Autism One Newsletter

[Guest guest]

Proud Member of the Autism Collaboration

Sunday, October 7, 2007

AUTISM IN THE NEWS – Hats off to Ackerman and McCarthy

It was a long time in coming, a very long time – when a member of our community would get up on national TV and tell the truth about our children, without apology and without hesitation. Ackerman, founder of Talk About Curing Autism (TACA), made it happen.

runs one of the finest autism organizations in the country and when McCarthy needed help she found TACA and today her son is recovered.

’s appearances on Oprah, The View, and Larry King Live are testaments to TACA and all the great TACA Moms. Articulate, passionate, courageous and without pretense exhibited the hallmark qualities of TACA. Thank you, , great job, .

Vaccines not linked to kids’ neurological ills

Study: Mercury not connected to problems, but autism risk still unexamined

LOS ANGELES - A mercury-based preservative once used in many vaccines does not raise the risk of neurological problems in children, concludes a large federal study that researchers say should reassure parents about the safety of shots their kids received a decade or more ago.

However, the study did not examine autism — the developmental disorder that some critics blame on vaccines. A separate study due out in a year will look at that issue, said scientists at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led the latest analysis and published results in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. (Read the article.)

Olmsted on Autism: The CDC gets Jukt

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 -- One of the best journalism movies ever is called " Shattered Glass. " It's about the serial fabrications that a young, ambitious New Republic writer named Glass foisted off on his editors, and subsequently his readers. One too-good-to-be-true story after another made him into a minor celebrity in the DC-media-darling world until a reporter at Forbes Digital started making inquiries about a software startup Glass wrote about called Jukt Micronics. The Forbes reporter, chewed out by his boss for being scooped on his own beat, tried to do a follow-up story but couldn't find any evidence that Jukt even existed. (Read the article.)

Generation Rescue’s Rescue Post

JB Handley and the good folks at Generation Rescue have launched the Rescue Post. A fine and needed addition to reporting on the autism epidemic we welcome and applaud JB’s efforts.

Schafer Autism Report

For all your autism news subscribe to the Schafer Autism Report here.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Defeat Autism Now! Conference – Don’t Miss It!

This fall's Defeat Autism Now Conference set for Oct. 11-15 in Garden Grove, California, (near Disneyland), will provide critical updates and guidance for parents to effectively address their children's biomedical issues - so often masked or ignored due to autism's behavioral effects.

Join us at the conference to challenge your mind, update your knowledge, and get inspired in a compelling and invigorating setting. You'll find the tools and motivation you'll need to help your child - including evidence-based treatment strategies, the latest research findings, and the opportunity to connect with clinicians and fellow parents from the autism community.

For information, online registration, and to purchase discounted hotel reservations and flights, see: www.danconference.com

AUTISM ONE RADIO (www.AutismOne.org/radio)

Upcoming on Autism One Radio – The Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) recently released “Thimerosal and Autism Spectrum Disorders: Alleged Misconduct by Government Agencies and Private Entities.”

We will examine the who, what, why, when, where and how of the report and what the report’s conclusions mean for our community, with Jim Moody, Esq.

In the UK physician–researcher Wakefield and two of his colleagues are in the middle of a hearing before Britain's General Medical Council, which is investigating charges that could cost the doctors their medical licenses. In 1998, this trio (with many others) published an article indicating that there were possible harms from the MMR vaccine.

We will bring you updates on the hearing and possible outcomes.

WHEN 1 +1 =3

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Edsger Dijkstra, one of the most influential computer scientists said, “I observe a cultural tradition, which in all probability has its roots in the Renaissance, to ignore this influence, to regard the human mind as the supreme and autonomous master of its artefacts. But if I start to analyse the thinking habits of myself and of my fellow human beings, I come, whether I like it or not, to a completely different conclusion, viz. that the tools we are trying to use and the language or notation we are using to express or record our thoughts, are the major factors determining what we can think or express at all!”

Modern medicine, also called allopathic medicine, to a large measure is based on models, where a model is an abstraction, which reduces reality to general qualities or characteristics, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.

Abstractions are useful in any number of fields, particularly in science and engineering where they help to clarify and provide a way of thinking about thinking. Long chains of abstractions stitched and layered together are put to work to explain and tame the world. “Laws” of science, principles of engineering, and the models of medicine are abstractions.

Like any tool abstractions have a tendency to be over-generalized and misapplied. Let me give you an example from my field, software engineering, of a tool, the computer, which is poorly understood and, I believe, provides great insight to the field of medicine.

Computers are often defined as “digital machines that operate on discrete quantities, most often represented as ‘on’ or ‘off’, indicating whether the value is “1” or “0.” Numbers and information are represented by the binary system.” For example, the number five is “101” and the letter “a” is “01100001” in binary notation.

Ask most computer professionals why computers are binary and you will likely be told about how the internal electronic switches are either “on”, represented by a “1” or “off”, represented as a “0,” much the same as the light in your room is either on “1” or off “0”.

In the minds of many professionals who practice the fine art of programming necessity is often the mother of invention and binary numbers are considered necessary to capture the “on/off” binary electrical states.

But contrary to the definition and professional perception computers are not binary by necessity. Binary computers are built on the twin pillars of reliability and cost. It is far cheaper to build and operate a machine with two states (binary), but it is quite possible to build decimal computers or alphabetic ones. ENIAC, one of the world’s first computers, was a decimal machine (10 states) and for years the Soviets manufactured decimal-based computers. In fact, the majority of the world’s computers are analog machines.

As elegant and egalitarian as the binary model is – it is a model to simplify reality, not replace it. Strings of 1s and 0s are not absolutes, but abstractions representing ranges of current. The “1” is represented by ranges of anywhere from 6 to 8 volts and the “0” is represented from 2 to 4 volts.

In the belly of the beast, lost in abstractions and algorithms, the temporary respite from the tedium of reality propels the professional and user alike to accept the current implementation of computational binary necessity as concrete and complete. But when the hard drive crashes or the power supply suddenly goes down the machine’s behavior exhibits all the messy details of reality.

In that flashpoint of hardware and software the unbounded centuries-old medical fissure between empiricists and rationalists crystallizes. On one side - models; on the other side - reality.

Allopathic practitioners observe a form of rationalist medicine, which attempts to distill reality through models. Lost in their own “binary model of necessity” today’s MDs deal only with the bits and bytes of autism never daring to question the model, let alone look at the underlying machine as the possible source of aberrant behaviors.

Your son crashes, your daughter regresses, and your doctor finds the false in all of them. Reliant on “modern” mainstream medicine’s reductionist models the earth is still flat, the sun rotates around the earth, and the circular circuitry always points due north to mom as the most likely suspect.

Most models shun the indignity of feedback mechanisms. Neither self-correcting nor self-aware they are spun to provide predefined algorithmic answers for mainstream medical professionals who are unwilling to acknowledge the limitations of their models and unaware of the models’ influence on their thinking. The model becomes the message with the chilling effect of freezing thought into preconfigured habitual patterns.

When 1 + 1 = 3 perhaps it’s time for the hardware to be examined. But don’t count on it.

As always please let me know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or ideas. Thank you.

Ed and Teri Arranga

714.680.0792

Autism One

www.autismone.org

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