My mother-in-law recommended a certain pediatrician when we moved back to Canada from the U.S. Things seemed to go smoothly with our healthy daughter, but I grew suspicious of his abilities when a discussion exposed his poor understanding of the genetics of blood types. A couple of years later, when we told him that we suspected our two year old son was autistic, he brushed it off claiming, “Yeah, sure. Everybody’s autistic nowadays.” When we insisted on a referral, he recommended a psychiatrist whose specialty was dealing with eating disorders.
Every question the psychiatrist asked us seemed to be straight out of an old edition of the Merck Manual. I had a copy of the latter and its outdated article on autism. After two short observations, he labeled our son with P.D.D, pervasive developmental disorder. As a precaution he did refer us to someone with more experience, even though he claimed that no sound diagnosis could be made before the age of five. The next psychiatrist analyzed our answers to a long questionnaire, watched our son make a mess of her office and correctly concluded that he had a serious case of autism.
I don’t want to focus on the negative aspects of parenting an autistic child. Even though he only started to call us Mom and Dad at the age of 7, he has learned to do things the rest of the family enjoys like bicycling and hiking. Last summer over a period of two weeks he hiked 88 km of mountain trails in Gros Morne and Gaspe. My wife joined a local foundation and helped raise over a million dollars that has gone towards the purchase of a respite center. Meanwhile I’ve learned to plaster, unclog major toilet problems and repair broken furniture to keep our home intact.
But after 12 years of living with autism, my main advice to parents is to avoid the pseudo science. If you have not done so already, look at the data(http://www.autism.com/pdf/providers/ParentRatings2009.pdf) from over 27 000 parents, compiled by the Autism Research Institute, and you’ll see that so much of what has been tried on these poor kids does not work. Given that these are not even controlled studies, the effectiveness of the various drugs and diets is probably even worse than what’s reported. Some acquaintances have recommended outlandish hyperbaric oxygen treatment and stem cell transplants. A dentist we know even blamed autism on the mercury amalgam in my wife’s fillings. In her rationalization, she claimed that mercury and oxygen had the same valence number. I didn’t realize until then that it was possible to get a dentistry license while being clueless about basic chemistry.
In November 2002, when my son was four, the New England Journal of Medicine reported, Of the 537,303 children in the cohort (representing 2,129,864 person-years), 440,655 (82.0 percent) had received the MMR vaccine. We identified 316 children with a diagnosis of autistic disorder and 422 with a diagnosis of other autistic-spectrum disorders. After adjustment for potential confounders, the relative risk of autistic disorder in the group of vaccinated children, as compared with the unvaccinated group, was 0.92 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.68 to 1.24), and the relative risk of another autistic-spectrum disorder was 0.83 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.65 to 1.07). There was no association between the age at the time of vaccination, the time since vaccination, or the date of vaccination and the development of autistic disorder…. This study provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism. With such research I tried to deflate the arguments of dozens of mercury-conspiracy theorists, but it fell on deaf ears. Some even tried expensive and dangerous chelation therapy. Aside from the charlatans that exploit parents, there’s also an army of special educators in schools and government centers, many of whom have the best intentions but are not scientifically trained due to the low standards of university education departments. If you can, avoid them too.
Every question the psychiatrist asked us seemed to be straight out of an old edition of the Merck Manual. I had a copy of the latter and its outdated article on autism. After two short observations, he labeled our son with P.D.D, pervasive developmental disorder. As a precaution he did refer us to someone with more experience, even though he claimed that no sound diagnosis could be made before the age of five. The next psychiatrist analyzed our answers to a long questionnaire, watched our son make a mess of her office and correctly concluded that he had a serious case of autism.
I don’t want to focus on the negative aspects of parenting an autistic child. Even though he only started to call us Mom and Dad at the age of 7, he has learned to do things the rest of the family enjoys like bicycling and hiking. Last summer over a period of two weeks he hiked 88 km of mountain trails in Gros Morne and Gaspe. My wife joined a local foundation and helped raise over a million dollars that has gone towards the purchase of a respite center. Meanwhile I’ve learned to plaster, unclog major toilet problems and repair broken furniture to keep our home intact.
But after 12 years of living with autism, my main advice to parents is to avoid the pseudo science. If you have not done so already, look at the data(http://www.autism.com/pdf/providers/ParentRatings2009.pdf) from over 27 000 parents, compiled by the Autism Research Institute, and you’ll see that so much of what has been tried on these poor kids does not work. Given that these are not even controlled studies, the effectiveness of the various drugs and diets is probably even worse than what’s reported. Some acquaintances have recommended outlandish hyperbaric oxygen treatment and stem cell transplants. A dentist we know even blamed autism on the mercury amalgam in my wife’s fillings. In her rationalization, she claimed that mercury and oxygen had the same valence number. I didn’t realize until then that it was possible to get a dentistry license while being clueless about basic chemistry.
In November 2002, when my son was four, the New England Journal of Medicine reported, Of the 537,303 children in the cohort (representing 2,129,864 person-years), 440,655 (82.0 percent) had received the MMR vaccine. We identified 316 children with a diagnosis of autistic disorder and 422 with a diagnosis of other autistic-spectrum disorders. After adjustment for potential confounders, the relative risk of autistic disorder in the group of vaccinated children, as compared with the unvaccinated group, was 0.92 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.68 to 1.24), and the relative risk of another autistic-spectrum disorder was 0.83 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.65 to 1.07). There was no association between the age at the time of vaccination, the time since vaccination, or the date of vaccination and the development of autistic disorder…. This study provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism. With such research I tried to deflate the arguments of dozens of mercury-conspiracy theorists, but it fell on deaf ears. Some even tried expensive and dangerous chelation therapy. Aside from the charlatans that exploit parents, there’s also an army of special educators in schools and government centers, many of whom have the best intentions but are not scientifically trained due to the low standards of university education departments. If you can, avoid them too.
