The blogosphere and certain Yahoo groups are _outraged_ by the idea that a study from Cornell University alleges that TV might have a role to play in autism.
The idea is pretty stupid. Basically, the Cornell guys are saying that because there’s autism in places where there’s lots of rainfall and because when its raining kids watch TV that autism has a link to TV. In fact, that piece of thinking goes beyond ‘pretty stupid’ and inhabits the landscape of ‘hilariously inept’. To give them their due they stop short of claiming a causative connection but they claim its a major piece of the puzzle.
We are not saying we have found the cause of autism, we’re saying we have found a critical piece of evidence
Guys – you _so_ haven’t.
Anyway, the merits of this study aren’t the focus of this post (hilarious as the study is, I couldn’t do better than Joseph’s takedown ). What’s interested me over the last few days are the outraged splutterings coming from a certain section of the autism community.
As they have dumbed down this society over the past generation and people took the history of science courses as opposed to pharmacology/pharmacology, all sorts of insane theories and mischief can emanate from a population of social/mental dingbats whose primary source of production is television shows as opposed to hard goods.
H Coleman, Evidence of Harm Yahoo Group.
First and foremost this is a perfect example of what happens when economists that know nothing of a medical condition try to find some statistical relationship between their beloved data and a condition.
The authors of this study made no effort to explain how TV watching could trigger chronic intestinal inflammation, toxic levels of heavy metals, inability to sleep, hard and bloated abdomens, food allergies or intolerances, and much more.
Kendra Pettengill, EoH Yahoo regular
I could go on but I think you get the idea. In a nutshell, the mercury militia are _not happy_ that TV has been linked to autism. Most of them are not happy because the study is totally ridiculous. On that I agree with them. Some of them are unhappy because they think its a study trying to put the blame back on parents in a bettlehiem-esqe manner. I think thats an overreaction but I can see what they’re saying.
However, a lot are unhappy because it refuses to recognise mercury as being ‘in the mix’. Thats as hilarious, predictable and sad as the study in question.
But I’m _still_ not making my point. My point is this. OK, this TV study is junk but here’s a question for you my mercury obsessed cherubs – what scientific merit does your vaccine/thiomersal/MMR theory have that elevates it above this TV study? I’m going to go right ahead and assert that the vaccine theory has no more causative evidence behind it than this joke of a study.
Both hypothesis have, at their core, an implausible correlation with a couple of self-congratulatory scientists dabbling with numbers that they want to twist to fit their theories. And that’s it. _No_ clinical evidence, no decent epidemiological evidence and a mainstream science community sniggering openly. What this TV theory needs is a bunch of credulous people to form pretentious sounding groups – SAFE TVINDS maybe or Notelly.org, then they can part-fund some crappy science to support the original crappy science, write books, organise marches on Hollywood instead of the CDC, get harvested by a whole new crop of quacks etc etc.
In all seriousness: mercury boys and girls – how you see the TV theory (a mixture of borderline tolerable amusement and offence to science) is exactly how the rest of the world see’s you.
Left Brain Right Brain 
In all seriousness: mercury boys and girls – how you see the TV theory (a mixture of borderline tolerable amusement and offence to science) is exactly how the rest of the world see’s you.
That’s right. The laughing gets louder with each passing year as the mercury parents desperately cling to the thimerosal hype-othesis.
As silly as this study is, it’s still better science than we see from the mercury mob. It would be nice to see a side-by-side comparison with Ray Palmer’s silly study.
p.s. I like the pop windows when I hover over a link. Slick
The people I feel sorry for are all the scientists who enter this field and are then attacked by the mercury parents. On EoH, they are encouraging parents to phone the authors of the TV study, and give them what-for. They did the same to a perfectly good study (the Shattuck work) a while back.
I am sure that the authors of the TV study are genuinely interested in the causes of autism – maybe even one has an autistic child. They’ve plumbed their own field of expertise to come up with a hypothesis that fits at least as well as the autism=mercury hypothesis. And now they are subject to hate-mail and nasty phone calls. It’s enough to put any serious researcher off.
By the way, my child did regress at about the same time as she became very interested in watching TV. I’ve wonderered for years if it wasn’t a factor in her gradual social withdrawl. I was so interested that I set up a survey. I asked parents if they had found various therapies helpful (or not). One of the questions was about “Cutting back on television/video watching”. That received 24 favorable votes, compared to 4 unfavorable, which compared quite respectably to the top therapies which were speech/language therapy which received 38 votes for and 4 votes against, and ABA which received 31 votes for and 3 votes against.
Chelation was much less favored, with only 6 postive, and no negative votes.
What this TV theory needs is a bunch of credulous people to form pretentious sounding groups – SAFE TVINDS maybe or Notelly.org, then they can part-fund some crappy science to support the original crappy science, write books, organise marches on Hollywood instead of the CDC, get harvested by a whole new crop of quacks etc etc.
Oh man, I’m ROTFL.
I’ve been discussing a similar issue over at Wade’s blog. Basically, that this theory has become a test for those who claim to be completely open-minded about autism research.
In addition to the theory not making much sense, the element of parent-blame is certainly an important part of what makes parents dislike this theory. But in the case of the mercury parents, I’m sure they are concerned about comparisons of plausibility and strength of the evidence, in addition to the impact it might have on vaccine litigation.
BTW, my opinion is that the quality of the statistical analysis done by the Cornell economists is better than anything I’ve seen from the Geiers yet.
Thanks for linking.
Don’t forget though – the Amish don’t watch TV 🙂
I remember being banned from watching TV in 1970 because my parents thought it might be making me act hyper. I whined and complained because I was obsessed with Speed Racer at the time. My father tried to distract me by giving me a desk and an old typewriter and encouraging me to write stories. I wrote a bunch of Speed Racer adventure stories, which must have made me one of the very first kids to waste large amounts of time writing anime fanfiction, LOL.
Eventually my parents gave up on the TV ban when they’d had enough of the other ways I found to amuse myself, such as pounding nails into random parts of the house. It definitely didn’t make me any less autistic.
Still, you might almost say it’s a pity the TV theory didn’t become more popular among the cure-seekers. A lot of kids might have been saved from dangerous quack treatments if it had.
What this TV theory needs is a bunch of credulous people to form pretentious sounding groups – SAFE TVINDS maybe or Notelly.org,
Television Rescue!
Coalition for Image-free Broadcasting
Defeat Video Now!*
Moms Ordering Remotes Off Now (MORON)
*DVD’s from this conference are available by special order. Sales to persons under the age of 18 strictly prohibited.
I find it amusing that I could be typed as a “TV mom” as I watch absolutely no TV.
One of the Hg moms wrote them a letter and “corrected” them with totally wrong information. She wrote that 25% of kids are basically autistic from birth but the epidemic kids all regress (that would be her other 75%). She has the numbers backards. Only about 25-30% of autistic kids have a “regression” and many of them don’t actually lose skills but they stop acquiring them at the same rate and appear to have a plateau developmentally for a while. Kids that really suddenly stop speaking altogether are pretty rare, and many of them did not have normal vocabularies before that.
The Hg parents want to paint this picture of all these superior children who suddenly lose all their “skills” overnight (or within 3 months… depending who you are listening to) following a vaccine. That might happen, but one would expect it to happen if a certain number of kids of getting vaccinated who would regress anyway, parents could attribute the regression to the vaccine because that’s what they’ve been hearing now for a decade or so.
They also want to paint a picture of 1 in 166 kids with hard, distended bellies and horrific bowel problems. That’s far from the reality. The distended bellies could be due to something like lactose intolerance, though I don’t know what caused the problems with the kids in the photos that Wakefield shows… he has I picture of a kid with a distended belly he uses. It’s not common in autism, that’s for sure. Of course, the MMR folks put any gut problems down to measles, and the hg parents put it down to mercury from vaccines…
I suppose eventually the anti-tv parents would point to flat buttocks and echolalia to television watching. They’d say all autistics have flat buttocks from watching too much TV and all are echolalic, and that they only echolal television in the beginning… all this being proof that NBC and the Disney Channel owe them BIG bucks….
I’m not sure what the quacks would sell them… little treadmills maybe, jungle-gyms with clear domes covering them so children will have healthy play outside when it’s raining… books can’t be too good they’re 2 dimensional, just like a tv image.
Is Erik Nanstiel is freaking out yet. What would be the anti-TV version of “FAIR autism media.” FAIR autism Live Performances? I guess Erik could stand outside the NBC news studio in NYC and do a mime performance for the audience or something, trying to get them not to let their children watch TV… I wonder if the Illuminati have weighed in on this issue. 🙂
And maybe they could even label television as an illuminati conspiracy.
Bill Gates is supposed to be one of the Illuminati. He is if you listen to David Ayoub and Erik Nanstiel, and Gates’ gots that MSNBC thing going with Bob Wright. I never did trust that Bob Wright, I’m pretty sure someone said they saw him shape shifting. There’s only a few degrees of separation from the Illuminati to autism, and we don’t have to invoke vaccines, even.
I never did trust that Bob Wright, I’m pretty sure someone said they saw him shape shifting.
It’s true. I saw him morph into Don Imus right before my very eyes. Actually, it might have been Diedre. I can’t trust my eyes when I’m watchin’ the idiot box these days. Maybe it was Montel. I’m confused.
Thanks for the post Kevin.
I read the paper and it’s a pretty sloppy piece of work, but the priceless irony, as you stated, was the reaction of, “Of course it’s not the TV…it’s mercury poisoning from vaccines!”
That’s a coffee-on-the-keyboard moment.
I think that clone3g wins the award with “Television Rescue”.
It’s kind of a shame of timing that some other research announcements, such as Fombonne/MMR and the Vanderbilt work on the MET gene are getting lost in the media attention to the TV (poster?–not really a paper, preprint? …)whatever is happening.
Thanks, and keep the hits coming.
Regan
Joseph wrote:
“I’ve been discussing a similar issue over at Wade’s blog. Basically, that this theory has become a test for those who claim to be completely open-minded about autism research..”
I find it interesting that over here one can say:
“The idea is pretty stupid. Basically, the Cornell guys are saying that because there’s autism in places where there’s lots of rainfall and because when its raining kids watch TV that autism has a link to TV. In fact, that piece of thinking goes beyond ‘pretty stupid’ and inhabits the landscape of ‘hilariously inept’.”
but on Wade’s blog the statement that:
“In contrast, the TV hypothesis – in light of current knowledge of autism and the brain – has no ‘biological plausibility’, in that it does not offer a reasonable hypothesis to explain the major structural differences found in the autistic brain, as identified in peer-reviewed scientific research of merit (and no, I’m definitely not limiting this just to Dr Casanova’s work on minicolumns), let alone some of the findings of Mottron et al regarding autistic cognition. Propose one and I would be willing to look again.”
is implied to be close-mindedness. Better yet, it is part of a pattern of close-mindedness that justifies comparing Wade, MarÃa Luján and I to farm animals. Rather than a test of ‘open-mindedness’, I’d suggest that the subtext of the question being posed was not “Why don’t you accept the possibility of a reasonable hypothesis” – Joseph’s statement “In addition to the theory not making much sense…” pretty much rules that one out – but was instead “If you believe one nutty idea then why would you not believe another?”
I’ll point that this exchange occurred during the same week that Interverbal and MarÃa Luján posted this and this, but I’m afraid that the irony might be lost on some.
No Ian, the difference is that Kev doesn’t go around lecturing about open-mindedness, implying at every turn that unlike most people, he’s unusually open and willing to consider broader possbilities, while constantly demanding “respect” for largely anecdotally-based beliefs. And no, Ian, I’m not necessarily referring to you specifically.
Joseph, Are you referring to me?
If it is so, it would be nice to know that this is your opinion about me.
Thank you
Joseph, sorry, I read she and not he.When I reread I noticed my mistake.
However, I consider that we can discuss many things, even if they are not prooved for sure.
Why can not ex plore properly different possibilities? In this sense , even if you mentioned a “he” Why is it not valid the analysis of all kind of evidences, asking for more high level science in these topics?
However, are you interested on the reading of an answer of your last post and questions to me on Wade´s blog? Can I send you the “extended version” of it to your e-mail?
Yes, MarÃa, obviously. I’ll have to pass on the “extended version” of your response.
What I’m referring to is something like what went on in here.
As I can read from here it is the weather to blame for the autism in the first place. TV has its own part in making people more stupid than they are, but not causing this disease. It is a total waste of time and effort, but who cares about it. Only the TV addicts! Do you know that line form Toy Dolls, “I need no morphine I need a TV screen� Well in most of the cases TV offers you addiction and stupidity, but not autism.
It’s not the TV. It’s the rain. Rain causes autism. It’s so obvious, I can’t believe nobody’s worked it out before now.
Hey, yeh…. it’s the Rain… man!
There is a more humorous aspect to this debate. http://whitterer-autism.blogspot.com – the dreaded Telly – well at least I hope there is?
My wife has been running an in-home daycare for the past 16 years, she watches 5-6 kids per day. We noticed over the years that the children that watch high amounts of television at home had speech and learning difficulties. These kids were also a year or two behind when it came to potting training, where as the kids that did not live on television could be potty trained by two years old, without difficulty and had no speech problems. It’s easy to see which kids are used to living on television because they beg to watch it all day and the only words they know are the ones from their favorite movie or television show. When a television is turned on they flock to it like moths to a flame, its sickening. For all you folks out there thinking there is not a connection between child development and television, your DEAD wrong. Seeing a child that can’t speak correctly, can’t focus on the person that is speaking to them or is still in a diaper at 4 years of age because his parents were to lazy or too busy to interact with the child, its nothing to joke about.
I think I need to expand on the term “high amounts” of television, high amounts meaning 8+ hours of television. I’m sure it’s hard to imagine how a small child could be exposed to so much television in a day so let me give you some insight on how a couple of these children were raised.
Child 1:
Both parents worked and the mother took the child with her to work, the child was kept in a play pen in the office and was in full view of a television which played all his favorite videos and television shows ALL day, which of course kept him pacified and out of his mother hair. He also was allowed to watch as much television as he wanted in the evening. This was his life for the first three years, after that he came to my wife’s daycare, the damage was VERY obvious.
Child 2:
Stayed home with the mother, the mother being one of these people that is oblivious to the world around her and had no sense of time, not sure if it was OCD or some other problem, I’m not a physiologist. The child was treated like a household pet (or worse), the child had full run of the house, was never disciplined and could do what ever she wanted and eat what ever she wanted. The mother rarely interacted with the child, most of the time the mother never knew where the child was. So of course she sat in front of the television and played her favorite videos over and over again ALL day and evening and ate nothing but junk food, she knew how to operate a VCR before she ever learned how to speak. The child showed the same learning problems as child 1.
Maybe all this is a coincidence but out of the 40+ kids my wife has kept over the years these were the only two that had high amounts of television and had the same learning disabilities. I happened to catch a show on television about feral children (a child who has lived isolated from human contact starting from a very young age and who has remained unaware of human behavior and unexposed to language). The children in the show acted and moved in the same fashion as the two children I mentioned above, it was very eye opening yet extremely sad. I’m sure there are going to be many people that don’t believe what I have written or will say there is no correlation but I saw this with my own eyes and I feel like it’s a real problem and that there is a connection. I think that any type of isolation (television, video games, hand held games) can cause these kinds of problems its not all about the television, these distractions just help the child live an isolated lifestyle. I’ve read other articles that link ADD, ADHD and Alzheimer’s to television, I think they are on the right track, its not so much the television but the isolation that causes the problem IMO.
I do think lack of appropriate human contact and interaction can have deleteriouis effects on kids, that’s for sure.
The question is whether those changes permanently change one’s brain structure, which is what I believe would have to be happening for television to be a causal factor in autism.