CAM and scientific terms

Oh, I get to go first!

Hot off the presses of Medical Hypotheses…*”Iatrogenic Autism”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Hahr%20JY%5BAuthor%5D&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=23706997

“Iatrogenic autism.
Hahr JY.
Source

Childrens Hospital of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, United States. Electronic address: [email protected].
Abstract

Autism as we know it, is caused iatrogenically and occurs reportedly one in 88 live birth [3]. Now national survey pegs autism prevalence one in 50 school-age children and the incidence is rising much fast in recent years. The author is hypothesizing idiopathic autism is caused by feeding of infant formula. Majorities of formula in the world are milk based and the molecular weight of the cow’s milk is much higher than that of human breast milk. These increased solutes contributes to increased osmolality of the environment of the newborn infant, is directly affecting hemodynamics of normal homeostasis of the developing human brain cells. Formula makers fortified new substances in the process of formula making whenever they found previous unknown substances in the breast milk, for past several decades. When those solid substances were added in the process of formula making to make 20cal/oz of infant formula, this resulted displacing free water in the formula. When new substances were added, same amount of free water has to be displaced from the formula. That is why we are seeing more autism in recent years, compared to previous several decades.

Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

* “Iatrogenic Autism” also used by anti-vaccine parents to describe their “vaccine-damaged” autistic children.

I’ll be waiting for Dr. Jay to weigh in on this “Iatrogenic Autism”, caused by not breast feeding and feeding babies infant formula.

Never forget the Toxins™

“Inflammation” – A term with a specific medical meaning, but one I’ve seen abused by quackupuncturers to explain how their magic voodoo pins work.

“Gene-targeted” – As per our Polish friend.

“Immune response” – I’ve seen that used by the Pin Cushion Posse I mentioned above.

It’s 6am and I’m running on two hours of sleep so I’ll leave it for now, but not before this piece of horror-woo:

prolopuncture.com

I searched your blog archives and didn’t find any results for it, so I hope it’s as shiny and new for you as it is for me! Be sure to read the section called How Prolopuncture came to be. It’s crammed to bursting-point with woo-tropes.

I particularly enjoyed his recollection about treating the injuries he sustained in a motorbike crash by putting hundreds of acupuncture needles in each joint. Simultaneously.

That one front page alone misuses so many scientific terms that it’s like a decade worth of Christmas+birthdays in one go.

Enjoy!

The one I like is “food as medicine.” Eat the right food in sufficient quantity and you can cure any ailment!

Why the food, where the key ingredient is found in varying quantities and mixed with other stuff, is better than a drug that synthesises the key ingredient and delivers it in a measured dose every time, has never been properly explained to me.

I’ll take ‘placebo response’, and a “me too” on ‘toxins’.

Tricky, because the terms keep shifting as real science marches on, or they get called out for mangling the terms.

A good starting point is sci-fi buzzwords from pulp novels – in order to make something seem “sciency” you simply slapped a buzzword on as a prefix….

Some buzzwords over the decades…..
1910 – Electric!
1920 – Radio!
1930 – Tele!
1940 – Atomic!
1950 – Electronic!
1960 – Laser!
1970 – Computerised!
1980 – Nano!
1990 – Quantum!

So you can have a cure that works by “Nano particles” in the 1980’s, “Atomic snake oil” in the 40’s, and a medical device which works by adjusting “Radio waves” in the 1920’s.

Frequencies. As a physicist, this rates right up there with Chopra’s “quantum” on my cringe scale.

“Leaky Gut Syndome” and dysbiosis…and not to be confused with peritonitis:

http://www.leakygut.co.uk/Dr%20Gilbere.htm

Speaking of CAM, I thought I may as well throw up this link to YT video of a humorous (and informative) video on Homeopathy.

http://tinyurl.com/kmagqzo

“Detox” is a sure sign of woo.

Synergy – describes the holistic interactions between nutrients and thus explains why diet is more powerful than those ‘reductionist’ drugs.

@Renate – I know, right? Shades of “Mummy mummy, are we nearly there yet?”

The whole thing sounds like a kid writing a “What I did during the holidays” essay. “I went to China and it was AMAZING and I discovered the 10.000 year old art of acupuncture which was BRILLIANT, then I went to Germany (That’s in Europe!!!!) which was so COOL, and learned about mesotherapy which was AWESOMESAUCE, and then, and then, and then…

The End”

Heavy metal poisining that takes years to “detox”
“Other ways of knowing” instead of the patriarchal medical model, this one is usually used for childirth and women’s problems, but I’ve seen it used for mystical treatments too.
Any time a site speaks of adrenal fatigue, or strengthening the immune system or my favorite: natural immunity being far superior than an ebil vaccine.

“Healing” and “cure” have been appropriated by wooists to a nauseating degree.

“Die-off” is another buzzword, though it had limited applications in science.

There’s another term often used to justify the typically magical view that whole herbs are better than purified extracts – not synergy, though it’s a related concept. Maybe I’ll think of it after the morning coffee jolt sets in.

“Epidemic” is always a lovely word tossed about rather carelessly by the woo-inclined. Everything is an epidemic, which means we must, of course, panic about it. And those who don’t do anything about whatever the supposed epidemic is, well, they must be sheeple or in on the conspiracy.

“iatrogenic autism” from formula?

Good grief. Now “thinking moms” who can’t produce enough breast milk will become terrified to supplement with formula and instead go to things like cow’s milk and goat’s milk, which I’ve seen land some infants in the hospital gravely ill with the symptoms of food protein enterocolitis.

Also, JY Hahr (aka JY Harh) looks to be a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin who may have last published in 1975 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Harh+JY%5BAuthor%5D)

You know the woo works if you get a Herx. A Herx in Woo-land is when their treatments make you much more ill than your pre-existing condition. A Herx effect is evidence that your body is fighting dis-ease. The more ill you become the better, as this is further evidence of the effectiveness and appropriateness of their treatments. Sustained levels of increased illness and pain are most desired, as chronic illnesses require chronic and aggressive treatment. Keeping the patient with ‘one foot out of the grave’ seems to be the goal of some practitioners.

In contrast, mainstream medicine defines a Herx as a Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction, which is a potentially fatal but short-lived response appearing within a few hours of initiating antibiotic therapy.

I’d say ‘traditional’ is the fundamental quackery magic word

To the rest the world it means “of long standing”, but to woomeisters it means “self-evidently beyond all doubt”.

How could I forget:
paradigm shift, psychoneuroimmunology, healing crisis

from TMR – skimming recent posts:
vaccine-injury, thinker, neuro-toxins, PTSD, detox, mainstream media, methylation

@ JGC:

what’s hilarious is that I’ve heard ‘traditional’ applied to woo, e.g. “traditional Chinese medicine” “herbalism”
but also applied to SBM (!) because it is old-hat and the incoming wave of futurity is of course, alt med.

-btw- they also say ‘tsunami’, ‘cascade’ and ( Lord help us)
SUSTAINABILITY

And lately, both Adams and Null toss around ‘psychopath’ in reference to anyone who is recognised as an expert and/ or has governmental/ social/ financial power according to the mainstream.
similar usage: ‘fascist’

Methyalation.
Also, anything to do with balancing the “terrain” to “make it inhosptibale to cancer.”

anything said by a FABNO–a naturopath who has achieved the status of a specialist in cancer

new one orthobionomy

The still on-going fad in nutritional supplement quackery is anti-oxidant. Cox-10, krill oil, fish oil, krill-fish oil, anti-oxidants that are 10,1000, 1000000 times stronger than Vitamin E.

Search your local AM stations on weekend mornings and you’ll know exactly what I mean.

@ Stu:

we shouldn’t forget “high ORAC” foods/ supplements.

Good grief. Now “thinking moms” who can’t produce enough breast milk will become terrified to supplement with formula and instead go to things like cow’s milk and goat’s milk, which I’ve seen land some infants in the hospital gravely ill with the symptoms of food protein enterocolitis.

Oh no my dear; it’s camel’s milk. Really, check out AoA.

Embedding scalar energy into herbs with custom energetic imprints to alter and heal your DNA. Proof can be seen with Kirlian photography.

My new favorite one that keeps popping up everywhere is ‘probiotic.’ This term has basically no meaning when you look into it.

As a former structural vibration engineer, one of my favorite are: vibrations and healing frequencies.

I keep wanting to know both the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the stuff that “heals.”

I once went several rounds with a chiropractor over “innate intelligence” that the body was supposed to have. It apparently meant that because the body functioned, it must be conscious, which was proven because it functioned. Or something.
“Personalized” is another one.
I also love the “high ORAC” thing. I have always wanted to eat breakfast cereal made with Tariel cells.
Gluten is a popular buzz lately. So are shamans (Shamen? And are there shawomen too? And is it “shah-man” or “shay-man”? I still don’t know.).
Of course there’s the ever-popular “boost” as in “boosts the immune system”, but also boosting other things. It sometimes gives way to “promotes”.
“As used for centuries by the [name of some tribe or defunct civilization] people of [name of remote region]”, which gives the eye a break from “traditional”.
And “superfoods”, we can’t forget them. My daughter brought home some “superfood of the Inca warriors”; I asked how come with such a superfood on their side a few dozen malnourished scraggly Spaniards could defeat thousands of them in one day of fighting. No answer has been forthcoming.
Let’s not forget how many things must not only be natural and organic, but also GMO-free, gluten-free, without high-fructose corn syrup, zero trans-fats, cage-free, cruelty-free, without antibiotics, and without growth hormones.

Infections are where it’s at. Everyone’s chronically infected.

MSIDS – Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome

The new money-making ailment to replace “chronic” Lyme dis-ease.

How about the appropriation of quasi-medical terms from pre-industrial cultures to ‘splayn phenomena understood perfectly well by SBM:
xi, chi, ki, prana, mana

as well as talking about “tribes”,”healers”, “shamans”, “medicine men/ women”,”loss of soul”, “vision quest” et al

*Farmacy*. All of the health you need to treat dis-ease is in healthy, locally sourced, non GMO, organic, cruelty free, food raised by virgin bi-sexual wood elves.

Reiki

Past-life trauma

Zero point energy is also misused as an explanation for the hypothetical bioenergy that so many talk about (qi, orgone, prana, od), but which is apparently impossible to measure consistently (probably because it doesn’t exist).

Funny thing that this brings to mind for some reason: In sci-fi, it seems to me that a lot of the technology works “harder” where in real life, we’re generally stuck with trying to work “smarter.” Sci-fi machines get generators with absurd output to do mundane tasks, like anti-gravity hoverboards and forcefield prison cells. Meanwhile in the real world, we’re generally trying to squeeze out just a little more efficiency from the devices and materials we’ve already got.

In a way, I think woos have partially caught onto that problem, since scientists are very good at detecting stuff. So, they try to come up sneaky “smart” ways to do what they claim with “subtle” things. Of course, it’s mostly to produce unfalsifiable hypotheses in an effort to avoid easy refutation.

^ Theo Theoharides, MS, PhD, MD

My first thought was “Herxheimer reaction”, but I see that Daisy at #34 was there long ago.

I see it far more amongst the anti-evolutionists, but many alties also seem to misuse the word “theory” a lot. If they disagree with a scientific theory than “theory = totally unproven hypothesis” in their minds, but if it’s their own wackadoodle ideas we’re talking about their definition suddenly changes to “theory = OMG I had this great idea that is automatically COMPLETELY true and anyone who disagrees with me is a stinky stupid-head” or something of that sort.

Oh sweet, sweet hypocrisy.

I find lotsa Woos plagued with “Parasites” and “Candida /Fungal Overgrowths”! Many claim that veggies like potatoes and tomatoes are related to deadly nightshades and therefore should not be eaten. Sugar appently feeds their “Overgrowths”, and is religiously avoided–sadly, no desserts for those afflicted.

I dare them to try and get orca milk.

You’ve got it all wrong! Obviously the best milk for everything is sheep milk!

Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in sheep milk, oh wait…

Oooh! That reminded me! One of the AM informercials this weekend had a guy on claiming his antioxidants were the best because of “massive research”, including reflexology.

Ahem.

Milking an elephant?

Denice Walter: I need your help to develop a business plan for unicorn milk marketing

Who’s going to volunteer their back 40 acres for my unicorn herd?

Well, Old One Eye, tomatoes and potatoes are part of the Solanaceae family, which includes deadly nightshade.

Of course, the Amanitaceae includes death caps and destroying angel mushrooms, as well as several extremely delicious and totally non-toxic mushrooms (rather like all the fungi families).

If you are going to avoid plants that have deadly relatives, you’ll probably have to stop eating plants.

Anything that has “clinically tested” in the title makes my spidey senses tingle

lilady: I hear there’s plenty of cheap, prime real estate available in Cloud Cuckoo Land. You could put the unicorns there.

Some of them are dumb enough to milk a steer

@ Denice,

I went ahead and read his post as well as Seth Mnookin’s post and there’s lot of contrast between the 2. In any case, you know where I stand on all of this.

Alain

Someone posted an anti-vaccination meme today, stating that when a baby is teething, histamines open up the blood brain barrier, making the baby more susceptible to neurotoxins… (Or something like that) lol

I’m pretty sure they ran out of legitimate “ethnopharmacology” leads a long time ago. All the hoodia and quinoa and St. John’s wort were snapped up and are now old news.

Somewhere, there must be some guy randomly grabbing plants and a local, writing down whatever they call said plant, and selling a tiny amount of the ground up leaves/stems/roots/dirt and selling it as a miracle supplement!

That one is called Dragon’s Toenail! It cures bad breath!
Over there is Bing-bong Walla-Walla! It’s great for eye boogers!
This one is called Ecky-Ecky Wallafizbang (local dialect translation: “What? it’s just a plant”)! It cures heavy wallet syndrome!

also – Bodywork (many flavors)

Has anyone here ever ried to milk a camel? I thought not.
😎

@Chris Hickie – Long, long ago, before records began, when man and saddled dinosaurs lived in peace together…

Oh OK then, in 1997, the comedy duo Lee and Herring had a sketch that ran throughout their series, and it was called “Food and Milk”, a parody of the cookery/lifestyle show “Food and Drink”.

Rich didn’t try orca milk, but I believe blue whale milk was on the menu in one episode:

(If anybody is willing to sign up for “DeepDyve,” it can be “rented” for free. The preview of the first page will probably suffice, given that it includes the sections “Introduction,” “Text” [I sh*t you not], and a good chunk of “Discussion.”)

The most misused word in CAM is “supports”.

I’m trying to figure out where the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Pediatrician, Dr. Hahr is licensed:

http://online.drl.wi.gov/LicenseLookup/CredSummaryDetails.aspx?chid=105621

@ Rebecca Fisher: Thanks for your kind offer…heck, we can have an international cartel, selling unicorn milk.

http://media.photobucket.com/user/GrahamalanHull/media/milk.jpg.html?filters%5Bterm%5D=funny%20milk&filters%5Bprimary%5D=images&filters%5Bsecondary%5D=videos&sort=1&o=10

Has anyone here ever tried to milk a camel?

I’ve eaten camel, but I don’t suppose that counts.

As for the unicorn milk marketing exercise, first we have to explain that unicorns are not a myth, something like…

A small herd survives in a remote valley in the Himalaya, just as dinosaurs survive in the swamps of Central Africa, but we have to keep the exact location secret to protect them from poachers. Have you any idea how much genuine unicorn horn goes for? The milk of this gentle creature is renowned for its powerful medicinal properties among the Hunza, whose longevity is legendary.

We supply this rare and precious substance in the form of tiny lyophilized pills, which dissolve under your tongue and which look remarkably like the lactose tablets that homeopaths use, but which are far more powerful (and expensive) than any homeopathic remedy, so use with care.

Don’t the unicorns all live at Candy Mountain, sans a kidney or two?

Liliady–I noticed that too, about JY Hahr–is he living in WI with a NV license (but he doesn’t show in the NV medical board website) or does he have a WI license but lives in NV? I also can’t find him on the Children’s Hospital of WI website, which makes him something of a spectre.

Back to milk–I think either porcupine milk (think of how hard you can claim it is to get this, which would of course imbue it with magical mystical properties) or etruscan shrew milk (the world’s smallest mammal–so you could only get a wee bit of milk which would make it even more precious) would be how I’d go if I was going to scam parents into thinking that their child with autism will be helped by drinking a very exotic non-human milk product.

Good Morning VCADOD Group!

And, how has it been in autism-land? I see you guys have still not repented and asked forgiveness for your sins. Anyway, I am back after a wonderful retreat to a tropical resort. It was quite a beautiful trip with my family. Still, at times I felt a little bad that many of my autistic families due to their circumstances would never be able to get away on such vacations, and even though they really need the break.

Anyway, let`s reflect on this thought for our question of the day. When you guys are staying at your super posh resorts (probably a lot nicer than the one I stayed at) do you guys feel guilty? Do you feel guilty knowing that your professions that afford you such trips are the same professions that promote immunization that will result in autism and autistic families not being able to partake in such privileges?

@ Alain:

I don’t know what the best path is – only you will, when you chance upon it. I can only suggest that you study something that you care about BUT which also alllows you to accumulate skills which are applicable in the work place.

For example, my undergrad degree is not in psychology but I did manage to get skills that made me attractive to the business world ( in advertising) and my graduate work/ degrees encompass different aspects of social science that gave me some freedom to work as a counsellor and in non profits, other business etc. So had I left my universities at any point I could have found employment. At one time, I have assisted someone I care about in his career as well as managing investments for myself and others.

I’m sure that right now you already have skills that involve computers and perhaps lab work that may be a real foundation for you to build upon.

-btw- I was very surprised to learn that my late cousin’s daughter – who is attaining a graduate degree in architecture- is also accumulating courses at her u’ s ( well-known) business school that deal with management of architectural and related firms.

@ Dr Chris:

Which one ? I am currently aware of three:
today’s Teresa Conrick article @ AoA,
Jake’s most recent,
here.

Maybe they’re all inter-related – you know, like that meme about a butterfly’s wing’s movement causing all manner of catastrophe worldwide or suchlike.
Or inter-related because of a higher order phenomenon called….. BAD science.

Greg, the evidence that routine childhood immunization confers an increased risk of developing an autism spectrum disorder would be…?

Oh, that’s right–you’ve conceded you don’t have any.

Adam G@105 – That is comedy gold. Do babies fed on goat milk sprout beards and start eating their bedding? If not, why not? Science is failing us!

@Dreg – Not grounded anymore? Hope your trip to Granny’s house was fun, I bet she spoiled you rotten.

I’m pissing myself laughing, BTW, at your bizarrely childlike assumption that Lord Draconis pays us so much that life is an endless round of holidays at ;posh resorts”.

In November I’ll be going on my first holiday in eight years. Hilariously enough, given your assertion that people with ASDs can’t have holidays, the place I’m going to is a holiday park solely for people with disabilities, and their families. Every outdoor activity, from canoeing to quad biking, is designed to be accessible to anyone with a physical disability. They also have activities catering to children and adults who have ASDs, or are otherwise non-NT. There’s a fabulous sensory suite, a special horse-riding activity group, and all of the staff at the resort are fully trained in the handling of physically disabled people, and the needs of people who are non-NT.

Not only can PWD go there with their families, they can also go alone on respite holidays. There are special themed weeks catering to certain age groups, or for singles (because Dreg, when PWD and non-NT people aren’t headbanging and throwing shit, we like a good shag as much as the next person) or for young lads or lasses in their late teens or early twenties, so they can holiday away from their parents. Care is included in the price.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Not very posh, it’s in a fu€king forest, but sort of bollockses up the bizarre theory that PWD and non-NT people can’t have holidays.

So Dreg, now that mummy and daddy have restored your internet access you should have no problem showing us proof that vaccinations cause autism.

No anecdata, no claims dragged from your arse, no fevered postulations and deflections, on YouTube (or other) videos, we want proof. A peer-reviewed research study by a scientist, published in a high-impact journal, that definitively proves that vaccination can, has, or will cause autistic spectrum disorders.

Should be easy, if your previous bluster is to be believed. Now off you go, we’ll be waiting for you to return with your “evidence”, and we’ll keep asking for it until you provide it. OK?

Gregger, I see you’ve taken on the role of clergyman. It does not suit you.
You should consider employment more fitted to your talents, such as a career as a compost heap or biomass. Or you might find employment as raw sewage more fulfilling. At least you would no longer have to justify the bad smell you emit here.

I think it’s best to simply remind lurkers greg has offered no evidence whatsoever to support his claims, and move on.

Greg: “Anyway, let`s reflect on this thought for our question of the day.”

You have yet to answer any of my questions. So either you tell us which vaccine on the American pediatric schedule causes more seizures than the disease, or just go away.

@ Denice,

To make a short resume, regardless of courses that I take, I’ll graduate from my undergrad double-honour at age 55….While being on SSDI….Except during the paid summer internships. I could get away with doing a single honour and still graduate at age 48; still being on SSDI.

The realistic prospect for that is that I have minimal chance of being a medical doctor (add 4 years to the bachelor for the med school requirement so even at 52-53, there’s the residency) and instead, I’d make a darn good lab assistant/manager or I could apply for grad school and update the book I have written as part of my undergrad honours thesis.

I have some external pressure to graduate as fast as possible and it’s bothering me. I really dislike being pushed and there’s another part of me who is a perfectionist so this is why I want to do a double-honours and write the (neuroscience & biophysics) book.

In conclusion, is it a fine goal of graduating at age 55 from my undergrad bachelors with many publications as well as a book? I feel like I’ll be doing a PhD thesis in parallel with my bachelor.

Alain

@Alain: An option that was open to me many years ago (but a road not taken) was med school in Mexico. A former collegue of mine went that route when in his early 40s, weathered through the FMG process to get credentials back in the USA, got a residency in radiology and is still practicing today in his late 60s on the east coast.

@ Chris Hickie…….”I feel a stirring in the farce….”

With Greg here it’s more like a stirring in the feces….

*Platypus* milk – not quite as rare as unicorn milk, but probably nearly so. And platypuses don’t have teats, milking would consist of wiping the milk off the mother’s abdominal skin.
@Lilady at 73 – how did you find that site? it’s priceless. I particularly like that “Camel blood and the urine contains unique antibodies that are smaller in structure than those of mammals” and that “Studies done in Belgium with camel blood antibodies and colon cancer and in Saudi Arabia with the nano-particles from camel urine with leukemia, lung, colon, pancreatic, stomach, brain and breast cancer have been exceptional.” There, they’ve even got a “nano”; but remind me not to get cancer treatment in either of those countries.

@ Derek: If camel’s milk was featured at the A-1 Conference, why wouldn’t you believe the therapeutic value for autism treatment…and er, the anecdotal reports for camel’s milk as being as helpful as “Viagra”?

http://www.autismone.org/content/camels-milk

Anyway, let`s reflect on this thought for our question of the day.

No Greg, let’s first reflect on the fact you are too stupid to know a backquote from an apostrophe. I think the rest of your comment (and all of your comments, really) should be viewed in that light.

Stu, you obviously haven’t met Carlos Oliveira at the coconut oil thread at SBM.

Greg, either provide us the PubMed indexed study by a qualified reputable researcher that a vaccine on the present American pediatric schedule causes seizures more often than the disease, or just go away.

So in addition to being an unrepentant and obnoxious reality-challenged troll who wouldn’t know truth if it hit him square between the eyes, we can now also add crass, slimy, and misogynistic to Greg’s description.

If he keeps going at this rate he may end up checking off every single item in the “vile human being” list before the end of the week.

Greg, either provide us the PubMed indexed study by a qualified reputable researcher that a vaccine on the present American pediatric schedule causes seizures more often than the disease, or just go away.

(and yes, wordpress, I said it before, and I will continue to say it until Greg either answers or goes away!)

Forgot to say, my computer was killed with the linear regression within 10 minutes of being started, thus the leap and bound in memory need for my next computer (this is really huge for a dataset).

Alain

Ok VACADOD Group,

Did you come up with that precious little acronym all by yourself? On one hand, it seems sufficiently dense, tin-foil-hattish and obnoxious that you did… on the other hand, you haven’t displayed a single original thought yet…

Aside from a few well wishes

DIAFF, you obnoxious lying weasel.

didn’t answer the question of how you enjoy yourselves at posh resorts

The most inane attempt at red herring I have ever seen. You are pathetic.

knowing that most the kids your are maiming

Sorry, THIS is the most pathetic one. You have not even attempted to prove this in any way. This is nothing more than the tritest slander. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, yawn or outright slap you for being such a douche.

and their families will never have the chance to partake in such privileges.

Obvious. Stupid. Disproven. Lie.

Pathetic.

I will give you more time to reflect, so please feel free to weigh in on the matter.

No more time needed. Your delusions of grandeur are duly noted and are continuously being laughed at.

You are not as smart as you think you are. In fact, you are dumber than a sack of hammers. You do realize that the amount of cognitive dissonance you are building up putting your self-worth into being this witty and smart while in reality being denser than your average garden snail is about to open a rift in time and space, rigjht?

As for my current program

Look, my little failed Napoleon, you wouldn’t be able to spell “program” without digital aid. You are accomplishing nothing here except for deep, lasting embarrassment that will haunt you forever.

You do realize people can look this up, right? You do realize people can scroll back or — shudder — look up your comments on other threads and see you for the chromosomally challenged zygote you are… right?

we reconcile the discrepancy between pharma’s science and the parents’ anecdotal evidence.

“Anecdotal evidence” is a contradiction in terms. I know you don’t understand what that means, but let me just give you a pro-tip: using that phrase pegs you as a dumbass.

First though, I was very impressed with this comment from AoA that I thought I would share it….

You were impressed by a comment on AoA? There’s peg number… oh, whatever.

[Snipped asinine quoted comment]

Maybe you should research sanatoriums, orphanages, rates of mental retardation diagonoses and such. You know, before you start talking again.

Clown.

where are all the non-verbal, head banging, screaming autistics who are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s? Anyone?

Most of them grew out of it (at least partially). I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, sweetheart. “Developmental delay” is too complicated for you.

“So what did pioneer families (Victorian, medieval, etc. etc.) do with their many autistic children in the days before institutions, why did none of them so much as breathe a word about their existence?”
Good question, Gregger, little noisemaker. That’s exactly what they did – not breathe a word about their existence. They were a shame and a disgrace, or devil spawn, or God’s curse. They were kept in attics and cellars and woodsheds, and when someone came to call they were put where they could neither be seen nor heard. They were taken away by mountebanks to cut capers in the gutter for the crusts and small coins that were thrown at them. They were put out to beg in the filthy streets. They were used for simple repetitive mindless labor, like turning mills, where they were “paid” with rags to wear, slops to eat, and dirt floors to sleep on. They were put in Bedlam and Maudlin with the mad folk. Nobody wanted them. Nobody cared about them. Only a tiny percentage, a lucky few, might have been treated with patience and care.
The depths of your ignorance have yet to be plumbed. Please call a plumber and spare us the task.

I noticed that too, about JY Hahr–is he living in WI with a NV license (but he doesn’t show in the NV medical board website) or does he have a WI license but lives in NV?

The latter. I haven’t the foggiest what the relationship is with Ali Reza Ghahraman, who is licensed in Wisconsin but domiciled in Aliso Viejo, California, but Manta seems to think there is one.

#149, Alain, July 30, 2013

Equations which could get plugged in a massive computers to simulate a brain, or part of it. Dr. Henry Markram already work with a computer simulation of a part of the rat brain which sources its data from the pubmed (or equivalent) gene database and other biological database of research data.

In my case, I already killed my computer’s ram & swap (about 12GB) trying to do a linear regression of over 71000 brain coordinate (sources: https://github.com/neurosynth/neurosynth) to infer the area of the brain and since then, I’ve been coming up with a spec list for a supercomputer that I’ll build over the next 3 years

Alain,. have you considered looking into how we did linear regressions ans such 50 years ago, when our computers and disks were much slower and RAM and disks much smaller than current technology?
I wasn’t involved with this kind of work — I dealt with architecture, operating systems, and compilers — but I had to be aware of what some of the real-life problems were that we were trying to help our customers with. This awareness did not translate into expertise in linear regression or anything like that, but did include awareness of some of the techniques of matrix mashing and the like.
Some of these techniques were published in “Collected Algorithms” by the ACM. There were texts on the subject, now considered obsolete, but maybe they aren’t so obsolete after all…
Items that come to this ancient mind:
Don’t count on virtual memory for data store on disk — do it yourself, based on the algorithms in use. The swapping algorithms in the OS are general purpose, and rely largely on guesswork and rules of thumb in choosing what to swap out. The data files make automatic breakpoints, too, helping handle planned or unplanned service interruptions.
Do matrix stuff with submatrices — invert a submatrix at a time, then put the pieces back together.
Transpose one of the matrices, so you can multiply them by dot products of adjacent elements rather than jumping all around one of them.
Use sparse matrices where feasible.
 
“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

🙂 I hear he’s back.

Glutton for punishment that little troll 🙂

Where are all the non-verbal, head banging, screaming autistics who are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s? Anyone?

Stu says….
“Most of them grew out of it (at least partially). I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, sweetheart. “Developmental delay” is too complicated for you.

Stu — c’mon man (or woman)–I thought autism was argued to be a permanent lifelong disability? Remember how you guys use this line to dismiss the ‘quacks’ who claim they cure their kids? Yes, we hear stories of a few previously high functioning autistics who don’t display the symptoms anymore (but some argue that they are merely learning how to mask their symptoms rather than overcoming them). Yet, are we to believe that 8yrs old autistics who are non-verbal, who head bang, scream, at some point will outgrow these things and become ordinary NTs in their 30s, 40s, and 50s? Wait–I have an idea! How about we contact some of these previous autistics in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and find out when their parents reported that they stopped head banging, screaming, biting, hand flapping, and so on? I am sure with a 1 in 50 ‘constant’ childhood autism rate we shouldn’t have too hard of a time finding them.

Where are all the non-verbal, head banging, screaming autistics who are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s? Anyone?

ORD says…

“They were taken home to families torn with guilt over the hellholes they had been sent to. They went to group homes, They went to better places than the ones they were in.”

ORD, so you are not entertaining Stu’s argument that autism is not stasis? And you guys accuse me of cognitive dissonance? Anyway, you still didn’t really answer the question. You are suggesting that previous non-verbal, screaming, head banging autistic children who are now in their 30s, 40s, and 50s were taken back in their homes or sent to group homes, but again ORD, we are not finding them in these places. Where are they now? You also suggested that some of them died from past mistreatments. But seriously ORD, what life-threatening abuses were being inflicted on them back in the 50s and 60s? We are talking about the 50s and 60s, not the 1800s! Even if that were the case and they died, it would have had to be a significant majority to the point that we are not finding them in our current society. ORD, please report back to me when you guys get your stories straight.

Good Morning VCADOD Group!

Yes, the dawn is breaking so very nicely over autism-land. Stick a needle in — watch them change — deny everything–where it ends?–no one knows!

So I got detracted, again, attending to some rebuttals from last night’s program. Anyway, let’s get our show on the road with today’s question of the day:

Things are definitely looking really bad for you guys with the recent clinical trials failures of drugs to treat autism. If we are to believe that vaccines exposure during a critical period of infant brain development causes a re-wiring of the brain, and resulting in autism, is there any hope that drugs will ever be developed to correct this problem once the brain becomes fixed?

Greg, you are still boring.

@Stu

With your heated response, I am sensing that you have stayed at your fair share of posh resorts. Did that ‘rogue’ thought that repeatedly popped into your head spoil your filet mignon dinners? (ssshh) You can tell me — it will be our little secret! (hee hee hee).

By the way:

So I got detracted, again..

I think you meant to say “distracted”. Having said that, we are most certainly detracting you for your lies, ableism, sanctimony and refusal to back up your assertions.

Greg, either provide us the PubMed indexed study by a qualified reputable researcher that a vaccine on the present American pediatric schedule causes seizures more often than the disease, or just go away.

And just stay away, because you are annoying. Especially with idiotic unproven claims.

@ ORD:
( and lurkers)

Dave, earlier on, the greg-creature informed me that he had studied psychology; he refers to himself as an “interventionalist…. counsellor”. Altho’ ANYONE can say this,
I don’t see any evidence of a higher education, let alone one in psychology/ social sciences.

You shed light upon a history which is common knowledge to most people over a certain age and is specifically TAUGHT to younger people who study in this area. If he were a student, he’d be aware of this and not need your excellent tutelage. Other issues include how the concept of ‘child’ itself has developed historically and how it might determine how children are treated by parents, teachers and society in general.

People who work as counsellors and therapists usually follow a specific pathway that includes graduate level education and training. regardless of their national origins.

One thing we know from developmental psych is that even small children tailor their messages to their audience: thus it wouldn’t be unusual for an eight year old to instruct a younger sibling in simpler language than he would use for a peer or an adult. They can TELL the difference between different levels of knowledge/ information that others possess and also in relation to their own.

A while back, I characterised an exchange between a SB journalist and a well-known woo-meister succinctly as ‘about 2 sd’- probably in more than one measurable ability.. When I read over these threads, I might even up that number a tad. Unlike our average 8 year old mentioned previously but like the woo-meister, he doesn’t seem to be able to discern that he is talking down to people who understand much more than he does.

Then he perseverates upon his theme: ‘SB advocates damage children via vaccines and get paid for their dastardly deeds,’ presuming specialised, arcane inside information that no mainstream media outlets would touch…
OK, so I just compared G to both Gary Null and Jake Crosby- and that’s significant in that it reflects upon both their abilities AND their ways of explaining how the world works.
And perhaps where he gets his ideas.

SO any lurkers might want to look at exchanges between the scoffer and the minions with a few things in mind:
people reveal their abilities and backgrounds through writing- not only do they display their grasp and dexterity with language but also the breadth of their studies.

Developmental differences are also apparent- we can even see that in children’s person perception as I illustrate above. There are quite a few characteristscs that have been studied that differentiate levels of both cognitive and social cognitive development.
One you might want to look at is : complexity. Another is the degree of abstraction… going beyond what you can see or hear. Another involves the generation of hypotheses.

http://www.nature.com/news/nih-mulls-rules-for-validating-key-results-1.13469

Monatomic / Monoatomic / ORMUS.

Hucksters are still selling their magic* elixirs containing _individual_ atoms of noble metals (gold, platinum, etc.). Health claims include healing your DNA, increasing the bandwidth of your nervous system and achievement of a higher level of consciousness.

I tried the monatomic sodium and my mouth blew up.

* If you simply ignore the laws of chemistry and physics!

I tried the monatomic sodium and my mouth blew up.

Before atomic power came along, a staple of science fiction was monatomic hydrogen as a rocket propellant. Of course, keeping it from recombining prematurely was the problem. If these geniuses are so good, they should get to work on that.

I think Silvermaven is Greg’s wife…………

Re: NIH mulls rules for validating key results

I think it’s reasonably well established that there is such a thing as publication bias, and that we need better replication and confirmation of results. This is particularly true in health fields.

Greg drooled:

Things are definitely looking really bad for you guys with the recent clinical trials failures of drugs to treat autism. If we are to believe that vaccines exposure during a critical period of infant brain development causes a re-wiring of the brain, and resulting in autism, is there any hope that drugs will ever be developed to correct this problem once the brain becomes fixed?

I wonder if he pops over to curebie sites and explains to the curebies that there is no hope that their various tortures they inflict on their children will “correct this problem once the brain becomes fixed”?

@Silvermaven
Thx for the link.

@Denice Walter
Ms. Walters (I used ‘Ms’ because I sense you are divorced and probably multiple times) you are over-diagnosing, again, and should learn to think more simple. I am starting to feel compelled to give up on you. You are like an onion. I try to peel at your layers and all I get are layers stacked upon layers — no core!

@Old Rockin Dave
How can someone named Old Rockin Dave
despise me? You comment is really quite hurtful. Seriously, I am a nice guy. I can’t tell you how much people in the course my day stop me and tell me so.

@VCADOD Group
I a little dissapointed that as of yet, you guys have not weighed in on the prospect of finding a drug to treat autism. If you want to benefit from our exchanges then you will need to follow through with my requests. It’s really not fair when one person is doing all the work.

Skeptical Slug,

Monatomic / Monoatomic / ORMUS

I got interested in that a few years ago; I’m always being curious about odd beliefs, especially to do with chemistry. Basically they add sodium hydroxide (lye, caustic soda) to seawater, preferably from the Dead Sea, this reacts with any magnesium chloride to form relatively insoluble magnesium hydroxide, which precipitates out. This precipitate is what they call Ormus. Magnesium hydroxide is the main ingredient in milk of magnesia, so you might expect its most noticeable effect when ingested to be diarrhea.

There are claims that the magnesium hydroxide forms clathrates that capture the monoatomic elements from seawater, which sounds very similar to some of the claims made about homeopathy.

Some people claim to make monoatomic gold out of gold, or monoatomic copper out of metallic copper, using chemical techniques that sound downright dangerous to me. There’s a world of weird information out there if anyone’s interested in such wackery.

If you want to benefit from our exchanges then you will need to follow through with my requests.

Greg, you are dumber than a sack of hammers. Nothing above, say, your average sea sponge would benefit from an exchange with you. You are a petulant, ignorant douche.

You are also not fooling anyone. I keep feeling a need to point this out because you are a moron and obviously are not realizing this on your own.

#130 Alain

I don’t know what it’s like in Canada, but in the US, to get into a med school you are going to need extensive volunteering stints on your resume, as medically-related as possible. I don’t know how that’s weighted, but it was pretty important to at least one person I know who got into several schools.

Also, in the medical program I am thinking of, it is not possible to work while you are in it. The rigor is extreme and you would be studying for several hours a night to keep up.

How you’re going to manage your finances and do this is a good question; it’s another reason that medical school seems to be becoming more a thing of privilege than it used to be. Who can afford to not work for four years?

Of course, all that’s the US, and the experience of only one close friend, so it is but one anecdote. 🙂

Dear Greg 😛

Ms. Walters (I used ‘Ms’ because I sense you are divorced and probably multiple times) you are over-diagnosing, again, and should learn to think more simple.

You haven’t exposed a counterpoint to her over-diagnosis. Do you have an example of her over diagnosis? I don’t see any over-diagnosis.

I am starting to feel compelled to give up on you. You are like an onion. I try to peel at your layers and all I get are layers stacked upon layers — no core!

Ahhh…..because she’s a master of presenting only what she want us to see which is, in my opinion, very beautiful and to the point….if you beg to differ, who care…

Now about your behavior, I’m just observing while eating a very nice cheese & carrot cake made by my flatmate who is an excellent chef cook.

Proud Minion of Denice Walter.

You make an excellent PI (or is Domina) Denice 😀

Alain

“with great power comes great responsibility”
ain’t it the truth?

Yes it is.

Alain

Greg(or Samsa) says:
“How can someone named Old Rockin Dave
despise me?” What does my nom de ‘net have to do with what my opinion of you? Does it have some secret subtle connotation that I am not aware of? And you left off the apostrophe.
“You comment is really quite hurtful.” It was meant to sting. You are a nuisance and an ignoramus.
“Seriously, I am a nice guy.” If you are such a nice guy why do you continue to talk down to so many educated and sophisticated individuals in these comments? Why are you so snide? Nice guy, my ass.
“I can’t tell you how much people in the course my day stop me and tell me so.” I assume you mean “how many people”. I suspect the reason you can’t tell me “how much people’ is that the number is considerably less than one, especially if you speak to them as you do to us. Equally, it might be that they really do tell you that in order to avoid either a teary meltdown or a temper tantrum on your part.
No sale.

Anyone else see the irony in Greg relying on CDC & NIH numbers for the prevalence of autism yet rejecting the science (from the CDC & NIH) showing no link between autism and vaccinations?

He has yet to comment on this series of studies as well:

http://www2.aap.org/immunization/families/faq/vaccinestudies.pdf

Also, notice that once again this “person” makes claims, yet provides no evidence (because, if events happened as claimed, there should be well-documented evidence, right?) The Omnibus Hearings – http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/5026 put a stake through the heart of the “regression” evidence, as it was shown to be false and the supposed “experts” to be laughable.

Again, this is a very interesting psychological study, but at this point, the old troll is just a rehash of blatantly absurdest trash postings designed to be nothing more than attention-gatherings “look at me, I’m provocative!” posts. Now it is just ho-hum, been there, done that…..

Genes are speculated to give rise to it, but no genes have been conclusively identified as causing autism, nor is there a proposed mechanism for how these genes bring on the autistic condition

You’ve simply got no idea what you’re talking about. This is demonstrably false. Here’s a paper that does exactly that:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23727450

There are many more examples of similar cases, but I won’t Gish Gallop you, because you probably won’t even bother to respond to this just like last time (remember the diabetes ‘article’ with no reported odds ratios?).

Like others have said to you, just because you don’t read or understand the science doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Greg:

there is still the issue of resolving their discrepancies with the parents’ stories. We need to be shown where the parents are mistaken in believing vaccines changed their children.

You are worse than Tony “no unvaccinated autistics” Bateson. You have been told about Michelle Cedillo and about how Jenny McCarthy’s story has changed multiple times, and given a link to a study that showed how post Wakefield, parents of several autistic children edited their memories to fit the vaccine autism causation hypothesis. You are either lazy, too stupid to understand, or not acting in good faith and I’m leaning towards the last option.

Yet, this is not sufficient in itself because there is no saying that prior vaccines were not causing an impact and an additional round of MMR tipped things over the edge. And, the very fact that MMR aggravated things so severely is further evidence that vaccines, and specifically MMR are to be blamed.

Goalpost shift (“other vaccines”) and assuming facts not in evidence. Where is your proof that the MMR triggered or worsened autism? You haven’t given us any good evidence that it does.

These cases include many that were conceded in vaccine court such as the Poling case.

Hannah Poling had a mitochondrial disorder that the Special Masters conceded may have been worsened by her vaccines. THAT was why she was compensated, not for autism. As for your claims of many cases conceded, post the rulings of these cases. The OAP Test Cases were all refused, with the Special Masters tearing into the Petitioners’ “experts”.

Still, what if that person has video footage showing the ‘witch’ cursing her neighbour and also showing exactly at the stroke at midnight the ‘cursed’ person turning red and dying in an instant?

One problem with your analogy: the videotape evidence so far refutes the vaccine-autism causation hypothesis.

As I mentioned before, the Average Joe has no say in the scientific process and has no insurance that he is not being duped.

You are wrong. In the scientific process, other scientists look closely at the original research. Errors in data gathering and hypotheses not matching the data get found and the research gets torn apart. That’s an excellent guard against duping.

He needs his common sense measuring stick to determine if the science he is being asked to swallow is legit. Asking him to abandon his common sense and trust science, without even being showing where his common sense evidence is wrong is extremely disingenuous.

The disingenuous one here is you, Greg. We have given you examples of how common sense has been wrong in previous threads, including how to deal with a brush fire and if mental illness is affected by the moon. “Common Sense” can be affected by prejudice, and is often a shorthand for “it stands to reason”. As we know, things that seem reasonable are often wrong.

🙂 This just gets better

It really has overestimated it’s abilities 🙂

Greg:

Guys, nevertheless, I still don’t have my answer as to where are all the current day non-verbal, head banging, hand flapping, biting, screaming, and so on, autistics who are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. With the institutions now closed surely they should be amongst us in droves.

Right above you, lilady said in comment #209:

State-operated Psychiatric Hospitals are now closed and the former “inmates” who survived their experiences are now living in communities with appropriate medications or in group homes.

To quote the Joseph Ducreux meme, “Deceiver, deceiver, underwear aflame. Your proboscis is the length of a telephone cable.”

This just gets better

It really has overestimated it’s abilities

I dunno. I thinks its main function is to be all about Greg, all the time. It’s doing pretty well; since it reappeared, there have been 99 posts, Greg stars in 66 of them.

Greg,

We need to be shown where the parents are mistaken in believing vaccines changed their children.

A certain number of cases of regressive autism will occur within a few days of vaccination by pure chance. What we need to do is to see if there are more cases of regressive autism within a few days of vaccination than we would expect by chance.

Average age of regression in children with autism is 18 months. Let’s say for the sake of argument it occurs between 12 and 24 months. There are 365 days between those two ages, and three well-child visits to the doctor, during which vaccinations will be given, are recommended during that period.

Assuming that 1 in 50 children are autistic, and that 41% regress, since there are approximately 4.3 million births in the US each year, we would expect 86,000 autistic children, of which 35,260 would have regressive autism, each year. Of these, we would expect approximately 1 in 41, that is 860 children to show regression within 3 days after vaccination (and 155 to experience regression within 1 day) by pure chance, each and every year.

What do we find if we look at VAERS? Between 2003 and 2012 inclusive, there were 143 reports of children developing autism or an ASD within 3 days after vaccination, which is an average of 14.3 per year.

Even assuming that only 10% of cases of regressive autism due to vaccines were reported to VAERS, this is still very much lower than you would expect from chance alone, in fact it is less than 2% of the numbers we would expect merely from chance. The numbers are almost 2 orders of magnitude off what you would expect if your hypothesis was correct.

Wouldn’t we expect to see more reports of regression after vaccination than we would expect by pure chance, if vaccines were really to blame, not fewer?

Oops. There are two working links, one at the beginning, one at the end of the mess in the middle.

Guys, I have been quite clear and consistent about what I think of such studies. They are incomplete — mainly focussing only on thimerosal and MMR. Again, they do not tell us if vaccines as administered in their totality as recommended by the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule cause autism. The Cochrane Reviews say as much.

Except, as we’ve pointed out to Greg and others over and over, if vaccines caused anywhere near the ‘massive explosion’ of autism he and like-minded folk claim, it would have produced a very visible correlation in the epidemiological studies. I believe the last figure Greg cited (not from any source that had a clue, obviously) was 1 in 25. Epidemiological studies have successfully detected side-effects on the order of 1 in 100,000. If any component of any vaccine in the vaccine schedule was causing the effect the antivaxxers claim, there is no way it could be missed — no matter whether the component was thimerosal, something only contained in the MMR, polysorbate-80, heavy water accidentally used instead of regular water for mixing the vaccine, it doesn’t matter. If “vaccines as administered in their totality as recommended by the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule” caused autism, then we would see a different rate of autism between children vaccinated on that schedule and children not vaccinated on that schedule; we have looked for exactly that difference in rate, and it is not there.

If you claim that an elephant walked through the soft mud in your garden, people are naturally going to ask where the footprints it left are. If you say “Well, there are no footprints, the mud isn’t disturbed at all, there are no big depressions such as a big heavy elephant moving through mud would have left, but it doesn’t change the fact that the elephant went through, and those creatures are terrible, because they leave footprints in 1 out of 25 gardens and so you have to do something about it!!!” people are going to conclude quickly that you have some sort of mental malfunction.

Antaeus,
Strangely I wrote something very similar to your elephant analogy earlier, about evidence for an elephant having been in my back yard last night, but decided against posting it. I think it’s a good way of explaining that often when a scientific study says, “there is no evidence to support X hypothesis”, it means “we have looked long and hard for evidence we would expect to see if X were true, and it isn’t there, so X is very probably not true”. I think sometimes science is too conservative for its own good, and people either misunderstand, or attempt to take advantage of perceived wriggle-room that isn’t really there.

Gregger, two things.
One, let me tell you a story about the state of mental health diagnosis. My mother witnessed this when she was taking her MS in special education. In one of the institutions she was working at, there was a boy of about nine years who had come in at the age of three. He lived with the rest of the general population and behaved like them. He made inarticulate noises, ate with his hands, all the things you might expect. One of the staffers noticed something different about him. New testing was done, and he was found not to have ever been retarded as diagnosed. He was profoundly deaf. No one had ever checked for something as simple as that. Having had only the general population of the institution to model himself on, he acted just like them. I don’t know precisely what became of him but I know his family intended to get him more appropriate care.
This leads into the second part. As you probably don’t know, autists, no matter how deeply autistic they are, aren’t completely cut off from the world. When my mom was working in these settings, she was part of a project trying something that had never been studied systematically in those settings: operant conditioning. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s the use of rewards to encourage desirable behavior in place of the undesirable. Short story: it works. That’s one reason why a lot of the stuff you are voyeuristically so hot to see is gone.
See, Gregor Samsa, there is no substitute for actual knowledge.

@Antaeus,

Very well then, if the Epidemiological studies clearly do not show such a link, what’s then with all the hesitation to due the decisive studies which undoubtedly (insert sarcasm) will also not show a link, but will shut-up the anti-vaxxers for good?

I was wondering why this thread was getting so many comments. Scrolled up to find Dreg trying to whitewash the historical treatment of the mentally ill with his willful ignorance. Denying the past and believing life used to be a perfect, cheerful black and white sitcom before X came around is convenient propaganda for so many kinds of deceitful people.

I know I’ve had a privileged childhood, but I’ve seen some shows that depicted the horrors of insane asylums and other institutions of yesteryear. Knowing what I know, I’m pretty damn confident even those were probably sanitized for audiences. Movie and broadcast standards and practices aside, a lot of people probably weren’t ready to swallow the whole bitter pill.

I don’t buy into paradise lost myths. The bad things people complain about in new generations are typically things that have always been around. It’s practically a null hypothesis. The major differences I usually see are:

1) We’re better informed about the horrors of the world than we were in the allegedly golden days.

2) Nostalgia tends to apply whitewash by way of childhood ignorance: Adults pay attention to things in the present that they were ignorant of or even shielded from when they were children in the past.

3) We have a lot more people willing to openly talk about these issues. This one probably sticks in the craw of paradise lost believers the most, since many love hiding their favorite era’s dirty laundry behind “polite company” taboos. That’s part of how they erected the nostalgic facade in the first place.

To clarify on null hypotheses: We assume the null hypothesis (non-causation in this case) is true until the evidence falsifies the null hypothesis. The burden of proof is on the person arguing for causation.

It’s kind of similar to the presumption of innocence in a court of law. In principle, the defense doesn’t have to prove innocence. The prosecution has to prove guilt. If the prosecution doesn’t make their case, the defense shouldn’t need to do anything, though it’s useful to point out the sloppiness of the evidence or logical fallacies for the sake of reasonable doubt.

To cover one other thing: “Anecdotal evidence” is about as sloppy as you can get in science. Basing scientific claims of this magnitude on anecdotes requires ignoring everything we know about humanity’s cognitive biases.

Very well then, if the Epidemiological studies clearly do not show such a link, what’s then with all the hesitation to due the decisive studies which undoubtedly (insert sarcasm) will also not show a link, but will shut-up the anti-vaxxers for good?

If Greg is talking about the prospective vax-vs.-unvax studies that anti-vaxxers have been clamoring for since forever, then it’s wrong to say there’s “hesitation”. “Hesitation” is when you at least might do something, but instead of going ahead and doing it, you delay. Prospective vax-vs.-unvax studies are not going to be done, period – and any anti-vaccine parent who understood what the study would really mean wouldn’t want the study done either.

There are two kinds of studies, retrospective and prospective, and each one has different issues. The kind that produces stronger, more decisive data is prospective studies.

What makes a study prospective instead of retrospective is that you take control of the variables. If you want to do a prospective study to answer the question “does a shattered rib cage disrupt a student’s ability to learn?”, for instance, then you’d get two groups of students, alike as you can get them, and you’d methodically make sure the rib cage of each student in one chosen group was shattered. Then you’d sit them down for a quick classroom lesson, with a pop quiz to follow to test how well each group had learned the material.

If your reaction is “Wait, wait, what the f***, you can’t just go shatter people’s rib cages for a study like it’s no big deal!” then you should be commended, because you get it. You can’t just go doing any damn thing you please to people, and justify it by saying “Oh, it’s for science”.

If the things you intend to do to people, to test what the effects are, have even a reasonable potential to bring harm to the subjects, that means there are big questions of right and wrong in play. Does the chance that an experiment will give us good, useful scientific data that will benefit everyone going forward, justify us doing something dangerous to these people, here, before us now? Sometimes the answer in a particular instance might be “yes” – if we really need that data; if we can’t get it any other way; if we keep a close eye on the trial so that we don’t continue exposing the subjects to unneeded risk once the answer is clear – then the moral course may indeed be to go ahead.

But see, those circumstances in which a dangerous prospective study might possibly be justified are nothing like the circumstances in which the antivaxxers keep calling for a prospective vax-vs.-unvax study. “Do vaccines cause autism?” is not a question that we can’t answer any other way; it’s a question where we already got the answer, and antivaxxers want to go ahead with a study that endangers its participants purely because they don’t like that answer!

And make no mistake, the prospective vax-vs.-unvax study that antivaxxers propose is one that endangers its subjects, no matter which result you believe it would come out with. If you’re reality-based, you realize that the group which gets deprived of their vaccinations in such a study would be left vulnerable to diseases that could maim and kill them. If you’re anti-vaccine, however, and you believe that the vaccines have a much higher chance than the diseases to inflict harm, you believe that a significant number of the children in the study are going to be subjected to exactly that risk of harm. Even those who believe with all their heart that a prospective vax-vs.-unvax study would, unlike all other studies on the matter, indicate a link between vaccines and autism, believe that doing the study will harm children – it is, in fact, no exaggeration to say that they are counting on it.

And finally, in brutal honesty, that part about “will shut the anti-vaxxers up for good”? Nope. That wouldn’t happen no matter what the study showed. We’ve seen it before. “Autism is caused by thimerosal! There’s no question about it! We know for a fact what’s going to happen! When thimerosal is taken out of the vaccines, autism rates are going to plummet!” When thimerosal was taken out and rates didn’t plummet, it was bizarre special pleading – “well, sure, thimerosal may have been taken out of the vaccines, but, see, there’s mercury floating over the ocean from Chinese power plants, and coming from cremations of people who had dental amalgams, and that’s somehow happening to exactly compensate for the mercury that came out of the vaccines!” – and accusations of skulduggery – “sure, thimerosal-containing vaccines may be so hard to find now that we have to put out a special call to try and find anyone who still has some, but if we can find one vaccine that might be gotten by children, no matter how obscure it is, that means that thimerosal hasn’t really been taken out of vaccines after all!” – the one thing we didn’t get was “It looks like all our sureness about thimerosal being the cause of autism was wrong,” or any reasonable variant thereof.

Yet, look how they now show no such zeal in investigating a product that is suspected of harming kids in epidemic numbers.

That’s because the truth is that no sensible, educated people who have looked at the evidence with an open mind seriously suspect any such thing.

Thimerosal was taken out of vaccines, and many studies looking at the alleged link between thimerosal or MMR and autism were carried out, wasting millions of dollars that could have been spent on something worthwhile, like supporting the families of severely autistic individuals you are so concerned about. Why would anyone want to throw good money after bad, especially when the vast majority of parents fully vaccinate their children.

The scientific questions have been answered and there is already plenty of scientific evidence to win the PR war, such as it is.

Greg, you still haven’t answered my question about masturbating in public. You also haven’t proven my theory wrong about mangoes causing my daughter’s autism. Stop bullspitting around and defend yourself, you ignorant slut.

@ Stu:

Actually I think he said that he “studied” psych- which can mean anything just like many call themselves “autism researchers”.
On my planet, ‘study’ usually leads to degrees from accredited universties and ‘research’ should be published in credible journals.

@Stu

“I will put down $100, cash, of my own money, right now, to call bullshit on that. Only caveat: the degree has to be from an accredited institution. I’m not going to pay $100 to cover a bullpuckey $29.99 diploma mill “degree”.”

Stu, how did we get off to such a bad start? You are angry — very angry! You must control it. It will do nasty things to you. And yes, save your $100 — it’s from an accredited university.

Anyway, please understand my reservation in playing the intellectual elitism game. If you ask me what one thing that has gotten us into this autism mess, I would say it’s precisely that.

Seriously, how many decades now have the ‘stupid’, ‘uneducated’ parents been telling the ‘smart’ doctors with advanced degrees that vaccines are destroying their children. Yet they just refuse to listen.

But one would think that with all this brain-power surely we should have more answers to explain autism. Over a billion dollars spent on genetic research and we still have nothing. Nothing!

Stu, sometimes ignorance has its benefits.

Oh Geezz,

I did not get banned after all. Let’s see then about re-posting my earlier post to Stu…..

@Stu

“I will put down $100, cash, of my own money, right now, to call bullshit on that. Only caveat: the degree has to be from an accredited institution. I’m not going to pay $100 to cover a bullpuckey $29.99 diploma mill “degree”.”

Stu, how did we get off to such a bad start? You are angry — very angry! You must control it. It will do nasty things to you. And yes, save your $100 — it’s from an accredited university.

Anyway, please understand my reservation in playing the intellectual elitism game. If you ask me what one thing that has gotten us into this autism mess, I would say it’s precisely that.

Seriously, how many decades now have the ‘stupid’, ‘uneducated’ parents been telling the ‘smart’ doctors with advanced degrees that vaccines are destroying their children. Yet they just refuse to listen.

But one would think that with all this brain-power surely we should have more answers to explain autism. Over a billion dollars spent on genetic research and we still have nothing. Nothing!

Stu, sometimes ignorance has its benefits.

Greg’s latest comments on “burden of proof” invite (and reflect) significant amount of confusion. The root of the confusion is that there are actually two separate and distinct meanings of “burden of proof” – for each of two systems that are themselves separate and distinct.

Comments about a “‘burden of proof’ defense”, and about whether car manufacturers are “allowed to” make observations about where the burden of proof lies, are clearly based on the “burden of proof” of the legal system. Who bears the legal burden of proof in a given situation, and how much of a burden, is of course highly dependent on which legal system we are talking about, and it can fluctuate deeply based on the decisions of legislative bodies, and judicial precedents. The most obviously relevant example is that when the United States government instituted what’s commonly called the ‘Vaccine Court’, they made the decision that petitioners alleging damage caused by vaccines would face less of a burden of proof in that court than they would face bringing the same allegations in a more standard court. They could do that because Vaccine Court, like every court in the land, like every law whose application those courts adjudicate, is a wholly human-created system, which can be tinkered with to fit human needs.

But science is not really a human-created system at all. We don’t get to say “We want this kind of evidence to be strong evidence”, or “We want the answers to never be too tricky to get right”, because the universe doesn’t care what we want. We did not create the principles of scientific discovery, such as all the rules which determine where the burden of proof lies; they were already inherent in the system, and we simply discovered them. And they stay the same, whether they benefit “one side” or another “side”, whether they are pleasing to us or intensely frustrating at a given moment, because they are what they are: the best process yet discovered by humans for figuring out what is true about this world of ours and what isn’t.

So far, this is the state of the evidence: there is no good evidence to indicate that vaccines cause autism, and substantial evidence to indicate that they do not.

Is it a possibility that, despite the state of the evidence described immediately above, vaccines do cause autism after all?

Yes, it is a possibility.

But we cannot base our ideas on what is on “is it what I want to believe, and is it at least possible? Okay, then I’ll believe it.” That’s just asking to get fooled by your own biases.

We do not have a reason to start believing that vaccines cause autism until someone can significantly change the state of the evidence: make the weight of evidence that indicates vaccines cause autism not just non-zero, but even stronger than the weight of the evidence that indicates they don’t cause autism. If you can’t produce the evidence that supports your idea, that’s very likely because your idea isn’t true, and trying to figure out what’s true is what science is all about.

@Bronze Dog: The old chestnut about how they laughed at Galileo is plain wrong. They (the Vatican) were terrified of him; they put him on trial, threatened him with torture, and placed him under house arrest. They didn’t laugh, and for one reason – he had the goods. He was right and they knew it, and he could replicate his findings and did so, time and again. Get that, Gregger the noisemaker? He delivered. Your “heroes” don’t.
Wakefield? McCarthy? Doctor Whatsisname in the pirate outfit? They got nothin’ but their cult followers.

VCADOD Group,

Perhaps then we should end our program now and don’t start fresh tomorrow. I will be off on another extended break. Please review all my questions of the day and perhaps when I return we may take them up. Goodbye for now.

Alain, there is no one online except us chickens. I’m waiting for a pain pill to kick in…what’s your excuse?

The DSM was first published in 1952, for the purpose of a psychiatrists to reach a consensus about mental disorders.

The terminology “dementia praecox” has an interesting history; I believe it was used to describe early onset degenerative (and incurable) neurological disorders…which looking back at the primitiveness of medical diagnostics (no CT, no MRI scans, poorly diagnostic pneumoencephalograms), could have been caused by a variety of physical disorders, caused by viruses, bacteria, prions and genetic degenerative disorders.

I recall reading some of my mother’s old medical texts from the 1930s where dementia praecox patients were “hopeless cases”…as opposed to waxing and waning disorders such as schizophrenia and dysthmias. Those old texts may be available to you in large medical school libraries…perhaps in their entirety in volumes in storage or on microfilms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_praecox

I’m saying goodnight now, Alain.

Greg,

Why do you persist, in the face of all reason, in this charade? When you first posted here I thought you were well-meaning but misled, but we have shown you good evidence that contradicts your claims, and you have presented literally nothing but the same unsupported claims, with no arguments against the evidence we have shown you, and anecdotes (no evidence, I notice) of “countless” parents who have witnessed their children regress into autism after vaccination.

Not only that, but you seem to enjoy playing a weird game of pretending that we are all so dumb that we secretly disbelieve the powerfully persuasive evidence we have shown you. Why would we do that?

What opinion would you form of someone who behaved in the way you have?

Anyway, I wanted to address the “countless” parents you repeatedly mention. Let’s see if we can estimate how many there might be, using VAERS, the go to data source for antivaxxers of all persuasions.

Between 2003 and 2012 inclusive, for all ages, all vaccines, all dates, all nationalities, 989 cases of autism or ASD associated with vaccination were reported to VAERS, fewer than 100 each year.

As I pointed out above, we would expect 86,000 autistic children to be born each year (in the US alone, though I included VAERS reports from all countries), of which 35,260 would have regressive autism. Yet despite the greatest efforts of the antivaccine movement to encourage people to report their children’s autism as a vaccine reaction*, fewer than 0.3% report this “obvious” vaccine reaction to VAERS.

Even if we accept the claim that “only 10% of adverse reactions are reported”, that still means that 97% of parents of autistic children are not sufficiently convinced that their child’s autism was caused by vaccination to report it as such.

* There are 409 links to the VAERS database, mostly with instructions on how to report a vaccine reaction on the SaneVax website, and 463 links to VAERS on the Age of Autism website.

That should really read, “97% of parents of children with regressive autism are not sufficiently convinced that their child’s autism was caused by vaccination to report it as such.”

If you include all autism and ASD the percentage is almost 99% (again assuming that only 10% report to VAERS).

lilady,

Who first made that statement that only “10 % of adverse events are reported”? That may have been the case, years ago…but I’m finding that difficult to believe.

I don’t know where that figure came from, but I seriously doubt it too, especially with serious adverse events. My point was that even if we accept that figure, the number of reports of autism after vaccination on VAERS is far, far smaller than the “countless” numbers Greg and his cronies endlessly repeat.

Who first made that statement that only “10 % of adverse events are reported”?

It emanated from the FDA: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Safety/MedWatch/UCM168505.pdf
See “Underreporting”. It is of course routinely abused by anti-vaxxers and they always leave off the fact that autism-chasing attorneys have padded VAERS.

Perhaps then we should end our program now and don’t start fresh tomorrow.

Resident troll is suffering from Brave Sir Robin syndrome, I see.

In case some of our younger ‘uns don’t catch Shay’s reference (and if you don’t, shame on your parents):

@janerella: That’s all well and good, but how many horses have become autistic from vaccination?
Please tell before Gregger comes up with a fact-free “statistic”.

Good. He keeps dragging threads totally off-topic, and I for one am sick of it. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of threads on which he could post that would have been on topic, but instead he decided to clog the entire site with his contemptuous ableist crap.

@ Alain & Khani: The Troll has not been banned (Orac’s blog, Orac’s rules).

Stop feeding the attention-craving, ignorant Troll. Just talk around him, as we have done with other Trolls.

@ ORD:

Dave, it’s interesting because pets are often selected for their ‘friendliness’ ( communication skills) to humans: you may pick out a cat or dog because it reacted to you, seemed to like you, looked at you imploringly as if to say, “Choose me!”: I know I have.

Now wouldn’t it be revealing if pet owners reported anecdotally that the “light went out or his eyes” or ” she regressed and stopped responding to her name” after receiving vaccinations? So far I haven’t ever heard this.

@Denice Walter:

Now wouldn’t it be revealing if pet owners reported anecdotally that the “light went out or his eyes” or ” she regressed and stopped responding to her name” after receiving vaccinations? So far I haven’t ever heard this.

But now that you’ve put the idea in their heads…

Oh Denice, it’s been done already: http://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk/2010/03/dogs-and-autism-human-sanity-concerns-over-canine-health-concern/

Yup, regressive, vaccine-induced autism in dogs.

According the sister of mine who is a charge nurse with the VA system, exercise, diet, massage therapy, etc, all fall under the heading of CAM because they are non-intrusive.

In the interests of peace I had to bite my tongue.

Joseph Hertzlinger,

What the do New Age loons mean by “energy”?

It’s a reification of subjective somatic sensations and/or affect.

Few of them agree on what it actually means. Some talk of positive and negative energy that they clearly believe can be passed from one person to another, sometimes across large distances, to heal for example, or that can linger in a place. Others talk of resonance in connection with healing, the idea being that a healer with higher vibrations can increase the lowered vibrations of a sick person through physical proximity, “raising their vibrations” and thus healing them.

There are some attempts to be more specific; orgone, for example, which (allegedly) has measurable physical effects, and which has different forms, such as DOR (deadly orgone radiation).

I have also seen biophotons, infrasound, ultrasound and infrared posited as physical explanations for these subjective effects; I’m pretty certain this is all tooth fairy science.

@ Joseph Hertzlinger:

While I agree with Kreb about the somatic aspects, we also have to consider how it is linked to more psychological experiences like “will” and “intention”.Although alt med presents a gobblydegook of writings upon the subject, it seems as though energy can often be controlled by the correct actions or thoughts. e.g. ” Direct your energy on…”

There’s an essay on “Psychic Energy” by Jung which relates primitive humans’ experiences of “power” like ruach, mana, prana or chi to what those of his generation called “libido” or life energy.

So perhaps it’s the sum total of what people experience from sensations of physical power ( muscular strength) to vague spiritual feelings that they call their own.

LIke the early humans, they may also link that energy to other worldy/ transpersonal sources – a deity or the universe itself- which can be ‘tapped into’ as an ever-present reservoir there for the asking.

Thus whenever a woo-meister runs out of convenient physiological concepts to bend to his or her will, “spirit” or ‘soul” can always be inserted to cover the gaps.

Truthfully, I have a great more but am rather exhausted and I have errands to do. Let’s just say that woo-meisters link this to personal actions and intent.

To some extent, I think energy is favored because it’s sciencey-sounding while being vague and/or abstract in its other uses. Soft science fiction also loves to invent special kinds of energy with whatever plot-relevant properties they want, which probably feeds the woo meme. There’s also a thing woos seem to like in those tropes since they’ll often talk about energy being Off the Scales and/or Invisible to Normals. In real life, energy is quite measurable, with physicists and engineers essentially being energy accountants who can calculate where all the joules are going.

Thinking about it, it’s like the earlier points where woo appropriated electricity, atomic power, quantum mechanics, and such for the language. We had some big leaps in how we produce and use energy in the 20th century, so there’s an implied trend that we’ll continue learning new energy tricks beyond improved efficiency and collection.

We’re still doing weird physics experiments, so we’ll continue to produce buzzwords for woos as we expand the frontiers of our detection ability. They hide their stuff with the frontier language because 1) we know a lot about the older stuff and can empirically call BS on them by measuring their energy, 2) it makes them sound like they’re pushing the cutting edge, even though they’re riding the coattails of real scientists, and 3) it makes it sound like they’re right on the edge of a scientific revolution, rather than looking like stodgy old mystics refusing to accept that they’ve failed and that science has marched on.

Antaeus Feldspar:

Nope, Ms. Ennis gave me confirmation of the BBC Horizon fraude.

P.D. Firm the change petition:

https://www.change.org/es-LA/peticiones/cient%C3%ADficos-ingenieros-m%C3%A9dicos-p%C3%BAblico-en-general-que-se-acuse-a-james-randi-por-fraude-cient%C3%ADfico

@ Bronze Dog:

Wait until alties start using the concept of ‘strings’ to explain their woo.

You mean they haven’t? 😉

I don’t know any examples, but there’s probably some by now.

I don’t know any examples, but there’s probably some by now.

“By now“?

Nope, Ms. Ennis gave me confirmation of the BBC Horizon fraud. Mr. Bland recognizes that it is a replication, but Ennis nope.

*rolls eyes* Oh, well, that setlles it. I mean, if the person who made the original allegation isn’t a reliable independent source for confirming that the allegation is more than just the whine of a self-deluded woo-ster who lost a challenge and doesn’t want to face reality, who is, amirite?

@ Narad:

OMFG! She mentions strings- HOWEVER I am truly disappointed that she didn’t proceed into great rigamarole in search of analogies concerning vibrating strings, violins, symphonic harmonies et al..

Huge, the pseudoskeptiks and the scientism (No science).

I’ve got 50 quatloos on Benneth.

I wanted to flesh out a comment I made a few days ago, on the burden of proof and how it relates to anti-vaccine claims; I hope that someone finds it helpful and no one who already knows this stuff minds me covering it again.

The scientific burden of proof consists mostly of just two rules:

1) When evidence has been collected, and it’s pointing towards one conclusion, that conclusion becomes our default, and anyone who thinks we should be drawing a different conclusion bears the burden of proof.

The reason for this is pretty obvious; I don’t need to belabor this point. Complaining because that’s how science works is like whining about the fact that you can only become the holder of a world record by out-doing the previous record; what other way of doing things would make any sense??

2) When the evidence collected is insufficient or ambiguous, the conclusion we take as default is the one that represents us making the least claims to knowledge. This conclusion is also known as the “null hypothesis”. Anyone who thinks we should be drawing a different conclusion from that default, again, is the party that bears the burden of proof.

An illustration of how this works, which also emphasizes the fact that everybody who does science operates under this standard:

Right now, the evidence points to autism having a strong genetic factor. If someone comes along and says “I don’t think that should be our conclusion; I think our conclusion should be that there isn’t a strong genetic factor to autism”, the burden of proof is on them to provide evidence for the no-genetics conclusion, enough to outweigh all the evidence for the yes-genetics conclusion. That’s rule 1 in operation.

But suppose a researcher pops his head up and says, “Hey, we think we know which gene it is that causes all these cases of autism, it’s the gene A5B51, which no one’s really paid attention to before now.” So which conclusion becomes our default: that A5B51 is a key gene in autism, or it isn’t? Just knowing that there’s a strong genetic factor doesn’t tell us whether A5B51 is a key gene; it only gives the idea some prior plausibility.

That’s where rule 2 comes in. If you say “A5B51 is a key gene in autism,” you’re claiming to know much more than if you say “A5B51 doesn’t have any real connection to autism.” That makes the latter statement – “A5B51 doesn’t have any real connection to autism” – the null hypothesis, the default. If our researcher wants us to instead accept the conclusion that A5B51 is a key gene, he is going to have to provide the evidence which convinces us that conclusion is better supported than the null hypothesis. That’s rule 2 in operation.

There are more complications to “burden of proof” than just those two rules, but they form the majority of the system. So let’s look at some typical antivaccine claims and see how they relate to rules 1 and 2.

The first is the “vaccine-caused autism epidemic” claim. Well, as already explained, the epidemiological studies that would detect a large number of children who developed autism because they got vaccinated, do not. Epidemics are what epidemiological studies detect. The conclusion “there is no vaccine-caused autism epidemic” is far better supported by the evidence, and by rule 1, stands as our default conclusion.

Some antivaccine activists understand the importance of the epidemiological data (some don’t) and those that do have proposed a second idea that seems, to them, to get around that inconvenient data. “Okay, so the epidemiology shows that in the vast majority of children that get vaccinated and develop autism, the autism isn’t caused by the vaccination. But suppose there’s at least some cases where it is?? Suppose there’s an extremely rare genetic pre-condition, so rare that epidemiology studies can’t detect it, which, when a child with that pre-condition gets vaccinated, the vaccines act as a trigger, and so in that child, vaccines do cause autism!”

In our previous example, of the researcher hypothesizing a key role for A5B51, we arrived at a situation where there was a lack of evidence for or against because no one had studied that specific gene before. Here, we arrive at a similar situation because it’s specified that this hypothesized genetic pre-condition is rare enough that previous studies could have missed it.*

But in both cases, a lack of sufficient specific evidence for or against means that rule 2 rather than rule 1 applies. Rule 2 says that our default conclusion is the one that represents the least claim to knowledge. Claiming “there is a genetic pre-condition which can lead to autism, and furthermore the specific trigger which determines whether it does or doesn’t cause autism is vaccination, in some form” is definitely a larger claim to knowledge than “whatever genetic factors are involved in autism are not triggered by vaccines.” The latter stands as our default conclusion unless and until those who want the “vaccines-trigger-a-genetic-precondition” hypothesis to be true can produce actual evidence to establish that conclusion.

* In accordance with the principle of charity, we’re going to ignore the all-too-numerous putzes who then go on to say “And there’s clearly an epidemic of autism, caused by vaccines triggering this pre-condition so rare that it’s avoided the very studies that detect epidemics!”