Hello all. I'm going to preface this thread by saying that I am too lazy to look through old postings to check if this was already discussed. If the topic is a repeat, then I do apologize.
So...I was reading in my local paper (in Greensboro, North Carolina) that Jenny McCarthy has written a book about her experience as a parent of an autistic child. The main point of her book is that she "cured" her child of autism by changing his diet, getting him a speech therapist, and some other unorthodox things. She claims that her son was normal, had his vaccines, and within a week developed symptoms of autism. Here's my question--is it possible that her child, and kids like him who seem to "develop" autism after being vaccinated, do not have autism at all, but a separate "disorder" entirely? My autism specialist told me that autism involves the wiring of the brain (which is why it's not an illness). If that's true, how can a vaccine re-wire the brain??[/font]
I am still struggling with my opinion on the exact nature and causes of autism, so I won't comment on whether or not it was autism except to say that there are numerous theories on the cause and the important thing to keep in mind is that so far NONE of them have been definitively proven to be correct.
But as for this book... The rate of diagnosis of autism has increased vastly since the release of the movie Rainman injected knowledge of the condition into the cultural mainstream. Personally, I am skeptical as to whether it is not just a matter of lazy doctors labeling every child who is a little "too smart" or a little "too weird" as autistic or aspie. The increased rate of diagnosis has made the topic a very popular one; everybody has an autistic kid or knows someone with an autistic kid, so everybody wants to know more about it. Be prepared for an onslaught of erroneous portrayals as media companies rush to produce sloppy material to greedily exploit this new and lucrative market-niche. Just keep in mind that the primary objective of a media company is to make money; concern as to the genuineness of of their product will always be secondary. Personally, I could not be less surprised to see a bestselling book purporting a very specious "cure" written by a nude model. Just imagine what the marketing proposal must have looked like at the publisher's office:
"It's got autism! It's got boobies! It's got a a happy (if not a factually correct) ending! It's everything that's HOT this season! It's sure to be a hit! We'll be featured on Oprah, yippieee! MONEYMONEYMONEY!!!" I picture that it went something like that. Expect this cultural phenomenon to continue for as long as someone can make a buck off of it. Also, America's Next Top Model has a very popular contestant this season who has Asperger's. Given her popularity, expect a small flood of Asperger's books to hit the market soon, as every teenage girl who's ever been called "weird" rushes to have herself diagnosed with it.
PS: BTW, don't mean to disrespect Jenny McCarthy for being a nude model (god bless nude models
), and she has always seemed to me a very smart and funny lady, but yes, I am skeptical about the diagnosis as well as the "cure".
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"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."--Martin Luther King
I have no problem with Jenny McCarthy as a person, just the idea that one can "get" autism over a few days, and then be "cured" of it by eating certain foods. Really, I think he and others must have a different condition entirely. Thanks for your reply.
I find McCarthy rather frightening, considering the cover photo for her book "Baby Laughs", in which she's posing with a naked baby and sporting a grin that looks like she might eat that baby." I don't know that much about her, but the fact that she would do a scene like that doesn't speak well of her.
I have never considered Jenny McCarthy to be intelligent in any intriguing way. Intelligent for using her looks and personality to get where she is, yes--it requires a good deal of street smarts to climb the ladder so efficiently. But intelligent in other ways? Not as far as I can see. She doesn't demonstrate it, anyhow.
She also is a queen of gross-out humor and has a nearly fetishistic obsession with anything that falls into said category, and I'm not so enamored with that.
Nevertheless, she is writing books and claiming that she (along with the help of others) has cured her son's autism. I just think that is dangerous and misleading. It's also why I think her son may not have had autism at all. It's also possible that he's not cured, but [i]better--a point that someone else already made.
Well I am skeptical that Asperger's is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a "light" form of autism. People with Asperger's share traits with any number of disorders, the assignment to autism could legitimately be questioned. No one can prove, at this point, that it IS autism, and no can prove that it isn't.
You are just so mistaken in thinking that AS could conceivably not be a form of autism. AS/Kanner's/LFA share so many similarities--in fact, many who formerly were somewhat non-communicative (HFA) become a textbook case of AS when they get older--that to think AS could just be a "mishmash" of other disorders, is rather foolish.
Not to mention that the two seem more likely to co-exist within the same families - more often than not, if a child is autistic, you'll find that one of the parents is AS.