Autism Vox

This Week’s Top Posts

by Kristina Chew, PhD on February 2nd, 2008

A certain TV show about a certain lawyer and a certain hypothesis about what causes autism dominated autism discussions this week, for better or for worse—-when I talk about autism, I’m thinking of a very real boy, my son Charlie, and not so much about a fictional TV character. My real boy’s week was more of a struggle than has been usual. And then, this evening as we stood in the checkout line at the grocery store, a teenage clerk in the next aisle said “his tooth’s on the floor!” and sure enough, there was Charlie bending over to pick up a large molar (which he tried to put back into his mouth, on the lower right). Things have been a little more peaceful easy feeling ever since—Charlie’s been saying “pull loose tooth” for the past few weeks and a few days ago I found him holding a pair of scissors—-and then a screwdriver—at his mouth, while saying “help fix.”

(Yes, both scissors and screwdriver are quite hidden now.)

• The Unsticking Power of Music
  -year-old David Militello has sung the “Star-Spangled Banner” at NBA games and also before a Martin Luther King, Jr., rally in Atlanta last well. Music—singing, humming—help to “unstick” his mind
• Bad Publicity Is Still Publicity: The AAP and ABC’s Eli Stone
  The American Academy of Pediatrics, in understandable concern about the misinformation that Eli Stone show might spread about a link between autism and vaccines, sends a letter to ABC executives and requests that the show be cancelled.
• Eli Stone: Curiouser and Curiouser, and Zany
  The fantastic, the zany, and the unscientific in Eli Stone.
• Don’t Got Milk?
  The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders has published a study about thinner bones in boys with autism spectrum disorders.
• Teaching Strategy #15: Shhhh
  My latest strategy for helping Charlie when he’s in tantrum mode or when I can hear and feel one building up in him: I don’t talk.
• Diagnosis by 18 Months
  Researchers are “confident” that it will become “routine to diagnose autism for children just 18 months old and sometimes even younger” after a five-year study to be conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of California-Davis and the University of Washington.
• Ethyl Mercury Is Expelled Faster From Babies’ Bodies Than Thought, and Other Autism Truths and Autism Fictions
  With the “Eli Stone controversy” swirling round, the AAP lifts the embargo early on a new study in Pediatrics showing that the ethyl mercury previously used in vaccines as a preservative, is excreted much faster than other forms of mercury in the environment.
• What’s It All About, Eli?
  The idea behind “Eli Stone” is that a highly successful, seemingly selfish lawyer who has—with little apparent regard for ethical concerns—-fought on the side of corporate America, undergoes a sort of conversion experience and decides instead to fight for the “little guy”—the “vaccine-damaged” child of a single mother, in the first episode. Why this conversion occurs is a matter of science, or faith.
• A Pill to Induce Autism?
  A “group of German researchers” has announced that they have “perfected the method for inducing autism.” ??!!!?!?!???
• Handcuffs in Middle School
  11-year-old Gunnar Moody was handcuffed by school police because he would not leave a P.E. class at Bret Harte Middle School in San Jose, California.
• Vaccines in the Media: Emotion Trumping Reason?
  In a new book, Health, Risk and News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media, Dr. Tammy Boyce analyzes the media’s role in perpetuating public suspicion about giving vaccines to children in the UK — her analysis can be readily applied to the controversy over vaccines and autism in the US.

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POSTED IN: California, Charlisms, Comedy, Dentist, Diagnosis, Food and Diet, Health, Media, Teaching Strategies, Vaccines