stuff and autism

Yesterday I learned that foie gras will kill you and that the local Jehovah's Witnesses are going try over the next three weeks to tell every household in Southern Arizona personally about their yearly conference. I really must prepare something with which to entertain them, but I understand that if you're too entertaining, they come back.

Then I came across an article by a doctor who was treating a kid with Asperger's whose mom was convinced that her son's condition was mercury-related. The doctor reported that the kid had made no improvement on his mom's treatment plan, so clearly, from his point of view, people who are worried about mercury toxicity are deluded. I had a lot of thoughts about this, but I was pretty wiped out last night, so you didn't get to hear about it yesterday.

Then today I read an article that indicates people divide into two camps on autism: those who think kids are born with it so they need therapy, and those who believe mercury causes it so they need chelation. So now I can't keep my mouth shut, despite the fact that I had a couple of nasty exposures today so I am, to put it succinctly, kind of a moron tonight.

Anyway, the mom and the doctor fall very neatly into those two categories, where the mom thinks autism is mercury related, and the doctor thinks she's a nutball and it isn't.

And maybe in this kid's case it wasn't. Maybe this kid inhaled a bunch of formaldehyde crawling around on new carpet or couldn't handle all the stuff that passes for food in this culture. With a bunch of parents screaming about mercury toxicity, the medical community is not going to spend any time trying to figure out what mold or pesticides or formaldehyde do to developing brains, and toddlers aren't going to point and say, Mother, I react to the synthetic fragrance in that stuff you smear on my behind, or these carpet chemicals down here. They just cry and are unmanageable and antisocial.

Which sounds just like me when I first got sick, but I at least had developed social skills first. And learned to talk, and reason, and then go find the doctor who could help me. I mean, if my mom had had to diagnose me, it very likely would not have gone nearly this well, and I couldn't possibly have blamed her for it.

So it is my contention that autism may be caused by mercury, but it may also be caused by a host of other chemicals that lots of people tolerate fine, but some of us don't, and the sooner the doctors and parents of autistic kids stop arguing about nature vs. nurture and get the chemicals away from and out of the kids, the better.