Assuming the Pennsylvania Board of Registration in Medicine doesn’t pull things out of thin air, the Order to Show Cause issued in the Kerry case shows the deceased child was not given the “wrong” drug, but rather was deliberately dosed with Endrate, the disodium salt of EDTA, by IV push: http://www.circare.org/pd/kerry_ordertoshowcause_20060908.pdf

And never mind absence of indication for use, or that infusion over less than 3 hours is specifically contraindicated due to the risk of hypocalcemia, the condition the state coroner determined to have been the cause of the child’s death: http://www.circare.org/foia2/endrate_ppi.pdf

I don’t think anyone had really got to grips with causes, only symptoms, which are a useful framework in terms of statementing & other practical issues. I do wonder though, why the fathers of autistic children can often be found on the continuum, that is the autistic spectrum. Genes would be a biological cause right? & I’m not a doctor in case that last bit worried anyone!

I think it’s unlikely that Christine is the mother of a child with autism. Given the context, I’m sure she would have said it explicitly.

Also, the comments aren’t made at her, but about her.

Absolutely, they are the best responses. However you do need to make some allowances; I have trouble not getting angry when I read letters like the one above, and I’m not alone in that.

I feel sympathy for her, but she is dangerous, and her whole approach to an immensely complex and difficult subject threatens to destabilise the good work done by others. It’s not her alone of course; by herself she’d be harmless. It’s her and all the others. All the others who make sweeping assertions about medical conditions without any evidence, and who shout down anyone who dares to question them.

It’s really difficult to be sympathetic and angry at the same time. Most of the people on this thread seem to be doing their best.

nothing to do with being poked and prodded by a stranger then!

Just so. Vega testing and applied kinesiology are other favourites.

http://skepdic.com/eft.html

Manigen
as usual someone has latched onto the idea that heavy metals are bad (tipper gore?) and then blamed it for everything- a bit like candida (the woman above claimed to have had it on the brain, she cured it by becoming vegan for a month).

How, I wonder, was this diagnosed?

1 There’s an analogy between medicine and law. In law, we generally want our judges to be disinterested in the cases before them. (Interested rather than uninterested, but disinterested – not having a (financial or emotional) interest in the cases before them.) Indeed, we require them not to have even the appearance of an interest. It is generally agreed that if judges have an interest in the cases before them, the judgements are less satisfactory. And there’s a lot to be said for having the same kind of distancing between medical researchers and the topics they are researching.

2 With AIDS, I gather that there is widespread interest in the AIDS community in the details of new drugs and treatments being developed. The view that it is improper (unethical) to withhold treatment merely in order to satisfy experimental protocols, when it is becoming clear that a treatment is clearly looking good, is (I gather) fairly widespread. So new drugs become self-prescribed and widely used. The drawback to this is that it can then be difficult to run proper trials. And therefore the evidence in favour of new drugs is tainted. We don’t have the same level of confidence in anti-AIDS drugs as we do in drugs for less emotive conditions. Probably most of the new drugs do do more or less what we think and hope they do. But a few of them won’t do what we think they probably do, or won’t do it as well as we think they do. So if we’re being honest, we should dish out the drugs but say “These drugs will probably help you. But they may not, and that chance is significantly higher because we’ve been unable to do the proper tests, because a considerable proportion of your fellow AIDS sufferers have made it impossible for the proper tests to be done.”

3 A historical example – blindness among premature babies. It was found that sufficiently premature babies benefited greatly from an atmosphere enriched in oxygen. Within a year or two of that treatment being started, an increase in blindness in young children was discovered. Someone thought that the blindness might be caused by the elevated oxygen. So an investigation was started into how much oxygen really needed to be supplied. Apparently the nurses involved were so confident that high oxygen was essential that some were creeping into the wards at night to turn up the oxygen levels. (“I don’t want babies in my care being killed by too little oxygen because of some wild and fanciful theory.”) But it was found that too much oxygen *did* tend to produce blindness, and it is now accepted that careful control of the oxygen levels is necessary.

“I’ve had several letters about , many of which contain misconceptions typified by this message from Mrs. Trellis of North Wales:” etc.

Not exciting investigative journalism but maybe a good way to set the record straight.

Andrew.