That’s the title of this commentary in the latest issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. The author, Dr. Eric Fombonne of Montreal Children’s Hospital, provides his two cents regarding a new study in the same issue: Continuing Increases in Autism Reported to California’s Developmental Services System: Mercury in Retrograde. In sum, as Dr. Frombonne concludes:
The study by Schechter and Grether in this issue of the Archives provides additional evidence of the lack of association between thimerosal exposure and the risk of autism in the US population. Using an ecologic design and data from the California Department of Developmental Services, the authors showed that the prevalence rate of autism increased continuously during the study period even after the discontinuation of the use of thimerosal in US vaccines in 2001. Had there been any risk association between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism, the rate of autism should have decreased in young children between 2004 and 2007. Instead, the rate increase did not attenuate, indicating that thimerosal exposure bears no relationship to the risk of autism.
Whatever the science says, there’s at least three reasons why people continue to believe in a vaccine-autism link. Yet like the Vioxx litigation, science only gets you so far once litigation is introduced to the mix.
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The next myth that needs rebuttal is that autism exists at all, as a cohesive, valid syndrome.
Care to expand on that, SC? Are you saying that autism is a number of seperate syndromes that need to be studied and treated seperately, or are you saying that autism isn’t a valid condition at all?
Autism is indeed a “valid” syndrome… that it is wildly over-diagnosed doesn’t change that.
Let’s be kind.
At best, autism is mental retardation (MR) plus social retardation (SR). So, for any given IQ, someone with social isolation, language problems, and stereotypic behaviors has a reliably worse prognosis than someone with the same IQ, but not those features of autism. It serves to reliably predict a poor prognosis. It is shorthand for those three features, but not anything more. The children with the diagnosis but an IQ of 110 happen to come from families with IQ’s of 150. So even normal IQ autistics have MR compared to their families.
Is MR or is SR a cohesive, valid syndrome? No. It is a final common pathway for 1000 known causes, with half of people with MR going without a causal diagnosis. These are broad, uninformative labels like the word, “fever,” or the word, “fatigue.”
Such nosological, academic debate is not worth the effort. I accept the usefulness of the diagnosis as shorthand communication.
What is annoying are obsessed, rich, entitled parents seeking to plunder educational budgets with litigation by falsely labeling their child with this severe condition. Most of the increases in the labeling with autism is in bad faith. These rich people want expensive services dedicated to this severe condition, when their child has mere language delays, and social immaturity. About 20% of normal boys have not spoken at age 3. The most famous such boy was Einstein. He was just ready later than others. He did OK. For example, he had mistresses. He wrote a letter that persuaded a stubborn President, and changed human history by this communication. Pretty good for a language delayed kid.
The rich, narcissistic parents have the pull and the intimidating, vicious lawyers. Meanwhile, proven educational returns on cheap investments in Headstart go starving for many normal but educationally deprived, poor kids. These rich parents vandalize the proven, massive, but cheap educational payoffs of Headstart, by their legal aggressiveness. Their kids will either never improve, or their kids will improve spontaneously, as Einstein did. The public money is stolen and wasted.
Educators could stand up to these bullies, with educator expertise. They choose to take the money these rich parents procure for the school system with worthless, forced lawyer mandates at the point of a gun.
There is really little point in debunking the pseudoscience of the fearmongers. They will never let evidence get in the way of their wild postulates about causation.
SC hints at at some of the problem. A few decades ago kids were all over the bell curve with a normal Gaussian distribution. Now society wants only lake Woebegone (where all the children are above average). Anyone not ‘gifted’ (gifted requires entitlements to accomodated giftedness), is labeled ‘special’ (and special also requires entitlements). No kid can be perceived as normal any more, and parents show no hesitation to make a grab at a grossly unfair share of the communal resources for their own purposes.