The double standards applied by the autism alternative medicine community never cease to amaze me. Typically they do a game of “six degrees of separation” with any one they disagree with. Do you have ties to anyone who has worked on vaccines? Do you have ties to anyone who knows anyone who might have worked with a governmental agency? Well, if so, anything you say is ignored as biased.
Funny that no one took a good look at the Journal that the recent “confirmation” of Dr. Wakefield’s research was published in. The alt-med community doesn’t question research they like.
Confused? Here’s the back story. A recent article was published Clinical presentation and Histologic Findings at Ileocolonoscopy in Children with Autistic spectrum Disorder and Chronic Gastrointestinal symptoms in a journal called “Autism Insights”. The paper came out the day before the decision from the GMC on Dr. Wakefield. The paper was touted as “Wakefield’s Science Proven Valid Again In New Study That Replicates Findings” in a blog post (guess where?)
Have you ever heard of “Autism Insights“? Neither had I. Don’t feel bad. Unless you read one of the two other articles published in that “journal”, you couldn’t have heard of it.
Yes, two other articles. One is an editorial.
This new article brings the total published in “Autism Insights” to 3.
The first:
Trends in Developmental, Behavioral and Somatic Factors by Diagnostic Sub-group in Pervasive Developmental Disorders: A Follow-up Analysis
Authors: Paul Whiteley, Lynda Todd, Kalliopi Dodou and Paul Shattock
Then an editorial:
Autism Etiology: Genes and the Environment
Authors: A.J. Russo
and now
Clinical Presentation and Histologic Findings at Ileocolonoscopy in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and Chronic Gastrointestinal Symptoms
Authors: Arthur Krigsman, Marvin Boris, Alan Goldblatt and Carol Stott
Yep, that’s it. The entire production of “Autism Insights” is two papers and one editorial.
So far, every paper has had an author on the journal’s editorial board.
Take a look at the Editorial Board. This paper, timed to come out exactly when Dr. Wakefield needed good press has no fewer than four people from Dr. Wakefield’s own clinic, ThoughtfulHouse.
Bryan Jepson, MD
Director of Medical Services, Medical Center at Thoughtful House Center for Children, Austin, TX, USAArthur Krigsman, MD
Director of Gastrointestinal Services, Pediatric Gastroenterology, Thoughtful House Cener for Children, Austin, TX, USACarol Mary Stott, PhD
Senior Research Associate, Research Department, Thoughtful House, Austin, TX, USAAndrew Wakefield, MBBS, FRCS, FRCPath
Research Director, THoughtful House Centre for Children, Austin, TX, USA
There are prominent DAN doctors, Richard Deth, and others from the alt-med community on the editorial board as well.
Come on guys. Is this really the standard of science that is acceptable to support Dr. Wakefield?
As an aside, a year or so back I emailed some friends with a speculation that the alt-med community would create their own journal. As far as predictions go, this wasn’t really a longshot. Still, it is interesting to see the prediction come true.
As to the paper itself? I’ll only say a few brief words as it really isn’t worth the time.
1) I recall in the Omnibus hearings that many of the GI “findings” claimed by the petitioners were found to be misinterpretations by the experts who reviewed them
2) No one has ever said that autistic kids are somehow immune from GI complaints, including inflammation.
3) There are multiple details where, even if correct, this research is very dissimilar from that of Dr. Wakefield’s original Lancet paper and later work.
It is too bad that these researchers chose to make clinical findings into what amounts to a political statement of support for Dr. Wakefield. If there is any valuable information gained from these children, I don’t see how this paper respects their contribution.
edit to add: I forgot to acknowledge that this post came from a tip from Prometheus at the Photon in the Darkness blog.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Your lack of reading ability is evident when you totally miss that “Autism Insights” is a vanity journal, where the editorial board also includes the authors. The only thing someone on the editorial board should be writing are opinion pieces, they should not be refereeing their own papers. Or using their papers to drum up business for their clinic.
Mr. Clarke, where in Dr. Offit’s books does he even mention neurons? There is exactly one instance of the word “neuron” and it is quote from Kinsbourne. You also have very little understanding of how DNA works. Also it is not just Dr. Offit who thinks chelation is worthless for autism.
And Rimland is not exactly considered credible.
You are just an armchair prognosticator with a whacked out theory, and a couple polite responses from psychologists who know very little about biochemistry. Go away until you can find a real biochemist to show that DNA can be changed with the minuscule amount of mercury that used to be in vaccines.
RPCLarke,
others are being polite.
Clarke – Wow, I see you flexing your “google” muscle! What a wonderful person you are to make light of such a devastating event that left so many fellow Americans homeless. I applaud you.
Sulli – It’s been proposed that my son’s bowel issues (which have been a violent 5 year battle for him) and his new pseudotumor cerebri, are systemically linked. The first csf sample showed a permeability in his blood brain barrier aligning his symptoms/causes with Dr Singh’s theories. And it has caused quite the stir, which I never intended on joining. This experience has changed the way I view medicine completely. I don’t know when the majority lost sight of why they went into their fields. But, it seems now the broken little bodies are overshadowed by the corporations and hospital contracts, that’s just a three month long observation.
Every now and then we get a “Maverick” or two. Without them…where would we be? Where would my son be? He wouldn’t have made it to 9. I can not say I understand it all…yet… 😉 but I’m picking it up quickly.
Sully, when I saw Mr. Clarke’s remark I found no reason to pull punches. What he said was beyond the pale.
Ms. Swarek, there is no way I could ever know what you have experienced. I may not agree with you about the science, but I think you have had more than enough to deal with (yes, I also googled… saw the pictures and my heart broke). You do not need Internet strangers second guessing your choices.
My best wishes to you and your family.
Chris,
my comment wasn’t a statement that your comment was not polite. Just a response to “Strange that others don’t share your doubt.” He doesn’t know whether others doubt him or not. Sometimes when someone is so far from being correct, many people just don’t see the point in correcting him.
As to Tammy Swarek, I don’t know what google turned up, but I tend to agree with you Chris. I seriously hope that whatever team she has at hand has the right answers and fast. People, especially kids, belong at home, not in hospitals.
First I reply to Tammy – Of course I appreciate you’ve done an amazing job of coping with that disaster (though you’ve obviously had the huge advantages of not being destitute or disabled). But I also noticed your first comment about egos, indicating an, ooh, ever-so-slightly cheeky Schadenfreude sense of humor,
and so I was sure you’re a big enough ego yourself to take my silly humor in return without being upset. And I think you’ll agree those other personal circumstances deserved some recognition here! I myself don’t care for Schadenfreude humor but each to his own.
Meanwhile some others here have a problem with me challenging their beliefs about autism and in consequence they have to do the traditional thing of “blame the messenger” and so imagine
unfriendly inappropriate attitude where it does not really exist.
Now I reply to the reply from Chris “not pulling his punches”.
But I didn’t miss this. Exactly the same principle applies in many other matters. For instance in the pro-vaccine back-scratching club Offit makes out that Fitzpatrick is a “real hero” who’s written an “excellent” book and so on.
Where big corporate money is involved it can fund much larger groups of people ganging/back-scratching together which enables them to appear to be above such “vanity”, but it is still very much just appearance. As Eysenck rightly said of great innovators, “they have no peers” (not that I consider Autism Insights great innovators). Some people then get mesmerised into faith by mere sheer numbers of people making out one another to be great competent hero scientists. Bahh, Bahh.
In an ideal world that is true. But in a world where an overpowerful crooked corporate system severely corrupts the editorial selection process, people should be enabled to get their contributions seen and heard regardless of such over-“idealistic” censoriousness.
Exactly analogously to what the corporate-funded gangs do.
Offit page 145-6: “More important, the notion that chelation therapy can heal the brains of children who had actually suffered mercury poisoning is false. Once a brain cell has been damaged by a heavy metal like mercury it is permanently damaged. […then some further unsound debunking of chelation…] [So] it didn’t make sense that it would work.”
Do you have any actual rebuttal to my exposing of Offit’s false argument there?, a false argument that self-interestedly seeks to deprive the tragic victims of the opportunity to learn of a proper therapy for their condition. How much more disgraceful can Offit’s offence be there?
But you give no explanation of this supposed deficit of understanding. And I had already replied to that particular line of denialism in this post here. (The full discussion of evidence concerning mercury is contained only in my update review not yet available on the website yet.)
So what?, the entire trillionaire pharma establishment always wishes to deny the existence of any non-patented treatment. The history of medical discovery is absolutely studded with “leading experts” resisting the greatest discoveries.
For the same unworthy reason just above. Though Rimland did make one mistake in my view.
Sad. I hope you feel better soon.
(And btw I have never been of the view that vaccines caused any autism.)
RPClarke,
you seem to want people to comment about your blog post. If they wanted to do so, they would go to your blog and comment.
I don’t see any real substance in your comments here, or your posts on your blog. Lot’s of “corporate funded blah blah”, though. I hope that you get something from your writing.
I was just commenting on what I read here. I cite from my autismcauses site in order to reduce re-stating of material. That site is primarily to present material supplementary to my papers rather than to attract comments.
“I don’t see any real substance….”
I’m sure you’ll agree there is a blindness of brains analogous to the blindness of eyes, but I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree as to which of us has it the more!
I’d agree but I can’t see your comment 😉
Um, just a few points.
A follow-up study on Kanner’s original index cases showed that 1/6 of them had gone on to regular paid employment as adults. One was married with children. I think we all have to agree that Kanner’s kids were autistic, since we wouldn’t have it as a diagnostic category without them. 🙂
Hans Asperger noted in a 1951 paper that something close to 40% of his study children had Celiac Disease. This is BEFORE we had testing for celiac, back when people diagnosed it by putting the person on a gluten-free diet and seeing if his symptoms improved. If you hang out on any of the celiac pages, you note that children of celiacs who are not celiac themselves but are mothers, tend to notice that their children sieze and have developmental delays. A few have been diagnosed with autism. Removing gluten from the diet mysteriously seems to clear up these symptoms.
Oh, and research does bear out that most autism is a single-occurring event in families, however, since most families stop having children after having a child with autism, they may be somewhat biased, as the papers point out themselves.
I am from one of those familial clusters. My father didn’t talk until he was 6 and became a computer engineer. On a side note, work on all his projects came to a stop when he didn’t go into the office, since he never labelled his punchcards, having the unusual ability to read the code right off the cards. He was also covered in small, open sores for his entire life that looked like textbook dermatitis herpetiformitis. His mother had an older brother who was sent back from a school for the Deaf when he was 5, losing that diagnosis and never gaining another, though the family still called him deaf-mute. I’m guessing severe autism. One of dad’s brothers was an artist who never married, the other was a college professor of plant biology with a greenhouse in his backyard and a horticulturalist for a wife. Questionable.
My mother is “just” an OCD collector with Borderline Personality Disorder, but her sister was diagnosed as “mental retardation and schizophrenia” when she was 5 years old. My aunt is definitely and decidedly autistic, we got along wonderfully when I was 7-15 and developmentally not too far ahead of her. My mother’s uncle was a bachelor professor who lived with his parents for their entire lives, and then stayed in their house until he died. My mother’s grandmother was “allergic to wheat” and used corn and potato flours in all her recipes. When great grandma went to the nursing home, she shriveled up and died in 3 months on their gluten-filled food.
I’m another woman on the spectrum who has had severe GI issues my entire life. Never got any real help for them, the doctors wouldn’t even read anything I gave them. The ONLY things that ever helped me feel better were the gluten free diet, removing soy, the SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet) when I developed a lovely yeast infection in my gut, and megadoses of vitamins. I tried the psych meds first, they were a disaster and would have left me a homeless mental patient if it weren’t for a friend of mine who let me stay on her couch for a few months while I got myself sorted out and detoxed.
Oh, and yes, I was fully vaccinated as a child, including the MMR. I was born in the 1970s.
Tara, you’re not old enough to know, but at that time the concept of being unable to get a job just didn’t exist. Getting a job was easier than falling over. I know because I was there. That stat doesn’t mean all 1/6 were at all cured, merely that people were being kind, which was easy in the 1950s because there was so much money and optimism around, so different from your own lifetime; wives didn’t need to work. More to the point was that the other 5/6 of Kanner’s did not have a paid job even in those cushy times.
And I noted in a 1993 paper that autism was far from just being an abnormality of brain/psychology.
Nutritionists such as Weston Price, and health-gurus such as Mercola have been pointing out for yonks that modern grain products are not our natural ancestral diet and without the traditional processing (now largely lost knowledge) these foods are far from good for us, phytates and oxalates for a start, let alone gluten.
The fact that someone dies within 3 months of going into carehome is utterly unremarkable. They only move to a carehome if they are already on the way out anyway, and then they have this additional devastating stress of being uprooted and put in a sort of prison. And the carehome situation implies they have been effectively dumped by, thrown out by, their children (who’d otherwise support them at home).
Would be more remarkable if they didn’t just die after 3 months.
1.5 Time Cubes for Mr. Clarke.
Mr Clarke, do you have a reference with data showing that chelation does reverse heavy metal damage in the brain? As far as I can tell there is a little data for inorganic mercury and none for organic mercury. Actually the data seems to indicate that chelation for organic mercury makes any damage worse.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19027035
If chelation all by itself causes damage (which we know it does), then there needs to be pretty good dose-response data showing that at a particular dose of heavy metals, the residual damage from the heavy metal (at the particular dose in question) is worse than the damage from the chelation agent (at the particular dose in question).
Daedalus, thanks for the question of evidence regarding chelation but it can’t be adequately answered without some length. Anyway I need to compose an answer it anyway so I’ll see what I can do here in a following comment. I’ll here just briefly comment on that citation you’ve mentioned there.
Frankly I was stupefied to read such utter b.s. (not your fault to be sure!). The authors are either liars or idiots (or victims of some department of misinformation). Chelation is absolutely, very-well-known not to be about some ‘detoxifying’ process within cells. Rather it is about getting the toxin out of the body (or in first instance out of an organ). That article is therefore utterly irrelevant because it is based on an utterly false concept of chelation. More later hopefully, though the team of me and myself are even more swamped here at the moment (not least the journal has just asked me to jiggle some things in my update paper ms). (On second thought that article is actually relevant as evidence of the dirty tricks going on in this field.)
P.S. Haha, it’s a journal of €l$evier!, the publishers who spontaneously overrule the decisions of the scientific editors if not medico-politically-correct enough (in Medical Hypotheses). Questionable journal indeed!
Huh? So you don’t have any data showing that chelation reverses heavy metal damage, just hand waving and your opinion which seems to be at odds with much of the literature. You might want to read up on that literature some more so you don’t get caught being stupefied again 😉
How about this paper showing that chelation in the absence of heavy metal poisoning causes lasting cognitive impairment?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1831518/?tool=pubmed
If chelation all by itself can cause cognitive impairment, wouldn’t it be prudent to be very careful to not use too much chelation? The idea is to minimize the cognitive impairment due to both heavy metal poisoning and due to chelation. Once the heavy metals are brought down to levels below where damage occurs continued chelation is just going to do more damage.
If you want to understand autism and mercury, you need to look at the largest study of mercury and autism, the Faroe Islands study. Over 1,000 consecutive births were sampled for cord blood mercury and followed. Only a handful of children developed autism in that cohort, even with cord blood mercury levels more than an order of magnitude higher than considered “high” in the west. If the mercury levels observed in the Faroe Islands are not causing autism, then chelating the mercury out isn’t going to “fix” anything, it is only going to cause damage.
The idea that mercury from amalgam is responsible for the neurotoxicity of amalgam happens to be wrong. It is the zinc in amalgam that is toxic.
http://jdr.sagepub.com/content/82/3/243.long
Also, DNA doesn’t have any thiol groups for mercury to bind to, so mercury doesn’t bind to DNA. There are proteins with thiol groups that bind to DNA, these are called transcription factors. The largest class of transcription factors are zinc finger protein transcription factors. They have a number of thiol groups along the protein molecule that bind a zinc ion and cause the protein to fold into a certain shape such that it binds to a certain piece of DNA.
Hey “Daedalus”, I just politely replied that I was going to prepare a presentation of an answer to your question, but clearly your opinionatedness can’t wait a few hours and so you have to presume my words were just some sort of bluff.
Your attitude shown above does not impress me, you come across as one who may be in the business of scoring points for his (unlikely to be her) “correct” perspective rather than engaging in a sincerely openminded inquiry. And now you’re firing off a machine-gun rally of other issues and questions.
That said, I think it is very good to have the opportunity to discuss possible faults (or in reality imagined faults) in one’s efforts. So much better than the professionals who avoid even mentioning my work. But then again even you here don’t put your name to your critique here, unlike myself.
I’m a person with majorly excessive demands on my time and energy, myself disabled from age 15 by the mercury you defend (and whose attempts to get treatment have been met with the usual disgraceful parade of deceits). And without any team of assistants here (though you are welcome to volunteer!).
Anyway, we have to work with people as they are, and I do hope and intend to find time to properly reply to your not-entirely unreasonable questions there, in due course. I just hope you can appreciate that I can’t reasonably be expected to function as some sort of auto-magic answering machine of scientific expertise here!
I’ll make a start by first replying to this:
I never said DNA has thiol groups. No-one has ever said that thiol groups are necessary for mercury binding. Selenium and methyl don’t have thiols and yet they certainly “bind” mercury. My thesis that mercury is involved in autism as an antiinnatia factor is presented in my update review, which I am at present right now needing to get on with preparing (adjusting) for the journal editors. It would not be the right use of my time to meanwhile present it in dribs and drabs here. But as you insist….
The update review cited four references of studies which report mercury binding to DNA and thereby dose-dependently reducing gene-expression. That’s four studies that show that your “impossible” actually happens.
The rest of your objections are equally baseless. I appreciate that you are no less frustrated having to wait to read my answers than I am in having to wait to write them. Meanwhile have a nice day!
… and a little modesty might go a long way.
Indeed. And if you want to understand my understanding of autism and mercury you need to study my update review which documents it. Yet you’ve made no attempt to.
It’s most impressive how in your mind that utterly irrelevant in vitro study is able to single-handedly overturn the understanding that is based on hundreds of published studies about mercury and amalgam.
If you want your critiques to be taken seriously, you might be well advised to less unreflectively, presumptiously and conceitedly deride my own efforts as supposedly shallow folly.
My reply to “daedalus”‘s question about chelation is a bit too long to place here, so instead I’ve put it as this post on my own site. As I am far from talented in competent verbalisation, it is liable to get subjected to my usual retinkering.
Meawhile I really must now get back to murdering my enemies, and the other such humdrum tasks of mere survival.
For some reason I can’t seem to comment at your blog.
If you look at the Faroe Islands mercury levels
http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/7842/7842.html
The inter quartile range was 13.1 to 40.4 micrograms/L in cord blood. That is 65 to 201 nM/L. That means that 75% of the children in the Faroe Islands study had cord blood mercury levels above 65 nM/L. In the Hitlan paper, there were only two individuals with blood mercury above 60 nM/L, one ASD and one control.
There was a study of the incidence of autism in the Faroe Islands that included the age cohort tested for mercury at birth and later. In the 1,022 individuals tested for mercury there are at most 5 with autism (out of a total of 1,404 in the age cohort that included the mercury tested individuals).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17029020
There are at least 750 with mercury levels higher than the highest seen in the Hitlan paper and at most 5 out of those 750 have autism. If a mercury level greater than 65 nM/L produces an autism incidence of 1 out of 150, by what mechanism do the much lower mercury levels observed in the Hitlan paper cause autism?
Mercury was once used in a lot of medicines, the doses used in vaccines are quite modest. The doses of mercury that were used in teething powders were on the order of a grain of calomel, about 50 mg of mercury. That is 50,000 micrograms, about 4,000 times the dose of mercury in a vaccine (12.5 micrograms). These are the levels of mercury that caused pink disease. Pink disease killed multiple children a year. They were killed by mercury poisoning. Teething powders containing a grain of calomel per dose were sold by the many millions of doses per year for many years. Many millions of children received many thousands of times more mercury from teething powders than children a decade ago ever received from vaccines.
Let me repeat that. Many millions of children received many thousands of times more mercury from teething powders than any children ever received from vaccines.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=10645305
Were there millions of cases of autism when those children were being given such gigantic doses of mercury?
From 1923 to 1948 the number of children who died from pink disease in England and Wales was 1280. We now know that pink disease was mercury poisoning, likely caused by children being given teething powders containing 65 mg calomel per dose. We know that many millions of powders containing 50 mg mercury per dose were sold (30 million by just one company in a single year) every year. Presumably those doses were used, and so many millions of children were exposed to many thousands of times the largest amount of mercury ever present in a single vaccine.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2068104/
Pink disease was caused by exposure to inorganic mercury. Calomel or elemental mercury in teething powders, elemental mercury exposure by inhalation can cause pink disease. Pink disease is caused by exposure to much higher levels of mercury than are contained in the full component of vaccines given over an entire childhood.
In 1947-48, pink disease (or mercury poisoning) was responsible for 23% of child deaths (174 deaths from pink disease out of 759 total).
Experiments in multiple types of animals show that orally ingested methyl mercury causes higher brain mercury levels than does injected thimerosal. Thimerosal has a short lifetime, first it decomposes to ethyl mercury, much of which is excreted, then to inorganic mercury. Once the mercury in thimerosal has become inorganic mercury, then we can use the enormous body of data available on the toxicology of inorganic mercury to understand how it behaves. After a month or so, the only mercury remaining from injected thimerosal is inorganic mercury. There is nothing magical about the inorganic mercury from thimerosal, it is the same as inorganic mercury derived from methyl mercury, derived from calomel, derived from elemental mercury.
With this understanding of the pharmacology of how thimerosal is metabolized from an IM injection, it is completely understandable why there have been no reported cases of pink disease from thimerosal exposure due to vaccines. There is simply not enough mercury present to produce the toxic symptoms of mercury poisoning exhibiting as pink disease. Toxic levels of mercury have never been reported in any tissue compartment either. Postmortem analysis of autistic brain tissue doesn’t show levels of mercury that are toxic or that are even elevated.
Pink disease occurred and was understood when analytical chemistry was in its infancy. Some of the mercury exposures and early measurements of mercury levels in children with pink disease are breath-takingly high.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=5641461
In one case a 3 year old developed pink disease after receiving 180,000 microgram calomel, and was excreting mercury in the urine at concentrations exceeding 1,000 micrograms per liter. In another example a 1 year old was exposed to 180,000 micrograms mercury, and perhaps as much as 330,000 microgram mercury (if the 3 Steedman’s doses in the yellow wrapper did each have 1 grain of calomel).
In this article pink disease is characterized as a “hypersensitivity” to mercury because many children were given these teething powders without developing pink disease. That a small subset of children (hundreds or thousands among millions) are “hypersensitive” to 50,000 micrograms (or more) of mercury doesn’t suggest to me there is a larger set of children (1 in 150) that are sensitive to 12.5 micrograms and develop symptoms (autism) unknown during the time when many millions of children received many thousands of times more mercury. Some children with pink disease excreted in urine in one day more mercury than any child has ever received from their entire vaccination schedule in their entire childhood.
How many cases of pink disease were there when thimerosal was in vaccines? None.
How many children develop pink disease from vaccines? None.
How many children died from mercury poisoning due to mercury in vaccines? None.
Autism does not have symptoms similar to mercury poisoning. Autism certainly lacks the most important and quintessential diagnostic symptom of mercury poisoning, that would be an elevated level of mercury.
You and the others in the anti-vax “mercury causes autism” cult can delude yourselves that “mercury causes autism”. It doesn’t. Those of us in the reality based community have looked at the data, considered it, concluded that the idea of mercury causing autism is inconsistent with abundant reliable data from many researchers going back 50+ years, even before there was diagnostic criteria for autism.
Daedalus, you continue with sausage-machine production of objections which are not soundly considered. My theory and its extension in the update have nothing whatsoever to do with mercury in cord blood, or mercury applied to the skin, or swallowed orally, or thimerosal, so all that lot above here is irrelevant.
But I have never said vaccines cause autism, and repeatedly said they did not play any significant part in the increase.
Your blank assertion that “Autism does not have symptoms similar to mercury poisoning” is yet more b.s. showing you have a profound ignorance of the subject. Not least because you have not made any effort to study my update review. But then given your rigidly “you are wrong because” attitude I’m not sure you’re going to be offered the chance of reading a preview of it anyway.
I have patiently prepared answers to quite a number of your questions and misunderstandings on this page. But it is becoming clear that you are ineducable.
So I will now turn my attention to working with others who are more appreciative of my “delusions”, so goodbye for now.
P.S, As far as I can tell the comments are working on my site. Maybe a setting of java or somesuch at your end is involved. (Or maybe blogger’s spam autodetector is expressing its opinion. 😉
I still can’t post comments.
If you are not anti-vax, I apologize for saying you were. It is hard to tell when you make baseless criticisms of Dr Offit and parrot anti-vax talking points. But if you say are not anti-vax, I will take you at your word.
“daedalus”, thanks for your apology about the anti-vax assumption, though no need for it. I still don’t know why you can’t post comments to my autimcauses site, but in any case please consider yourself at least temporarily banned from commenting there on account of your drivel-barrageing abuse of myself on this page here.
I appreciate that you weren’t intending to be abusive, and didn’t think you were abusive. But that doesn’t change the reality which I explain at that link above. Hopefully we can have more-productive (note hyphen there) discussions at some future date but I doubt it’s going to be anytime this month. Cheers.
Why do you have a blog without the option of comments?
Chris–My autismcauses “blog” does have the option of comments; the comments have always been enabled and some people have posted them. It’s working now except apparently not for “daedalus”. But for reasons explained above I think that’s just as well in his case.
I greatly value discussion between disparate viewpoints and I am unusual in trying to promote it myself, as for instance in my venturing onto this site here. But not when it gets degraded by drivel-barrageing.
My Autismcauses.info is not really intended to be a blog, but rather to provide appendixes of material supplementary to the update review I am publishing in a journal, and opportunity for others to comment. It just so happens that I’m hosting it on free blogger com so it behaves like a blog.
It would be good to have some constructively critical discussion there, but I don’t really want it to become dominated by a forum function such as here at lbrb, let alone the excessive deluge of amateur comments/chat we can see over at Age of Autism.
I much appreciate the non-censoring ethos practiced here, but I do think the line should be drawn at drivel-barrageing, however well-intended.
@Mr Clarke: I read your post and honestly would have been more impressed if you had included peer-review references instead of only referring to one book that was not peer reviewed. You consistently attacked peer-reviewed articles but gave no references for your data. Will you have references once your journal article is printed? If so, I would like to read it, and them.
I, like daedalus, was unable to post comments there. Since you say that comments are allowed, perhaps that is due to the fact that I am using IE6 right now; I’ll look again when I am home and using Firefox (which your blog states is the preferred system).
Dawn–I’m not sure which post of mine you are referring to, or where I referred to a non-peer-reviewed book, or didn’t include peer-reviewed refs. (Btw, in practice most published books go through a process much the same as “peer-review” which means that any sufficiently pro-establishment junk is uncritically accepted whereas any non-standard or heresy is rejected no matter how sound.)
>You consistently attacked peer-reviewed articles but gave no references for your data.
Not clear what specifically you’re referring to there but probably I was raising well-known long established findings, hence tending not to need citation. And please note my recent comments about drivel-barraging. I am not here as a free educational question-anwering service much as I’d like to be. My autismcauses posts are intended mainly for an audience of people already familiar with the lit (or capable of verifying for themselves).
>Will you have references once your journal article is printed?
It would be hard to get an article accepted that didn’t contain adequate refs. Einstein’s relativity got away with just 2 but now that’s no longer considered enough!
>If so, I would like to read it, and them.
Send request to my email address. However I am at the moment doing some, well trying to do some, further enhancing of it, so not the best time to ask as it will put me in a bind!
People are not supposed to be using IE6 nowadays due to insecurity. So happens I myself use it for just reading the met office and it does my site ok too.
Maybe blogger’s spam autofilter doesn’t like you either hah!
>using Firefox (which your blog states is the preferred system).
But you shouldn’t believe everything I write!
I am just going off to do urgent work on my allotment and I doubt if I’ll be looking at any screens or keyboards while doing so. Gettit? Cheers.
PS to preceding: – The journal is moaning for one thing that my charts aren’t technically clear enough. If there’s anyone who might do a better job than myself of converting excels into tiff or eps files, I’d be most grateful for their assistance as I already spent yonks trying to get them clear! (Actually they look fine on my ten year old monitor so I suggest just a global banning of the use of lcds.)