jenny mccarthy wants your kid to get measles: autism, vaccines, and stupid idiots

To him, the M.M.R. vaccine, so aggressively studied since the media splash following Wakefield’s 1998 paper, is one of the few factors that can be been ruled out. But could it be aspartame? UV rays? Elmo? No one knows.

Still sticking with my Thomas the Tank Engine theory

has anyone read about ramachandran/others work on autism and 'mirror neurons'? shit is dope

― max, Friday, February 5, 2010 6:32 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

OTM

I haven't read ramachandran but just reading a summary of the mirror neuron idea - I mean - this is what's tricky about talking about psych pathologies. the underlying pathology results in a person who thinks, feels, behaves differently. the person is not the pathology, and I'm guessing yr point is, "there's nothing 'wrong' with autistic people." but, I mean, this is a classic question with psych maladies: if we say there's "nothing wrong," then why are we devising treatments at all? at root is the way that people have a pretty animal horror of anything that codes as "unwell" I think & that's a whole ball of Levi-Strauss & Foucault iirc

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Friday, February 5, 2010 8:30 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Not sure how this applies to mirror neurons at all. Also, there is nothing wrong with autism in the sense of a person reacting to the world in a different way than most but that most have built a society where to survive you need to be able to socially interact in a certain way to work, develop relationships etc. Whether its this part of autism, social anxiety disorder, borderline personality, bipolar.... treatment is primarily aimed at getting a patient to the place where they can comfortably do these things.

Back to mirror neurons, my personal stance is that they play a part but its v hard to believe its the whole, or even a huge part, of the explanation. Yes, empathy is rare or absent from even the highest functioning autistics along with denial of knowledge outside themselves, but what about the comorbidities of autism like anxiety disorders, epilepsy, cerebral palsy etc? Lack of behavior modeling as it affects social and language development is probably the poster symptom of autism but it really seems like a cog in a much bigger machine.

I read a study a short while back that claimed 1 in 4 people are sociopaths which seems impossible unless you try to think of it on a spectrum then it starts making some sense. The truth is sociopaths frighten me to near phobic levels and while I think researching a possible link between lack of mirror neuron activity and autism is still valid and necessary (although past studies have shown autistics to have 'normal' levels of activity), I really hope someone out there is attempting to establish a causal relation between low firing mirror neurons and sociopathic behavior.

Also, if you are at all interested in mirror neurons, there are a slew of podcasts and itunes U lectures covering the subject, some in relation to autism, mostly by Marco Icaboni.

they moved the sociopath next to me at work

yikes

read a study a short while back that claimed 1 in 4 people are sociopaths which seems impossible unless you try to think of it on a spectrum then it starts making some sense

Are you sure you're remembering this study correctly? All of the personality disorders I can think of occur in about 1-3% of the population. And sociopathy is a concept in criminology, not psychiatry.

actual sociopathy is extremely rare, this terms gets massively overused imo

I can think of exactly two off the top of my head - Ted Bundy and the one Columbine kid.

Girls I've dated imo

actual sociopathy is extremely rare, this terms gets massively overused imo

― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, April 23, 2011 12:10 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

otm

^^^

"sociopath" is definitely overused in cases where "asshole" would suffice

^^^^

I think I'm running out of carets.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-study-reveals-most-children-unrepentant-sociop,2870/

I can think of exactly two off the top of my head - Ted Bundy and the one Columbine kid.

Edmund Emil Kemper maybe too, not 100% sure

*waves at Kingfish* I still post here, actually more often (though still hardly ever) than I ever did in years of dedicated lurking. Mostly on ILM, though.

I just got Seth Mnookin's Panic Virus book (part of a huge haul from Amazon of books on societal issues in medicine). I could post my thoughts to this thread while reading it.

anyway I'm in a lecture about ~autism~ right now and dude is basically saying that there's at least twenty odd genes involved in autistic disorders, and that several other developmental disorders are related. all this magic bullet stuff is the sad theater of ppl reaching for answers for something they don't understand

― FUN FUN FUN FUN (gbx), Thursday, April 21, 2011 4:33 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

As a doctor, this bothers me almost as much as the denialism (which I have an easier time being empathetic about, and have lower standards for). I have yet to read a medical journal article on some barely understood phenomenon that doesn't start with several dense paragraphs of handwaving about genetics or patterns of immune activation or hypoperfusion on fMRI. God forbid we actually admit we don't know something, or at least that existing theories do not provide an adequate explanation (or more precisely, provide multiple inadequate and mutually contradictory explanations).

If you found an ipod lying on a beach would you assume it assembled by random, or would you judgementally look through the playlists?

haha YES.

hey plasmon, good to see you again. That book looks worthwhile.

Plasmon, the primary trait I look for in a dr is one who can say 'look I/we just don't know'. Mad respect for that.

I can't find the 1 in 4 sociopath study but 1 in 25 was considered the magic number. That's still stupidly high. Also, maybe y'all might consider reading some studies before randomly deciding a statistics is way off.

Oh and yeah autism is crazy complicated obv but I can understand how the excitement of finding neurons that relate to emotion, particularly empathy, language and social development might lead to new information about a disorder who's symptoms show an extreme lack of all of these things.

http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/critics_slam_pbs_nyt_autism_re.php

Posting this here since the conspiracism mechanism is the same: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/30/conspiracy_theories_truther_birther/index.html

i'm skimming the panic virus at work, it's pretty great (gives good background, clearly written, etc) and the chapter on Morgellons (which I'd never even heard of before) is wtf

finished the panic virus (fuck it, it's my last day at this job and i'm not doing any work). really good, at least as a layperson.

it actually made me feel kind of compassionate about the parents who believe in this stuff (especially the ones who joined in before the info about wakefield and his dumb theories were widespread), because having an autistic kid sounds really really terrible, and i can totally understand someone looking for a way, any way, to comprehend why it happened and how to deal with it.

^^^smartest post on this thread by far

ha there are at least a couple of medical professionals in training on this thread so i doubt it

yeah, I get that people need some way to deal with an autism diagnosis, but my compassion ends when their actions/advocacy become dangerous to other people and the public.

(and there's at least one medical professional not in training on this thread, ahem)

FWIW, I have a friend whose young son was recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and it didn't take him long to get on the environmental conspiracy track. People like answers, but to me it's both a fascinating and frightening facet of the human condition that sometimes there just aren't answers.

What in the environment was supposed to have caused his diabetes?

Sugar in the air.

there is some evidence that may suggest that a viral infection could trigger DM1.

which in a vague way could be said of lots of autoimmune disease.

yep.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=trains-nukes-marriage-and-vaccines-2011-04-22

The facts rarely matter as much as what we feel about the facts

Fright Doctors
The hideous impacts of the vaccine-autism myth—and the reasons it has proven so difficult to debunk.

A man from the cord blood bank told me on the phone the other day that stem cells can treat Autism. Not sure how that works.

Wd have thought that'd be pretty huge news if true?

half of the four comments currently on that article are already depressing
xx-post

I love how people still bitch about thimerosal, which isnt even IN MMR anymore :|

Wd have thought that'd be pretty huge news if true?
autism isn't big news. The psycho freaks trying to make it possible for ourkids to get polio again are big news. I mean the mirror neurons the 5th revolution in science isnt big news ornews at all unless you read science journals

http://www.salon.com/news/autism/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/08/25/vaccines_safe

Oliver Willis brings word of yet another panel of scientists announcing that there is no link whatsoever between the M.M.R. vaccine and autism. “The M.M.R. vaccine doesn’t cause autism, and the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t,” said Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, who knows what she's talking about despite not being a celebrity.

the next shoe to drop is when they say "mammography is effectively useless" again and people refuse to belive it again

Just came across this 2003 drama starring Hugh Bonneville has heroic Dr Andrew Wakefield in his war against a smug and uncaring medical establishment. Wonder when that will get repeated.

I can't remember what magazine I was flipping through in a waiting room a few weeks ago, but it was interviewing doctors who've actually dropped families as patients when they've refused vaccines. They talked about it being painful and a last resort, but it was nice to hear doctors basically saying, "GTFO with that noise".

xp Monthly breast self-exams have been known to be worse than useless for some time now--if a tumor is big enough to be felt, it's big enough to have already began to spread--but they are still being promoted widely.

Yeah I challenged my gyn on the "mammogram every year after 40" and she's all "I still recommend it." WTF ever I read the damn study myself and every two years is fine for me imo.

Of course the American Society for Radiology challenged those studies to the hilt, which I would have maybe paid more attention to had I not worked for a specialty medical society and learned first hand exactly which side their bread is buttered on.

Anybody see Michael Shermer's new book, _the Believing Brain_?

Supposed to be pretty interesting, except for the bits where he goes on about the free market

-if a tumor is big enough to be felt, it's big enough to have already began to spread-

In which case you'd definitely want to know about it, yes? Do you think it's better to wait until you can't help but notice it?

1zsx

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/killing-beneficial-bacteria/

not ~really~ related, but interesting

anyone have access to Nature?