Autism Vox

Spotty Knowledge

by Kristina Chew, PhD on November 13th, 2006

Instead of brainstorming absurd ways to explain the missing link of autism, why don’t we pay more attention to what we already know?

Writes Patrick Waldo in today’s Huffington Post regarding Cornell business professor Michael Waldman’s hypothesis that TV causes autism.

I applaud Waldo’s impatience with the seemingly never-ending attempts “to explain the missing link of autism”; I would wish that researchers and the general public might devote as much time and as many resources to teaching and helping autistic persons now. In his next paragraph, though, Waldo refers to a theory of the causes of autism, namely, that mercury poisoning from the MMR “can trigger autism in some children with bowel irregularities,” with references to Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s research. Waldo takes a professor of developmental child psychology to task for declaring that the medical community has “overwhelmingly” refuted claims of a mercury-autism link; this professor, writes Waldo, has contaminated ” a room full of future psychologists…… with false information.”

According to Waldo, the MMR vaccine and mercury poisoning provide “the missing link” into the cause of autism—-though scholarly and popular opinion about this particular theory of autism aetiology is hardly unanimous and full of doubt and dissent. Waldo’s Huffington Post article uses a metaphor of infection in describing what we know and what we do not know about autism’s causes (”Thanks to [Wakefield’s and Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s] hard work, our understanding of this debilitating disorder has been tainted forever”; “More knowledge will be polluted”). Indeed: Our knowledge of the causes of autism is spotty and “tainted” with all manner of false theories (think refrigerator mothers; stereotypes about autistic persons like the i”diot savant”). Nonetheless, due to the imperfect state of our knowledge of not only what causes autism, but of what autism is, it is all the more imperative—and responsible—to beware the harmful side-effects of what gets reported, and what is presented as true, or false, information.

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POSTED IN: Environment, Health, Language, Neuroscience, Psychology, Rhetoric, Stereotypes, Treatment, Vaccines, Weblogs