sounds). If the kid is about to speak and the mom starts him on the GFCF diet, there's no way in the world you'll be able to convince her that it was a coincidence.

Vaccines have never caused autism. There is zero evidence for this. Just as there is zero evidence for an increase in autism incidence. If the number of autistic kids being born is stable then we can logically assume that it's not something in the environment that has changed that causes autism. Either that or as one thing that "causes" autism has waned it was replace exactly by another thing that can cause autism so that the rate is the flat.

There is no reason to suspect toxins or whatever in any particular case of autism. Lead poisoning causes low IQ and chelating for it doesn't increase the IQ. This is why the big "cure" for lead poisoning has always been prevention. There's no reason on earth to think that chelation ever could do anything to change an autistic brain, except to make it also lead poisoned because some chelators mobilize lead from the tissues and deposit it in the brain.

Chelators are dangerous in the hands of people who don't understand them. A toxicologist should be consulted if a person really is suspected of being mercury poisoned. None of the autistic kids out there that I have seen described by their parents have actually seen a toxicologist. They almost all (like 99%) use bogus lab tests that show mercury poisoning when there is none.

On the other hand there are lots of "chelators" that are just not chelating anything but rely on the placebo effect, this would include td dmps.

There's no reason to chelate autistic kids because they are autistic kids, and there is no reason to chelate most people who are truly heavy metal exposed because of the dangers of chelation (which stirs up metals in the body and can make the person more poisoned). The chelating agents are toxic on many levels. They are big pharma drugs and also industrial chemicals, and in food processing (your can of clams probably has a chlelator in it).

Slamming vaccines is a fun parlor game for people who have no clue as to how bacteria and viruses spread in communities and who are easy victims of conspiracy theories. Bashing vaccines makes some people feel like they are important because they are "in the know" and aren't like the "sheeple" who line up to get vaccinated. And some antivax extremism is the result of paranoid psychosis because pscyhotic people are more likely to fear what the gov't wants to inject into them. These people can be psychotic and hold jobs. Approximately 1% of the world's adults are psychotic people. So just because someone sets up a website warning of the horrors of vaccines doesn't mean that they are in their right minds.


http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abs ... f_ipsecsha

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/28/88460 ... 34cb_o.gif

One of my animated images of disodium edta.
They put edta as a preservative in canned seafood and other stuff because it acts as a chelator and kills the bugs in the food as it chelates (binds up) metals that they need to live. They also use it to remove calcium (scale) build up from pipes and stuff in industrial settings. Yeah, inject people with drano, that's the ticket. No wonder they mix an anaesthetic with the stuff when they give it to people. Garry Gordon sold the EDTA to Kerry that killed Abubakar. He said he thought maybe they had put too much "'caine" in the batch and that's what had killed the boy (he wrote that following Abubakar's death).

O yeah, OP, I'm considered "high-functioning" for someone with autism by professionals (they're right in the ways they judge me compared to others), a common "aspie" too if one uses Gillberg's criteria. Personally, I assume that whatever the cause of my autism is, I just don't have it as bad as the majority with autism (I'm supposedly with the majority in Asperger's).

It's kinda like many conditions really, remissions and recurrences. In primary school, I was completely "normal", before then I was a typically passive autistic child; I went "back" to being a typically passive autistic child from 13 onwards.

I don't know where i stand on this heavy metal/immune system issue. I haven't studied the science in real depth to make a concrete judgement, and I don't think anyone here has either. I find the whole issue hurtful towards people on the sprectrum, but at the same time I look at the arguments and even listened to debates and feel that the pro-vaccine/autism side are on to something.

Many experts have made rather convincing cases for the increase in the number of diagnoses on the spectrum of autisms being largely due to:

1. Expansions of the DSM criteria. These changes, especially with the addition of Asperger's in 1994, have increased the numbers of persons being diagnosed with conditions on the spectrum of autisms.
2. Separation of autism from childhood schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder. Prior, to 1980, no one was officially diagnosed with autism (using DSM categories). Those with conditions on the autism spectrum, like myself, were either diagnosed with schizophrenia, childhood type, if they were children, or with schizoid personality disorder, if they were adults.
3. Qualifications. The fact that therapists have become increasingly familiar with the autism spectrum, and that more of them have become qualified to diagnose in this area.
4. Over-diagnosis. Some people have suggested that, because of the increasing popularity of Asperger's as a diagnostic category, more people have been diagnosed with the condition than is actually justified from their symptoms.