Autism - Mercury Connection & the Medical Establishment
As parents of a child with autism, my wife and I struggle with therapies and treatments. One promising line of attack is biomedical treatments and dietary modifications; we have found promise in these for our son.
NY Times has published an article [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/science/25autism.html?ex=1120363200&en=72b7420ebae0d3b3&ei=5070&emc=eta1 ]On Autism’s Cause, It’s Parents vs. Research[/url] (subscription required) pretty much calling these treatments junk science, questioning their value, and attacking the premise that mecury in vaccines (containing the preservative Thimerosal) had anything do with the epidemic of autism seen in the last 15 years, where its incidence has increased over 10-fold.
The medical establishment is solidly united in calling this connection junk science. Two years ago, when I first heard about the mercury/autism hypothesis, I naively accepted the establishment wisdom. But the more I read the accumulating evidence, the more I am persuaded that there may indeed be a connection that requires thorough investigation.
The NY Times article does a totally one-sided demolition job. They intereview and quote many establishment scientists, and they portray the other side as emotion-driven, scientifically illiterate parents, almost dismissing all the non-establishment doctors and scientists working on the mercury-autism connection as crackpots or worse, questioning their integrity.
They approvingly quote one of the establishment scientists:
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“It’s really terrifying, the scientific illiteracy that supports these suspicions,” said Dr. Marie McCormick, chairwoman of an Institute of Medicine panel that examined the controversy in February 2004. |
Yet, the other side is portrayed, without even naming any names,
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| Experts say they are also concerned about a raft of unproven, costly and potentially harmful treatments - including strict diets, supplements and a detoxifying technique called chelation - that are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars to desperate parents of autistic children as a cure for “mercury poisoning.”
In one case, a doctor forced children to sit in a 160-degree sauna, swallow 60 to 70 supplements a day and have so much blood drawn that one child passed out. Hundreds of doctors list their names on a Web site endorsing chelation to treat autism, even though experts say that no evidence supports its use with that disorder. The treatment carries risks of liver and kidney damage, skin rashes and nutritional deficiencies, they say. |
Very balanced, right?