Doctors and the govt suppressing the truth about autism causes and possible cures, page 1

I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea to post this - in fact, I almost didn't write it either. But like someone once told me, there's nothing worse than giving up before trying. So I tried hard, and now post this in the hope that it ends up doing some good.

Autism (like many, many terms out there) is a word used for a collection of symptoms. The disorders causing those symptoms can be very different, just as the precise collection of symptoms. The diagnosis, subsequently, is more a reflection of certain symptoms than an analysis of causes (as is common with physical diseases).

What Jenny McCarthy is doing right now is claiming authority over how autism works. No good scientist would ever dream of doing that, and most certainly not for something that entails many different mechanisms, possible causes, etc.. It's impossible to claim any one thing about something that actually entails many different things (see first paragraph ).

For McCarthy the only thing that counts is that there are many children diagnosed with autism who actually can recover. I understand that it is a very important message to spread, and commend her intentions. For those parents, she is doing just the right thing.
However, by completely ignoring the complexities of the diagnosis itself (!), she might very well be offering false hope to parents of children who may never 'recover' from autism.

To 'recover' from anything implies that one regressed into the state to recover from. By referring to autism in general, McCarthy seems to claim that all kinds of autism are cases of regression. However, I would like to emphasize that a childs brain is heavily developing throughout youth (with many different stages), and that many parts of the brain interact with the environment to specialize as to develop all the skills we need. At any time of that 'interactive specialization, both the environment and the brain itself (!) are of critical importance for the development (this is pretty much from the moment of conception - the uterus is an environment as well).

Whether by a neurological, biological, socio-emotional or other cause - when brain parts fail to specialize, it will affect any following interactions with the environment. In a way, this can act as a snowball effect; brain parts work together in order to develop, and thereby often affect each other. Since social interaction is one of the most complex events a human brain can get to handle, any type of interruption in the development of the brain could end up having a huge effect. When such an interruption occurs during a critical stage of the interactive specialization (e.g. the forming of synapses after 4 months, when synapses in visual and auditory cortex are fully formed, but the prefrontal cortex is still neurologically building up; or in the first year when the fusiform face area is forming, by which eye-contact becomes a very conscious effort - etc.), the effects on the subsequent forming of the brain can be immense, and as such, irrevokable; especially when it comes to interactive specialization. It may very well be possible for the child to progress through therapy, but recovery is not the right word nor concept. The development of the brain is not a static process, but instead heavily interactive; while initial allocation may be fairly static, subsequent use and interaction of brain parts dictates eventual development. A well-known example is that of children growing up without human contact; in those cases that the child (or adult, often) eventually enters society, it is nigh impossible to learn to correctly speak any of humanity's languages, even though there is evidence for specific language acquisition mechanisms in the brain. The child can learn to communicate sufficiently, and thus 'recover' in a sense, but will never experience language in the same way as we do.

I hope my explanation of the complexities of this issue makes some sense to you. As I said, I wasn't sure if I should even have written this, but I felt obliged to. It's a commendable thing to realize something could and should be done differently and to reach out and offer hope, but offering hope without understanding the matter seems like the kind of thing this site has a slogan for (I mean that in the kindest way). The way she portrays the matter by stating things like "They fixed their kids first" is simplistic - a story of simple causes and easy fixes, which is just not the way the brain works. It takes a lot of time and effort, sometimes more than one person without the help of technology or medication could muster (parents have proven that too, Jenny!). So please be careful with your emotions; do not immediately jump on the bandwagon, but be aware of the complicated nature of both the diagnosis and disorder. Don't stop hoping; but try to hope for the right thing.

[edit on 10-3-2010 by scraze]