Autism at 1 in 40 now? No, I don't think so.
You might have seen the latest headlines on this issue they have been trying to soft-sell via the news media for years. Back when they were reporting it was 1 in 80 I took two random samples, this was a decade ago, and came up with the same ratio both times: 1 in 19 had autism. I haven't bothered to look since. Don't need to. If I go down with my kids to the neighborhood park and there are five or more kids at the playground, one will have classic, obvious autism. Don't need to look for it very hard anymore. Per my math and the math of a mathematician at MIT half the kids born in 14 years will come down with it- 85% of the boys. How do you think society will handle that? There's a hint on that, too, in the news today. Basic math: 2 kids/family = every family, in effect, will be directly affected. Let me tell you...this destroys families.
We began to gain a better understanding of why such irregular behaviors were connected to common neurological dysfunction, the worst of which is autism. The medical community again stepped into the "name game," and decided that the relativity of the neurological irregularities deserved to be placed on common ground, now referred to as the "Autism Spectrum."
The problem with such broad descriptions is that almost everyone with an uncommon twitch (I tap my head when I'm pondering) is declared to be on the Autism Spectrum. While this raises the alarm sought by a medical community eager for more bucks, it muddies the water for people trying to get aid for the truly autistic, who are cut off from the world by damaged sensor processing.
My grandson is both severely autistic and ataxic (he doesn't process language well, and is mostly non-verbal). While he found some aid when very young, once past puberty there is no effective positive care until he reaches adulthood, when there are group homes that can provide aid in most cases.
The flaw in research on autism is that it is almost entirely focused on gaining more detail on the neurological irregularities related to the disorder. Studies on possible causes or how to create an environment for positive interaction with autistics are given the short end of the stick.
Genetic trails should be established, to either identify a possible genetic source, or eliminate it from the discussion. Communication studies that identify a means of translating the surroundings to a form understandable by autistics should be pursued. We need to tie the neurological damage to possible environmental causes. Sadly, it seems the anti-vaccination folk are the only ones concerned with a cause and effect relationship to the disorder. If we don't realize this is a pending disaster, it will consume us as a society.
We did not have so many dysfunctional youngsters in the past.
Just because you recognize things which the 'medical-industrial-complex' defines as being 'on the spectrum' doesn't mean that 1:19 nationwide is autistic!
You cast that net wide enough and you'll easily get to 1 in 4, or even 1 in 1. Hell, just to make sure we're all "included," let's just start there. Don't want to leave anyone out and make them feel bad!
To me, though, there is an even more insidious trend - the desire to elevate a child's status to the point of immunity from bad behavior. We see this every day with story after story about college campuses, where people claim with straight faces that they can't be accused of racism, sexism, x-ism, because they are immune from such criticism based upon their identity.
We've long taught our children in schools that there IS such a thing as perfection, and that they can achieve perfection by a simple equation: Actual Work + Good Enough Excuse = Perfection.
Now, instead of doing actual work, we see both parents and children striving to find the "perfect excuse," and with trends like this Autism "spectrum" we've given it to them on a silver platter.
Fun fact: That scientific conclusions are never perfect is why postmodernism got started.
You lit up my curiosity. Where can you send me to find more on how postmodernism started and what postmodernism is. I finished high school in 1953 and got some college and graduate education and never ever heard of postmodernism. Now, at 83, I have all the time I wish to learn what I missed. Can you help me please?
Your grateful Maritimus
Here’s a short clip of Jordan Peterson talking about the nutshell evolution of postmodernism,
https://youtu.be/el6TVEMnS3E
Stephen has a much longer much more detailed lecture on the subject,
https://youtu.be/-BGbHG63x8w
And then there is this frustrating, nearly futile debate with a postmodernist,
https://youtu.be/loGG5nrVIsM
A good summary of postmodernism is, “anti-objectivism.”
Take the thing we call inflation. It would be much much higher if we had kept the methods of measurement and calculation constant, instead of changing the rules based on politics.
I can only imagine what they would have diagnosed me with these days.
I was born with a propensity for this disease, I didn't have to manifest it but something, food, environment, allopathic medicine, fluoride treatments, (teeth), vaccines or even mercury in the fillings of my teeth could of been the trigger...no one has been able to pin it down.
PS...O and A type blood people are prone to hyperactivity by mere consequence of their blood type...add in DNA heritage and bingo, you got it.
Would have been nice to be armed with that info before hand.
They did explain that my body was attacking my thyroid...I went into thyroid storm at age 38. Believe it or not, a Chiropractor was the one that caught it.
I want to share something I've shared here before. When I was well into my discovery on this topic I happened to also be well into reading Atlas Shrugged. I, in the medical/government complex around us, was seeing glaring contradictions. I was seeing very bad behavior by people one would normally trust with our medical safety. I saw studies corrupted. This confused me. Then, one night while laying by my fireplace after everybody else had gone to bed I read the following quote. (going off memory here) "When their little comforts are threatened you can be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice." You need to read that scene in the book again. That was when I realized how dead on Ayn Rand was about a lot. Should we be cautious about government, yet trust it with select things like the safety of our children? No. That's a contradiction. When you see contradictions - check your premises. That is what is needed here. When I saw what I've seen I realized that when our society finally checks its premises on this the damage will be so great that it will be very painfully cathartic. That, I guess, is the point of my thread. Be cautious. Check your premises. If you're here at the Gulch you're not a dummy. May your kids and their kids be fine...
Dr Stadler:
“But you've made them think it's science. Science! You've taken the achievements of the mind to destroy the mind.”
- Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
And of course,
“Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.”
- Ayn Rand
As a scientist I can fully attest to that.
I was born in 1940 when there were not shots given until school age at five years old. All I got were for diphtheria and smallpox vaccines. Measles, scarlet fever, pneumonia, mumps, chickenpox, and other diseases disabled or killed many as they do today in undeveloped countries. There were quarantines for many homes. Even in the late forties there were no vaccines but quarantines. My house was quarantined due to two of my six sibling getting scarlet fever, so my father was not allowed to enter the house and would leave groceries on the porch. I did not like the large sulfa tablets. I spent the quarantine period assembling model airplane kits that I won on the "Uncle Ned's Squadron" radio program from WGN out of Chicago. All I got was two weeks out of school. Sick times were not very pleasant in those days.
When you say, "There is no evidence that vaccines promote autism," I have to wonder if you read the article I linked. It is a lengthy article, but very persuasive and worthwhile in my estimation. And the article lays out very clear evidence that vaccines do cause autism, though that evidence has been ignored or intentionally buried by government officials and pharmaceutical companies.
I'm no spring chicken myself, so I only had a vaccination for measles out of that list of diseases you provided. (Actually, there is still no vaccine for scarlet fever that I'm aware of.) In my experience of childhood, there were no quarantines and none of the kids I knew of from the neighborhood or school were seriously injured or killed by contagious disease.
If you look at a chart which shows the number of fatalities from these diseases -- one which tracks the numbers from the 1800s to the present -- you will see that the number declines sharply before vaccines for specific diseases are even introduced. We've certainly seen reductions in the number of children disabled and killed by these diseases in the past 100 years. But attributing the reduction to vaccines rather than to improvements in sanitation, hygiene, nutrition and medical care does not make sense when the reduced rates of fatalities precede the vaccines. The pro-vaxxers like to cut off the earlier part of the chart, and only show a few years prior to introduction of vaccines, which distorts the picture, and makes it appear that vaccines are causing the decline in fatalities. If you evaluate the evidence with an open mind, I think you'll agree that vaccines can not reasonably be considered to be a significant cause of declines in mortality. See http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/an-h...
greenmedia is, well, it not even wrong.
Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother. This is fundamental in genetics. To deny that is to
destroy a good part of human knowledge. (which could be the idea).
The protocols for diagnosing autism vary so much that it just is not possible to reach any conclusion
about the incidence of autism across any time frame of locality. There is no medical test for autism.
greenmedia is, well, it not even wrong." Can you show me where in the linked article anyone claims that mitochondrial DNA comes from the sperm and ovum? I just searched the article, and I still don't see it anywhere.
When I say- "greenmedia is, well, it not even wrong",
I mean, after a quick perusal, that the mishmash of badly presented misconceptions is not worth re- reading.
More generally, the green movement is strong by appealing to emotions of fear and unthinking altruism. The argument of keeping an open mind is good. As a skeptic I say, yes but not to the extent your brains fall out. What is happening is they get you to make decisions without mind on emotional stories.
The green movement believing without evidence that the planet is overloaded wants to cull the human population. Stopping vaccination is a good tool for that.
There is a kind of god of the gaps going on with vaccinations and autism. First thimerosal preservative was blamed for increases in autism. So, in the USA iit was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001. But the rates of autism kept climbing. So it must be the result of something else. So, a new hypothesis is developed and tested and shown to not be valid. It goes on and on, frightening parents into accepting more injury and deaths from disease by not vaccinating.
Your link article has some nice graphs but they do not distinguish between those who are unvaccinated and those who are. Would both graphs tend to continue going to zero if the two groups were distinguished? For example, pediatric deaths for flu were 180 for a recent year. 60% were with unvaccinated children. So an excess of deaths were due to not being vaccinated. Is that acceptable to you?
The for and the against both have a belief bias as to evidence. Last year the flu vaccine was only 40% effective. Suppose it had no effect would there be the same number, 80,000, or more or less than there were?
Most importantly, court outcomes are not to be considered as scientific evidence.
So some of the kids you knew were only mildly injured by diseases? One has to look at the whole group and not just just a subgroup.
Here is a long research article which has a discussion of the relationship between autism spectrum disease and mitochondria dysfunction.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
I do not like meta-analysis because it can easily become a data mining process.
It remains to be seen whether there is a link between autism and mitochondria dysfunction. The metabolism of mitochondria depends on many chemicals provided in cytoplasm which can affect its function.
That's because me dino don't know who does.
I'll state it here. I was wrong. I have learned a great deal from it...
Get ready for the wave.
If it were true, what triggers it? Autism has not been around at the current levels in the past.
I read that injecting babies with large doses of vaccines may be one of the culprits which was denied by some medical professionals.
I still find it hard to believe.
You certainly must have information through your professional associations.
As for causation, many of the austistic children I've known had a dramatic and negative change in personality after vaccinations, including my son. These changes are what lead to the autism diagnosis. The number of required infant and childhood vaccinations has increased exponentially in the past few decades. I do not believe it is the vaccines' active ingredient that causes the autism. Rather, it is what they put with the active ingredient: mercury (thimerosal as a preservative) and aluminum adjuvants, which lodge in the brain. The symptoms of so-called autism exactly mimic those of heavy metal poisoning. There seems to be a great deal of variability among infants and children as to their susceptibility to this poisoning, and males as a group appear to be more susceptible than females. That is the genetic component of autism--susceptibility to heavy metal poisoning. Government and industry ascribe autism itself to genetics, as if the human genome somehow changed within a few decades so that autism rates skyrocketed as they have. It would be laughable were it not so tragic.
Correlation is not causation, but there is almost a perfect correlation betwen the number of required vaccines and autism diagnoses. Please do not tell me about all the government and industry-funded studies that purport to show no connection. Many of those studies use vaccines with no thimerosal or aluminum adjuvants, which should tell you something right there. If it was conclusively established that vaccines caused autism, which properly labeled would then be heavy metal poisoning, it would bankrupt the manufacturers of those vaccines. Except that vaccine makers have a special exemption from such liability under a law passed in 1986, which should also tell you something.
For anyone interested in moving past the propaganda, here are two fairly recent links that will get you going:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/11/n...
https://healingoracle.ch/2018/08/10/m...
If you know anyone who is expecting or recently had a baby, I have several strong recommendations. Ask for vaccines without thimerosal and aluminum adjuvants. They are more expensive, but they are available in most areas. If your health provider doesn't know if their vaccines have those ingredients, assume they do and go elsewhere. Also, space out the vaccines and do not get multiple vaccines at the same time. If possible, decline vaccines for as long as possible after the baby is born. The entire vaccination schedule is set up for hospital convenience and drug industry profits, not your children's or grandchildren's health. If I stop one kid and his family from going through what my family went through, this post will be well worth it.
To end on a hopeful note. My son, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, has benefitted from numerous therapies that my wife and I discovered in the Southern California area. This year he will graduate from the University of New Mexico. He is a member of a fraternity, has his own apartment, has worked on two political campaigns, and has a job helping senior citizens learn how to use their smart phones and computers. If you met him you might detect something was a little off, especially if you have experience with autistics, but his improvement has been remarkable. Next year my son will find a job, and we are quite confident he will rise to that challenge as he has risen to every other challenge. Autism, or more correctly heavy-metal poisoning, does not have to be a life sentence.
I forgot in my above post to include the book my wife wrote about our experience: Rescued: a story of hope & help for parents of children with autism. The Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/Rescued-story-...
I have also wondered if a similar genetic difference can account for autism. In this case, the sensory input levels might be elevated to the point it overloads the brain and the person becomes confused by and rebels from sensory inputs. Just something that occurred to me while watching Good Doctor on TV
This
You may email me separately.
IMO most of the blame lies in the environment these kids grow up, a kind of disconnect between parents and children that the youngsters are not prepared to handle. This of course leads to society and its "trends" to be implemented in the home.
Just a far fetched example: the current obsession with "gender" and other identities is hard enough for an adult to deal with, let alone for a child who is trying to find his/her way in life.
It will probably be too late by the time the "causes" are identified and those in the front line of precipitating it will never be held responsible.
Good for you taking care of abused kids. That's tough work, I'm sure.