People who support the idea that autism is mercury poisoning get to a certain point in the debate (i.e. when they feel themselves to have no recourse to logical debate any more) they resort to asking you:
have you had your daughter’s metals levels tested? And NO…I am not asking for your daughter’s medical records. It’s a fair question.
They do this mainly as they are unable to debate on an intellectual level about the issue at hand but they also believe this to be an acceptable request.
In my opinion it is totally unreasonable and entirely inappropriate to ask someone to discuss any aspect of their child’s medical history unless they feel comfortable discussing it. Especially over the Internet with people you never met before and who you don’t trust the motives of anyway.
There’s a few reasons I feel this inappropriateate. Firstly, its nobody’s goddamn business but my daughters. How would she feel in 20 years time to stumble across this blog Googles cache and find me blithely discussing her medical history with total strangers? I know how I’d feel about it if it was me – I’d feel that my parents had crossed a line between whats acceptable and whats not.
Secondly, this blog is basically an online extension of my house. Would you feel OK about me being invited into your house and then questioning you about matters that are nothing to do with you? I’ll bet you wouldn’t. I’d bet you would tell me to mind my own business and to stop asking such highly personal questions.
Thirdly is the issue of legitimising the argument of innuendo. Every time I read some neo-biblical testimony from some set of parents about how after they started using Chelation the mercury was ‘pouring out of our kids body’ I think mainly of how utterly irrelevant stories like this are – true or not they are not empirical research and thus prove nothing whatsoever. This is why science tends to eschew circumstantial evidencence like this – it is representative only of that particular individual and as such, without proper scientific investigation into _all_ the variables that came into play in that situation its meaningless as decent evidence.
So to my way of thinking if I start discussing what my daughter has or hasn’t had and claiming it as incontrovertibleble proof of my opinion I’m doing the exact same thing. The *only* way I’d let my daughters medical history be used like this was if it formed part of a large study run by a large, well respected medical institution, headed up by a well respected scientist and we were assured of complete anonymity.
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