autism
oracknows | December 11, 2006Via The Millenium Project, I've learned that some of the "Dummy" books may be living up to their names a bit too literally:
I almost didn't believe it when I was told that Understanding Autism for Dummies contains advice about how chelation might be a useful treatment for autism, so I used Amazon's "search inside the book" feature and there it was. Perhaps the authors could get a testimonial for the next edition from Abubakar Tariq Nadama. Oh that's right, Abubakar can't give testimonials because he's dead.
Understanding Autism for Dummies, indeed. Peter Bowditch is right. It's all there, if…
oracknows | November 24, 2006One year ago today, I discovered a rather amusing bit of chicanery on the part of an old "friend," namely J. B. Handley, the proprietor of and driving force behind Generation Rescue, the group that claims that all autism (not just some, not just some, but all) is a "misdiagnosis" for mercury poisoning. Given that today is one year later to the day, I thought it would be amusing to repost this. And, yes, one year later to the day, the domain oracknows.com still redirects to Generation Rescue, although, shamed, J. B. did stop having the domain autismdiva.com redirect to GR.
INTERNET SQUATTER: J…
oracknows | November 22, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Alex Palazzo has discovered autism quackery.
I'm hurt.
I'm hurt because apparently Alex doesn't read my blog. (Just kidding; I don't read every ScienceBlog, either, although I do read many of them and peruse the Last 24 Hours Feed regularly for topics of interest.) If he did, he'd know that simply giving useless RNA from yeast in supplements (it's useless because, as Alex points out in detail, RNA is highly unstable and broken down quickly in the stomach to its component ribonucleic acids) is actually one of the more benign forms of autism quackery. At least it probably…
purepedantry | November 13, 2006I see that Simon Baron-Cohen has a piece in Seed about his theory of autism. I am really skeptical of many of his arguments related to autism, so I thought I would discuss a couple of them. Here is his core argument:
So what has all of this got to do with autism? We know that autism runs in families, and that if a child with autism is a twin, the chances of the other twin also having autism is much higher if the twins are identical. This tells us that genes are likely to be an important part of the explanation, and that one should look at the parents of children with autism for clues.…
oracknows | November 8, 2006Is there a connection between Scientology and the mercury militia? Kevin Leitch examines the evidence. As he points out, it's not as far-fetched as it might seem at first:
Everybody knows that Scientology has an almost rabid outlook on psychiatry and what they deem psychiatric labels. Its so bad that Xenu-lover John Travolta is allegedly hiding the fact of his son's autism for fear of offending his masters in Scientology.
Scientologists have a natural theoretical affinity with the mercury militia and in particular the DAN! ideology. They are firmly against medication and firmly in favour of '…
purepedantry | November 7, 2006Did you know that Sacha Baron Cohen, star of the Borat movie, and Simon Baron Cohen, a prominent autism scientist, are related? I didn't. They are cousins.
Baron Cohen, 35, rarely gives interviews out of character. He guards his privacy so fiercely that, according to the U.K. press, his publicists denied not only that he attended a party for "Borat"'s recent London premiere, but also that a party even occurred. (It did.) When NEWSWEEK contacted his cousin Simon Baron Cohen, a psychologist and one of the world's chief experts on autism, Dr. Baron Cohen demurred via e-mail: "I must respect…
oracknows | November 7, 2006After not having written anything about the case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the five year old autistic boy who died as a result of chelation therapy administered to him to "cure" him of his autism, I revisited the case last week in light of the State of Pennsylvania filing charges against Dr. Kerry, the "alternative medicine" practitioner who delivered the lethal dose. I've now gotten a copy of the full list of charges, and it makes for some interesting reading if you can stand all the legalese. (The charges can also be found here.)
Here's the note in Tariq's medical chart from his initial…
oracknows | October 31, 2006A little more than a year ago, an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama died of a cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia at the hands of an "alternative medicine" practitioner named Dr. Roy Kerry while chelation therapy was being administered to him intravenously. Dr. Kerry, who trained as an ENT doctor, now bills himself as an "allergist" and an alternative medicine practitioner. Tariq's tragic and unnecessary death lead to a round of posterior covering by mercury militia enabler David Kirby and a rather blithe acceptance and dismissal by some who routinely go ballistic whenever someone…
oracknows | September 23, 2006Holy crap.
I suspected that my two posts about Dawn Winkler, the antivaccination activist running for Governor of Colorado on the Libertarian ticket, might generate some comments and attract some of Dawn's fellow antivaxers to the comments. Little did I suspect just how many, or how hysterical they would become. Because yesterday was a travel day for me, I didn't see many of them until just now, and, even having had a fair amount of experience with the irrationality of many antivaxers, even I was a bit taken aback.
I suppose I shouldn't have been.
One statement, I think, embodies the main…
oracknows | September 19, 2006Unfortunately for them, folks in Colorado have a hard core anti-vaxer named Dawn Winkler running for governor on the Libertarian ticket. I'm hoping for their sakes that, as a third party candidate, that she has virtually no chance of winning. Check out some of her rhetoric posted on Whale.to seven years ago in response to an essay by Dr. J. Thomas Megerian of Children's Hospital in Boston. Even though it's seven years old, I present part of it because it is so astonishingly clueless and because, as you will see later, Winkler apparently hasn't learned a thing since then:
How on earth did we…
oracknows | September 6, 2006While I'm back on the subject of autism, I thought I'd post this video that Kevin Leitch created while I was on vacation and posted to YouTube. Let's just say that it takes a rather dim view of autism "advocates," particularly the autism=mercury poisoning crowd.
I particularly love the picture of J. B. Handley that Kev found. It's also amusing to note that J. B. made an appearance in the comments of Kev's post, and he was not pleased. Also, if you're wondering what the whole "Illuminati" thing is about, Kev explains here.
Not to be outdone, Autism Diva produced her own contribution (below…
oracknows | September 6, 2006It's been a while since I wrote about autism. Part of the reason is that I've been on vacation. Another part of the reason is that not much has been happening lately on the mercury/autism front. I like to think it's because the evidence has been accumulating so rapidly that neither the MMR vaccine nor mercury-containing vaccines are associated with autism, the claims of the mercury militia notwithstanding, that the last even semireasonable people have started backpedaling, leaving only the hard core, like J. B. Handley. Indeed, I've spent a lot of time debunking the claims of the…
oracknows | August 23, 2006Note: One year ago today, an autistic boy, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, died of a cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy to try to "cure" his autism. Today, as I am on vacation, I have scheduled several of my old posts on the topic to appear.The investigation into his death is ongoing regarding whether to file criminal charges against the doctor, although it irritates the hell out of me that they are arguing over whether Tariq was given the "right" agent when in fact there is no "right" agent for chelation therapy for autism. The boy should never have been getting chelation to "cure"…
oracknows | August 23, 2006Note: One year ago today, an autistic boy, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, died of a cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy to try to "cure" his autism. Today, as I am on vacation, I have scheduled several of my old posts on the topic to appear.The investigation into his death is ongoing regarding whether to file criminal charges against the doctor, although it irritates the hell out of me that they are arguing over whether Tariq was given the "right" agent when in fact there is no "right" agent for chelation therapy for autism. The boy should never have been getting chelation to "cure"…
oracknows | August 23, 2006Note: One year ago today, an autistic boy, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, died of a cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy to try to "cure" his autism. Today, as I am on vacation, I have scheduled several of my old posts on the topic to appear.The investigation into his death is ongoing regarding whether to file criminal charges against the doctor, although it irritates the hell out of me that they are arguing over whether Tariq was given the "right" agent when in fact there is no "right" agent for chelation therapy for autism. The boy should never have been getting chelation to "cure"…
oracknows | August 23, 2006Note: One year ago today, an autistic boy, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, died of a cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy to try to "cure" his autism. Today, because I am on vacation, I have scheduled several of my old posts on the topic to appear.The investigation into his death is ongoing regarding whether to file criminal charges against the doctor, although it irritates the hell out of me that they are arguing over whether Tariq was given the "right" agent when in fact there is no "right" agent for chelation therapy for autism. The boy should never have been getting chelation to "…
oracknows | August 22, 2006Note: One year ago today, an autistic boy, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, died of a cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy to try to "cure" his autism. Today, as I am on vacation, I have scheduled several of my old posts on the topic to appear.The investigation into his death is ongoing regarding whether to file criminal charges against the doctor, although it irritates the hell out of me that they are arguing over whether Tariq was given the "right" agent when in fact there is no "right" agent for chelation therapy for autism. The boy should never have been getting chelation to "cure"…
oracknows | July 26, 2006Unfortunately, I didn't have time to write much for today. Fortunately, this gives me the perfect opportunity to remedy a situation in which I've been remiss. As you know, Kathleen Seidel has been tirelessly exposing the dubious science promoted by Mark and David Geier, who advocate using Lupron to shut of sex hormone synthesis as a means of "treating" autism by "making chelation therapy more effective." She's posted much more since I last referenced her.
The advantage of my not having much time is that you can read the results of her investigations directly without my extensive commentary.…
oracknows | July 19, 2006I thought this was a joke when a reader e-mailed me about it. I mean, it's just so over-the-top that I had a hard time believing that it was real.
It was (found via MacDailyNews):
The huge rise of autism in Britain is linked to old iPod batteries, mobile phones and other products of the electronic age, a leading scientist claimed this weekend.
Autistic children have been shown to have problems getting rid of toxic metals - and those metals are increasingly polluting the environment, says Dr Richard Lathe.
"Think of iPod batteries, computers, television sets and mobile phones - thousands of…
neurontic | July 17, 2006I've been meaning to read Temple Grandin ever sense reading about her in Oliver Sacks' 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars. But for some reason, her books continually ended up on the bottom of the pile on my nightstand. What a shame. Having just finished Grandin's Animals in Translation, I regret dragging my feet for so long. Her life story is like catnip for the psychologically curious.
Arguably America's foremost animal behavioralist, Grandin has spent her 32-year career working to ensure that the animals that end up in slices on our dining room tables are treated with care and compassion…