Lee's Blog

More comments on the inimitable Dr. Gordon.

In respect to parents of autistic children he stated:

I support their use of HBOT, chelation and other alternatives.

This is unequivocal. He says he supports chelation. He does not say, I am not familiar with the literature on chelation, but it seems safe and could conceivably be helpful, so I don’t object to its use. He continues:

Chelation therapy has been used in pediatrics and other specialties for decades. It is a safe proven treatment.

Well, yes, that’s true. It is a relatively safe proven treatment for heavy metal toxicity, but it is not proven, or safe, for randomly inflicting on just anybody just any time their parents feel like it. There are medical indications, proven over a period of decades, for when it should be used. Plenty of drugs are like that; prescription drugs are relatively safe (no drug is perfectly safe) and proven effective for specific conditions (though many anti-vaxxers would dispute even that — but if they did dispute it, I wonder how they justify not disputing chelation therapy for any condition whatever).

A number of people objected to the characterization of chelation therapy as safe for any purpose other than treating proven heavy metal poisoning, and Dr. Gordon responded,

Kathleen, I think that the risks to chelation are overstated (data, please gentlemen and ladies!!)

Uh … he’s supporting chelation for autism, which is an off-label, unproven usage, and he thinks the risks are overstated? He doesn’t have the data at his fingertips? But Dr. Gordon continues:

Can you send me to sites or articles you respect delineating the dangers of chelation? I know it’s well-known “woo” to you all, but I’m really interested in learning more about the potential problems.

He can’t investigate this for himself? He has little patients relying on him to guide their parents in caring for them safely, and he’s going to rely on the “brainy” commenters at Respectful Insolence to find articles they “respect” to help him learn about the potential problems of a treatment he supports?

*facepalm* That’s all I can say. Or *headdesk*.

There is a storm in the science blogosphere about a dim but shrill anti-vax radio creature named Jeni Barnett (*spit*). She broadcast a thing on the radio (lacking a better term) containing a full set of standard anti-vax nonsense but with some idiocy all of her very own to boot. Links to the transcript (made by a small group of dedicated science bloggers) are at the link above.

Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science, wanted people to know exactly what she said, but was concerned that if he merely quoted her, he would be thought to be taking her words out of context and making her look bad. So he posted the entire audio. Her lawyers, understandably wanting to prevent anyone from processing the thing as a whole, and listening to each idiocy with care, threatened him. He took the audio down, of course, but the blogosphere has picked it up and spread it far and wide. Like the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*), this legal thuggery has had the effect of making people all over the world aware of what would otherwise have passed pretty much unnoticed. Certainly I would never had heard of it if not for the legal thuggery which was reported by Orac.

People with a lot more intestinal fortitude than me have posted extensively about this radio creature’s stupidity. But I will mention my favorite parts of the transcript:

Now back in the day (and that’s an expression I’ve learned from my [unclear] son), back in the day, children got measles, children got mumps. I’m not suggesting – I am not suggesting – that we got backwards where some children, where we have one in fifteen children die of it. And that one person in fifteen is the one we have to be looking at and wondering why and dealing with it.

…

Is there something wrong with having mumps, is there something – you know is it – most people aren’t that one in fifteen.

Well, duh (speaking at a radio creature level).

I mean, anybody who is in a position to listen to her isn’t that one in fifteen. Not only that, but we aren’t even descended from that one in fifteen. All of our ancestors managed to live past their childhoods, at least into very young adulthood, or they would not have had children and thus would not be our ancestors. Why should we care if one child in fifteen dies? They aren’t us after all. And I’m sure it’s a great consolation to their parents to be told that we don’t care if their children die, so why should they?

An actual practicing nurse, the sort who deals with dying children, called in. You can read the transcript of the conversation here. The radio creature calls Yasmin vicious, but I don’t see anyone being vicious in this segment but the creature herself. Yasmin says the broadcast is extremely irresponsible, which is true; that it is not based on any facts, which is true; that people like this radio creature are responsible for the on-going measles epidemic in England, which is true; and that there are children who can’t get immunized or whose immune systems are weak because of something like chemotherapy, who are at risk of dying of measles caught from unimmunized children around them, which is true. Her most cogent comment are these:

So you really need to think about what you’re doing here and why you’re doing it.

…

You should think about what you’re doing in this programme. You’re doing a lot of damage. A lot of damage.

Of course the response to the second comment was, “Well, maybe. I don’t think so.” Yeah, well, that’s because she’s an ignorant moron spouting assertions that she doesn’t understand and that she learned from other people just as ignorant.

I will add that this radio creature claims to be merely arrogantly ignorant instead of actively vile::

I am not a scientist, I would not claim to be a scientist. When tested on the contents of the MMR vaccine I told the truth. I did not have the facts to hand. Was I ill informed? Yes.As a responsible broadcaster I should have been better prepared as a parent, however, I can fight my corner. I don’t know everything that goes into cigarettes but I do know they are harmful.

As a professional should I have been better prepared – YES – but the discussion took off in a direction I hadn’t expected when I received a vicious phone call from a Nurse I was utterly thrown. I won’t get thrown again.

I am frequently amazed at the sheer unpleasantness of so many people on the Internet. Orac’s got another live one, for example.

This is one J. B. Handley, who runs Generation Rescue, which claims to try to help autistics in some way, but mostly seems to attack the doctors and scientists who are trying to help autistics as well as everyone else. Handley was interviewed by the New York Times, but before the article came out (I’m not sure it’s out yet), he posted a personal slam at the interviewer. Orac goes into much more detail in his patented style. Read the whole thing.

Orac criticizes him for using gutter language, which Handley doesn’t think is fair, so after a couple of hostile but printable replies, he uses … the very same gutter language.

But I wanted to reply to a specific “argument” he makes. He says this:

What did this study actuall [sic] do? Well, from the study itself:

“The age at which doses of thimerosal-containing vaccines were administered was recorded, and measures of mercury exposure by 3, 4, and 6 months of age were calculated and compared with a number of measures of childhood cognitive and behavioral development covering the period from 6 to 91 months of age.”

Plain English: They compared the TIMING, and only the TIMING, of when kids got the DTP vaccine with Thimerosal, to see if the TIMING of the shots (earlier in a child’s life) was correlated with neurological disorders.

Their conclusion:

“We could find no convincing evidence that early exposure to thimerosal had any deleterious effect on neurologic or psychological outcome when given according to an accelerated schedule. This is reassuring for developing countries that receive DTP vaccines according to the Expanded Program of Immunization schedule and where multidose vials that contain the thimerosal preservative are often the only option. In the face of the current evidence from this study and the growing literature, the dangers posed by contaminated multidose vaccine vials far outweigh any potential risk posed by thimerosal.”

Plain English:

This would be the same as saying:

We looked at smokers who began smoking at 13 with those who began smoking at 21. Their lung cancer rates were the same. So, smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer.

To look at a study that ONLY looks at vaccinated kids, and within that only looks at WHEN they got their vaccines and than say this somehow helps makes the case that vaccines do not cause autism means that you are one of the stupidest people in the history of mankind.

Well, I said his comments were initially printable, not that they were polite or sensible. But to respond to his example:

Suppose we found that the lung cancer rates were the same, but the median age at which the first group developed lung cancer was 40, and the median age for the second group was 50. If all other things are about equal (like total cigarettes smoked by the time lung cancer developed), then that would indeed suggest that smoking does cause cancer. It’s that dose-response thing that Orac has mentioned on occasion. On the other hand, if we found both groups developed presbyopia at a median age of 45, then we would reasonably conclude that in fact smoking doesn’t cause presbyopia.

In the case of the Heron study Handley mentioned, if vaccines cause brain damage that causes autism, then earlier and more frequent vaccines should cause earlier and more severe autism than later and less frequent vaccines. But that hypothesis was not borne out.

Kathleen Seidel, famous for standing up to the legal thuggery of Clifford Shoemaker (*spit*), has written about an industrial chemical which exists nowhere in nature but is being sold as a chelator anti-oxidant (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean? say no more) for use in defenseless human beings, specifically autistic children, without FDA approval because it’s a “dietary supplement”.

Kathleen has described the minimal testing of the chemical, and I am frankly appalled that people are putting this stuff in their own mouths, much less in the mouths of their defenseless children. Apparently it was tested by feeding small doses, briefly, to cats and rats, and applying it (in some fashion) to goldfish. Man, I’d rely on that, wouldn’t you?

The fact is that there are chemicals that are safe to take in small doses or briefly, but not in large doses or for a long time. There are even chemicals that are vital to your health that fall into that category.

Consider, specifically, Vitamin A. Vitamin A is essential to your health (that’s why they call it a vitamin), but it is also poisonous in large doses. People have died of it. The body has ways of getting rid of excess Vitamin A (having evolved in an environment where Vitamin A may be encountered), but they don’t work well with large doses. They also don’t work well with chronic excess Vitamin A in quantities not large enough to kill. Excess Vitamin A in a pregnant woman can cause birth defects in her child.

For another example, I used to take some rather powerful asthma medicines*. They were essential to keep me alive, but at the same time they were plastered with warnings about the necessity to do blood tests to verify that blood levels of the drugs weren’t getting too high. Fortunately I didn’t take them long enough or in large enough doses to require that.

So now we have this chemical that was tested briefly in animals that are not terribly close to humans (goldfish??). It may even have been good for them in certain cases (the claim is made that it was beneficial for a cat that had demonstrably been poisoned, and maybe it was). And therefore it’s okay to dose children with it.

Are the doses large or small relative to the ability of the victim patient to excrete the stuff? Who knows? Who cares?

Is this chemical safe over the short term but toxic over the long term? Who knows? Who cares?

Does this chemical cause birth defects if women take it in the early stages of pregnancy, before they know they’re pregnant? Who knows? Who cares?

There’s money in them thar industrial chemicals!

Update: I had forgotten this example. One of the treatments for nerve gas is atropine, but you don’t really want to use the atropine unless you’ve been exposed to the nerve gas, because atropine is poisonous too. So I’m not terribly convinced of the safety of daily use of a chemical just because it is (or is alleged to be) effective in treating an animal that has been poisoned.

*The eeevil Big Pharma seems to have slipped up by helping me get my asthma completely under control and therefore don’t get to sell me powerful asthma medicines any more.

So, based on Cullen’s comment, I see the chelation argument sort of like this:

Suppose you have a good diet and adequate exercise so that calories in and calories out exactly match. You don’t gain or lose weight. But then you go on vacation and eat extravagantly, and gain five pounds. When you get back and go on your normal diet and get your normal exercise, those five pounds just stay on. You can’t get rid of them because your calories in and calories out match. The only way to lose them is to do something other than your normal life: go on a diet or do extra exercise.

By hypothesis, some people are just barely able to excrete mercury fast enough to keep up with the normal environmental exposure. They just manage to keep in balance day in and day out. But a vaccine that contains mercury would add an extra slug of mercury (like the five pounds) which they can’t get rid of. So their mercury level stays a little high indefinitely even though it’s not the same actual atoms that were put in by the vaccine (this is the point that bothered me — it seems clear to me that the mercury from a vaccine would not last for years). The only way to remove the mercury is to do something other than normal life, i.e., chelation.

Okay, I understand the reasoning now.

I still don’t see how a defect in neural development caused by mercury could be healed by removing the mercury, however.

I am really baffled by the claim that chelation (to remove the mercury from autistic children’s bodies) could do any good in combatting autism.

The claim in the Sykes case, for instance, was that the child was injured by a vaccine given to the mother when the child was in utero. There is absolutely no question that a child can be injured by something the mother was exposed to when the child was in utero. One need only look at the victims of fetal alcohol syndrome, crack babies, and thalidomide babies. But, a very big but, the damage is done during the development of the embryo, then fetus, then child. Once the damage to development has occurred, you can’t reverse it. There was no treatment anyone could give to a thalidomide baby that would make limbs grow to normal size. If, indeed, autism is (ever) caused by an in-utero injury that damages development, I cannot understand at all why anyone would think that damage could be repaired by “removing the mercury” later.

Further, if (as is claimed in other cases), mercury in vaccines causes injury that causes autism, I again cannot understand why “removing the mercury” years later would repair the damage. The damage is done. As it happens, my father is an ophthalmologist who treats diseases like glaucoma. If someone has lost vision to glaucoma, the vision is gone because the nerves in that area are dead. So he can’t restore that vision because, as he says, he can’t raise the dead, but he can try to prevent further loss. If the mercury in a shot when the child was two caused brain damage that produced autism, removing the mercury won’t raise the dead and resurrect those dead brain cells.

Unless, of course, you’re claiming that there is ongoing damage from the mercury in the shot. In that case, removing that mercury that’s been hanging around for years without being excreted would be a good thing. It won’t resurrect the dead brain cells, but it will stop ongoing damage. But, years later, the child has been exposed to mercury from any number of sources, such as fish or just breathing the air. How can you claim that the other exposure to mercury is irrelevant and it was — it had to be — the mercury in that long-ago shot that caused the problem? If the child is suffering mercury poisoning years later, that surely is due to environmental mercury.

I just don’t see how one can simultaneously claim that mercury in shots years ago caused autism and chelation today can cure or even just improve the condition.