Perspective

I got to see a movie at a theater this past weekend. It's the first movie I've seen in a theater since I was on travel last year. Of course I wasn't with my wife. That would be too much like being married. No, the wife offered to take our son swimming so that I could go watch a show. Normally, when we volunteer like that, it's so the other can get something accomplished at the house. Fix a leaky faucet, mow the yard, try to get plants in the garden so we don't spend as much on groceries, laundry. . .

You see, our son has the best nutrition we can give him, organic food, vitamin supplements that I didn't even know existed before he was diagnosed. The off-shoot of that is that he looks like a little Olympian, with the stamina of a marathoner. Swimming is one of the only activities he likes that will tire him out. Of course we have to be with him at the pool, so one of us is out of action while he swims. The other has a few set hours before the return to try and make some progress on projects at the house. We still haven't finished unpacking from our move two years ago!

We have spent so much time getting him to this level of health and still have miles to go before we finish. That's why going to see a movie was such a big deal in one way and a reminder that we still aren't there yet in another.

I miss going out on dates with my wife! I miss being able to talk about things we want to do. I miss being able to call a sitter on Friday night and going out to dinner. My wife misses being able to ride horses! My wife hasn't been to see a movie on the big screen since the second Lord of the Rings movie! We could go out after our son was asleep and see something. Made for a really easy job for the sitter. . .

Getting out to see a movie was awesome. No, I didn't see the new Indy Movie, I went to see Iron Man, but if I get a chance, I will go see the new Indy, yeah, maybe next weekend. . . Hey honey. . .

Anyway, the whole problem in a nutshell is to imagine what it would be like to have your skin scrubbed off with a dry loofah, and then decide that life could be worse. Like, you could be married to someone who believes in the "Trickle-down" theory of economics, or that fossil fuels don't contribute to global warming, or that vaccine benefits are a proven scientific fact. Heck, at least my son didn't get voted off the island! What a sick thing to do.

Spin Baby Spin!

Okay, in the greater Washington DC area, people accept certain, "Laws of Elected Officials".

An example, "Congressman/Senator/Representative/Mayor so-and-so ran over 3 latino children yesterday afternoon, after a 12 martini lunch with Big Pharma lobbyist." (I made this up, honest)

The story that comes out is, "Congressman/Senator/Representative/Mayor so-and-so took steps yesterday to reduce illegal immigration and is pushing for more vaccines against bumper poisoning!"

The problem is that no one wants to take a good look at our current medical practices and then ask some hard questions. On the way to work this morning, there was a news item that more than HALF the population of the United States is now taking prescription medication for chronic conditions!

MORE THAN HALF THE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES.

Pharmaceutical companies are laughing all the way to the bank, and the country club, and at you, the drug-taking public. We are so wedded to the magic pill idea that nothing else matters. We don't need to eat right, exercise, sleep. We've got pills!

Can't get it up? Take this pill!

Can't get pregnant? Take this pill!

Why am I not able to conceive? Don't look at the ingredients of that diet soda you're drinking. . .

I now hear more adds for IVF treatments than I hear for auto sales adds!

Don't pay any attention to the explosion of autistic children, or the fact that there are now more children on meds for ADD, ADHD, and a host of other learning disabilities than ever before in our history.

What do you think happens when you feed your children nothing but high fructose corn syrup,  and expect them to act normally?

There are several people that are now coming forward to proclaim that maybe, just maybe, we should actually study the causal link between mercury and autism. It's a cautious claim mainly because everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE is afraid to piss off Big Pharma. If they get even mildly upset with us, the stock market drops, oil prices go up and Democrats start looking for more seats in Congress.

I'm not saying there's an easy fix. Hell, I'd be surprised to find out there even was a fix. Most people are too short-sighted, (myself included) to even understand what might happen if we:

1. Put a known neuro-toxin into a substance with other toxins like formaldehyde and aluminum and cultures of germs and shoot them into infants before they have a chance to establish their immune system, this from Answers.com

"... A concentrated level of antibodies is reached and maintained by seven to eight years of age." (my emphasis added, go to the link above to read the whole description)

2. Start adding things like titanium dioxide and aluminum salts into foods to make them "whiter" so that consumers will buy more, and MSG to make the consumer even MORE addicted, and

3. Created laws that forbids the use of raw, unprocessed foods because someone might get hurt.

We're painting ourselves into a corner, and then breathing the fumes so that we think it's funny!

Taking the Long Road (with detours and roadblocks)

After massive amounts of trial and error, piles of experiments, and truckloads of money, we're still working on recovering our son. He has made a lot of progress, and is as healthy as we can keep him, so I guess we're on the right track.

The problem is that my son isn't just a case of thimerisol poisoning. His case is a little more involved. Since it has been established that the mother now passes toxins, including heavy metals, to the fetus in utero and through breast milk, my wife's old college job doing materials analysis has come back to haunt us. She did mercury porosimetry and in the course of working that job, she ended up with a lot of mercury in her system. What she didn't know, (and no one told her) was that getting rid of mercury is much harder than taking it in.

This goes for any heavy metal that's taken in by our bodies. What my wife didn't know is that even after 20 years, (give or take) she still had a load of mercury in her system that would pass to our unborn son.

It also didn't help that I had a full series of vaccinations when I joined the Army, or that I had taken preventative medication for malaria for a field problem in Egypt while on active duty, or that while on active duty I handled depleted uranium ammunition, and that being a tank crewman, I worked with lots of petroleum products all the time, or that I was, (and still am) a fan of competition pistol shooting, even if I can no longer compete.

I loaded my own ammunition using the cheapest materials I could find. An unjacketed bullet is straight lead cast into the bullet shape with no copper jacket. Lead is used because it is easy to work with, (relatively). I didn't actually cast my own bullets, but I bought unjacketed rounds from a local in my town. Manually handling thousands of rounds meant at least some bodily uptake. Primers have mercury fulminate in them, but come pre-made ready to load into a cartridge. On the other hand, when processing the spent brass, one step is removing the old primer. Any residual mercury fulminate could have/would have been absorbed through the skin of my hands.

What all of this means is that our son has had an exposure to toxins since his conception, or, to put it another way, his mercury/toxin poisoning was/is at a MOLECULAR level.

Then we ran into a problem with pesticides. We moved to Florida so I could go to school, into a nice apartment complex with a roomy 3 bedrooms and the sheer novelty of living in Florida. About a month into school, a bunch of religious fanatics rammed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and let's not forget the one that ran into the ground in Pennsylvania.

Orlando became a ghost town almost overnight! People lost their jobs as shops that catered to tourists started to close. People moved out of the apartments around us and the management decided to lower their standards and allow large pets into the complex. But first, we need to spray pesticide all over the complex to keep unwanted critters away! Meanwhile, my wife was working on some plantings outside our apartment while I was at work, and our son was playing with the garden hose in the mud at her feet. She ended up at the pediatrician's office with my son being non-responsive and having his first seizure.

Take a step forward, then take about 10 steps backwards.

Insanity Plea, or How to Deny Everything

So, we have the CDC, AAP, FDA, AMA, and SCA (Society for Creative Analysis, otherwise known as mainstream media) marketing the hell out of the genetics/better diagnosis angle for the cause of autism. Where are these people getting these ideas?

First, there has to be money to allow for the 'studies' being touted that assure the public that autism isn't also caused by the one thing that makes BILLIONS of dollars each year for a certain private sector industry. Then there has to be a way to keep mouths shut, more money to keep the talkers quiet. Oh yeah, if all the experts work for us, then they can't really speak against us. Problem is, we need people who are experts running the alphabet soup agencies.

Hmm, so what we do is rotate our employees through the government positions, get them to approve funding for the things we want, (like getting the government to purchase billions of dollars worth of medicines that aren't tested for safety or if they actually solve a particular problem) deny any possible negligence, and get the other branches of the government to approve laws that keep the public from suing us. Then rotate them back into the corporate fold, give them raises based on how well they did keeping the business working. Rinse and repeat.

Along comes the Patriot Act! Yay Patriot Act! Yay! We can sneak a BUNCH of legislation into that whopper of a bill and no one will look twice since we all want to be safe from terrorists, and anyone who actually wants to read the bill must be anti-american or a terrorist, so there. . .

Can you sense the sarcasm here!? The folks over at Naked Authors are all about sarcasm too.

Follow the Money

Okay, we've established the fact that my son regressed into autism. We've established that the recovery of my son is very expensive. Hmm, I guess we haven't established that yet.

My wife and I are both educated professionals. She has an MBA and I have been working in IT and graphic arts for more than 10 years and have an AAB and a Occupational Associates Degree, (which is basically a trade certificate). Right now, I'm working, (we've swapped off every few years to allow each other a break) and I make a fair amount of money. With what we spend on my son's treatments, supplements, and therapies, we're barely making ends meet. Can't give more specifics, but we don't have a retirement plan, only have emergency insurance for my son, (haven't found an insurance plan that covers ANY of our therapies, treatments, or supplements), basic insurance for me, (free with the company I'm with, but again doesn't cover most of the things we do to stay healthy), and my wife is flying without insurance at ALL! No 401K, no IRAs, about $500 in savings, give or take, we live paycheck to paycheck.

Now, as my son gets better, we've been able to give up some of his supplements, but most of the time, we just end up having to get something new that replaces the last thing, or we have to have some other therapy or procedure that costs thousands of dollars, (he's got to have dental work done now because his teeth are having problems, which will cost us around $3000).

Okay, so we're not completely broke, but this is expensive. I've also been reading "The Chelation Kid" a comic about a family with a boy on the spectrum. They've got the same issues we've got, but are having even worse problems paying the bills!

So let's move on to the whole Biomedical vs. Genetic issue. Follow the money!

First, for those in the cheap seats, here's the issue:

On the Biomedical side there are parents that believe the Autism has a biomedical cause, namely mercury, but I'm going to expand that to general environmental toxicity or in easy words, I think we're pooping in our own drinking water. This includes mercury in ANY form, which spews from coal-fired power plants, gets used in vaccinations via Thimerisol, (hence the vaccine issue), is in all of those new efficient light bulbs, and is used in the creation of munitions for our military, (mercury fulminate). Aluminum, which is used to 'whiten' all your white foods, like cream cheese, white american cheese they use at Subway, etc. If the food needs whitened, it has aluminum or titanium, (or both) in it.

Really.

Let's see. . . oh yeah. . . antimony, used in fire retardant for furniture, including baby mattresses. . . yep yours too. Look it up. It's right next to Arsenic on the periodic table. Hell, pull out an old chemistry book, flip to that periodic table and start reading off the elements, if you can read it, it's being used somewhere in the average household. Oh yeah, arsenic, used in treated lumber to keep bugs out. I'm not lying!

If you don't believe me, start reading labels!

On the other side is the CDC, FDA, (insert lots of acronym agencies here) and Legislative and Executive Branch of our government, (they get their own mention because they have been creating laws based on information from the other agencies). The official stance of our government is that Autism is caused genetically, and that the increase in diagnosis of cases in Autism is the wider definition of Autism and a wider recognition of the symptoms.

Huh?

So, another way for the government to say this is that we are experiencing a genetic epidemic. We'll look at the numbers for the epidemic in a minute.

If it's that the recognition has gone up, why not tell us where all of the 30 to 50 year old Autistic people that should exist are hidden if it's just better diagnosis. . .

Okay, the numbers for the genetic epidemic. . . hmm. . . wait, aren't those the same numbers collected by the CDC? Can we take a peek at those numbers? No? Why not?

Most of the key people working at the CDC have come from Pharmaceutical Companies! That's like making the executives from tobacco companies pay for their own research into the causes of cancer! Wait. . . didn't we do that already?

What about putting auto manufacturers in charge of safety testing their own vehicles! Wait. . .

I know. . . how about putting the inmates in charge of the mental hospital? Wait. . .

David Kirby's Article on Huffington Post

I had to interject this so that the few people that read this blog can check out some news from our world.

The Vaccine-Autism Story: Trust Your Government, or Be a Patriot and Get on Google

Posted March 7, 2008 01:33 PM (EST)

A big autism bomb went off yesterday, about how US medical personnel had determined that vaccines had aggravated a little girl's mitochondrial disorder, resulting in autism. Now, the American people are left to interpret what it all means.

Here is a handy guide. You can:

A) Blindly trust what government officials are saying (or not saying)

or

B) Invest 30 minutes in the future of your nation's young people (do it now, over a nice, warm latte!) and go Google for yourself.

OPTION A:

Yesterday, Dr Paul E. Jarris, Executive Director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) sent an email to his colleague, Anna DeBlois, on how officials should respond to the glaring headlines emanating from Atlanta.

"You may have seen the recent media interest in a vaccine-autism lawsuit which was settled by the federal government," he wrote. Apparently, someone in the federal government had reached Dr. Jarris and told him to pass on the following (internal) explanation:

The case was settled because the vaccine worsened the child's underlying and previously undiagnosed disorder, causing impaired brain function. These symptoms of impaired brain function then led to an autism spectrum disorder. The federal government maintains that vaccines do not cause autism, and that this case does not indicate any change in their position on the issue.

TRANSLATION (An Anti-Syllogism): "Vaccines cause brain impairment, and brain impairments cause autism. Therefore vaccines do not cause autism."

Meanwhile yesterday, back in Washington, Bush administration officials would not comment on the case, saying they needed permission, "from the person who submitted the information" to the court.

TRANSLATION (Auto-Censorship): "We really, really want to explain WHY we folded like a tent without so much as a whisper of a defense, but that would require asking permission from our lawyer (the DOJ), which we are unwilling to do.

And most recently, CDC Director Julie Gerberding told the media that the American people need to "set aside this very isolated, unusual situation," even though "the court apparently made the decision that it is fair to say that vaccinations may have been one of the precipitators."

TRANSLATION: (Middlebrow Bureaucratese) "I am either an exceedingly ignorant, untruthful or misleading Director, because there is no evidence at all that this situation is 'isolated and unusual' (indeed, the evidence points to the opposite), and because the court 'decision' was not made by the court at all, but rather by medical doctors who work for the US Secretary of Health and Human Services," otherwise known as Dr. Gerberding's boss.

OPTION B)

Google "autism and mitochondria," (96,900 hits) and then Google "mercury and mitochondria," (169,000 hits) and draw your own, informed conclusions.

Now, enjoy your coffee (and your good citizenship).

PS: The next time someone tells you that this girl does not have autism, but only the "symptoms" of autism, you tell them that the definition of autism is having the symptoms of autism. Period. Hannah Poling has autism as defined by every medical book, on every shelf, in every library -- including at the colleges where all these government officials received their degrees.

No Hope!

That's what we were told by most of the medical establishment. The Web, on the other hand, was telling us that if we spent our money with X person or X treatment, our child would be spouting poetry within days of beginning treatment.

Ya gotta love snake oil salesmen. . .

Then you've got the groups and individuals who believe that uncontrollable bowels, fits of screaming, smacking your head against the wall for hours on end, biting yourself, biting someone else, or seizures are supposed to be acceptable? Maybe the message is a little
too obscure for me, but I'd like my son to be integrated into society.

It's okay, and encouraged to be different in our house, but when you can't function in this society, (is there another society out there?) then maybe we should be working on that integration thing.

I know my son is smart, he's got a really great sense of humor, and he's got an ear for music, (just watch him shush Mommy, who tries hard but doesn't carry a tune well). I believe that my son is an individual who is a person separate from his ASD. I'd like to meet that person.

We've spent Tens of Thousands of dollars on supplements, therapies, and treatments for our son. Some have worked for a while, some not so much, but we'll keep trying. I've seen my son's frustration when trying to communicate with us. I've seen him get embarrassed because
someone points out his liquid diet, or his nearly constant humming.

When I see children, (or sometimes adults) staring, I try to ask them if they have questions. Sometimes they do, and I answer them as best I can, in as few words as possible, (general lack of attention these days). Most of the time, they shake their heads and go back to whatever they were doing. Doesn't matter, they've still embarrassed my son. He sees and understands, but can't quite act/react to his environment.