A revolution in thought

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

I don't have a position yet. I am taking a cautionary approach until further evidence either supports or denies the correlation between thimerosal and brain insult in a subset of children.

Still weaseling.

Do you think autism rates are declining, increasing, or staying steady?

[LadyShea]

This paper posits minor brain damage from instant cord clamping as a cause of LD, autism, etc. They further say this brain damage includes damage to the blood-brain-barrier which may make birth injured infants more susceptible to any negative effects of early vaccines

http://www.birth-brain-injury.org/do...III.pdf‎

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Still weaseling.

Do you think autism rates are declining, increasing, or staying steady?

I don't get your attitude at all. Why are you so enamored by one study that shows cutting off oxygen to an infant from cutting the cord too soon makes sense and other studies which correlate vaccines to autism go by the wayside.

[LadyShea]

<----peacegirl

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

This paper posits minor brain damage from instant cord clamping as a cause of LD, autism, etc. They further say this brain damage includes damage to the blood-brain-barrier which may make birth injured infants more susceptible to any negative effects of early vaccines

http://www.birth-brain-injury.org/do...III.pdf‎

First of all, what you are saying when translated is who the *#*$ cares about the reason for brain injured children. You are trying very hard to justify your position that vaccines have nothing to do with brain dysfunction in babies and toddlers, but it's not working.

[Vivisectus]

Are you kidding me? I don't have to account to prove my case. Who do you think you are LadyShea, god incarnate? I'm being serious; I just don't get your attitude at all. What gives you the right to conclude that the studies you used are correct and other studies go by the wayside? Please explain. As far as I'm concerned you are showing your bias so that you can feel justified in your decisions to give your child a flu vaccine. Show me otherwise, but don't attack me on false allegations.

This brutal asking someone to clearly state their opinion on a subject has to stop, Lady Shea! Good god, what is going to satisfy Her Inquisitorial Highness here? An answer or something?

[LadyShea]

<----peacegirl

[Vivisectus]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

First of all, what you are saying when translated is who the fuck cares about the reason for brain injured children. In your effort to be vindicated, you would be willing to hear another court case with the best lawyers available to support your false testimony. You lose LadyShea big time. Try and try again to justify the issue of vaccine damage not having anything to do with vaccines.

Incoherent rage noted! Now breathe deeply and try again, only use your words this time.

[LadyShea]

I actually found that paper very interesting and disturbing and will be following up on that research. How you read my not giving a fuck into my post is the big mystery.

You are acting quite deranged.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

It's a very good analogy, the great majority of people exposed to a disease are protected from disease by the vaccine as the great majority of people in an accident are protected from injury by the seat belts. There are a small number of people who are adversely effected by the vaccine, and there are only a few accidents where wearing seat belts is less safe.

You say there is a small number of people adversely affected by vaccines. Let's compare the numbers.

Originally Posted by thedoc

Your whole argument has been that those few who are effected by the vaccine should dictate the actions of the many who would be helped by the vaccine. If you were ever in an auto accident where the seat belts were a hindrance to your safety, you would be actively campaigning to repeal the seat belt law.

No I wouldn't, not if the benefits outweigh the risks but where vaccines are concerned we just don't know the extent of damage that vaccines may be causing, nor do we know which children may be affected.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

No I wouldn't, not if the benefits outweigh the risks but where vaccines are concerned we don't know the extent of the damage, nor do we know which children may be affected.

According to the WHO, prior to widespread vaccination starting in 1980, measles killed approximately 2.6 million deaths per year. In 2011 (the last year for which they appear to have data), the number of deaths was approximately 158,000. So, that's approximately 2.4 million lives saved per year, and that's just for measles. Unless the "extent of the damage" is equivalent to 2.4 million people dying every year, then that's an easy net win for vaccination and, again, I'm only using the numbers from a single disease.

Are there 2.4 million people out there dying every year that you think you can pin on vaccination?

[Stephen Maturin]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

They are not completely false.

Well now, there's a spirited defense! "Yeah, the statements are false. All right, they're mostly false. Hell, they're almost totally false. However, they're not completely false so give the guy a break!"

Yes, they are indeed completely false. O'Shea wrote that "There's no blood-brain barrier in infants." Not "the blood-brain barrier isn't fully developed until X," not "the blood-brain barrier is more permeable until X," but instead the blood-brain barrier doesn't exist at all in infants.

O'Shea also wrote that "Infants don't produce bile." Not that "infants have a poor biliary excretion of mercury" but rather that infants don't produce bile at all.

Both claims, as O'Shea presented them, are 100% false. Infants do in fact have a blood-brain barrier. Infants do in fact produce bile. Not even the whale.to crazies cited in your response say otherwise.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

But that is just not the case Stephen. You are assuming a lot. They want validation because their fears are not unfounded and they're doing everything they can to prove it.

Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

But you're entire argument hinges on anything but the facts.

It's not an argument; it's an approach, and it's served me quite well.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

He doesn't have to be right all of the time in order to be right most of the time, or even some of the time.

Generally speaking, I agree. The fact that a moron/lunatic believes X does not make X ipso facto moronic and/or loony; X needs to stand or fall on its own merits, independent of the believer's shortcomings.

There are, however, only so many hours in a day. All of us have methods for determining which claims we'll dismiss outright and which we'll examine in greater detail. My method involves, in part, checking out the messenger. If the messenger adheres to any preposterous viewpoint -- for instance, that Protocols of the Elders of Zion is real and warrants persecution of Jews -- vastly heightened scrutiny of all his views is necessary. If the messenger adheres to multiple preposterous views (say, Protocols, Obama is ineligible for the presidency, the Aurora theater shooting was staged, Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, the holocaust never happened, etc.), then the chances that person has anything worthwhile to say on any subject become vanishingly small.

Under the above-described circumstances, rejecting out of hand everything that comes from a multi-loon makes sense. In my extensive experience, you'll be rejecting incorrect claims/beliefs far more often than you'll be rejecting correct ones. On the rare occasions that following this approach leads to you reject a correct claim, the time and trouble you've saved is more than sufficient compensation.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Sometimes a person has to swing to the other side of the pendulum (and question everything) in order to find nuggets of truth in a world that is not receiving the whole truth.

I'm not interested in sifting through a mountain of shit in the hope of finding a "nugget of truth." In my book, that's a quintessential fool's errand.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Yes, get started. Prove to me that you don't side with the FDA.

And I'm obliged to provide this proof because ... ?

Originally Posted by peacegirl

But what he wrote is not completely false according to what I've been reading. See above article.

Yes, the statements at issue ("There's no blood-brain barrier in infants" and "Infants don't produce bile") are completely false. See above.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

No it isn't.

The guy's making overblown claims directed to frightened and grieving parents, and supporting them with patent falsehoods. That's contemptible. It warrants all the written derision we can send his way, and maybe a whole lot more. I'm certainly not going to hunt O'Shea down, drag him from his house into the street, and beat him with a baseball bat until he shits himself, but I wouldn't shed any tears if someone else did.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Thanks for asking. I'm trying to do a little each day so I don't get overwhelmed. All I have to do is find some silver shoes and jewelry to match my dress. I found a dogwalker who lives right near me, which is a big relief since I'll be spending two nights at the hotel where they're having the wedding.

Cool. Sounds like things are coming along nicely. It also sounds like your household's like mine in one major respect -- it's all about accommodating the dogs.

show spoiler

Flossy and Zsa Zsa sharing a bed that's too small for either of them individually:



Zsa Zsa and Buddy enjoying some couch time:

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

Where am I talking nonsense?

From what I've read the BBB is not fully developed in newborns. This is still a controversial issue, as well as how well an infant's liver can handle these chemicals.

There is cause to believe that these metals (including thimerosal) could be contributing factors to many childhood illnesses.

Why is confidence in nature a laughing matter?

I think it's selfish of the vaccine manufacturers, the pharmaceutical companies, the doctors, and the politicians to be secretive about the potential risks of vaccines for the sake of profit.

For more than 100 years, doctors have been publishing articles in the medical literature about the brain-damaging side effects of vaccines. The mother of all vaccines—the smallpox vaccine, created by Britain’s Edward Jenner in 1796—was found to cause inflammation of the brain in one in 3,200 persons.13 After Pasteur began to inject patients with rabies vaccine in the 1880s, it became obvious that brain inflammation was a side effect that affected as many as one in 400 vaccinated persons.14 And by the 1960s and ’70s, the medical literature was full of reports that the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine was causing brain inflammation and death in babies getting the DPT shot.15,16

Doctors and public health officials were talking to each other in the pages of medical journals about the fact that vaccines could injure children’s brains, but those being vaccinated had no clue. Mothers taking their children to pediatricians to be vaccinated placed a blind trust in the complete safety and effectiveness of those vaccines.

From Healthy to Sick after Vaccination

I trusted without questioning when I took my newborn to my pediatrician for baby shots in the late 1970s. At the time, I considered myself a woman very well-educated in science and medicine. My mother and grandmother had been nurses, and I had become a medical writer at a teaching hospital after graduating from college.

But I knew nothing about the risks of vaccines, which I assumed were 100 percent safe and effective. It never occurred to me that a medical intervention designed to keep a healthy child healthy could ever harm that child. The concept of risk associated with prevention is quite different from the concept of risk associated with a cure.

Like many women who had babies in the late 1970s, I was part of the natural childbirth movement. I attended Lamaze classes to prepare myself for birth without medication, and I knew I would breastfeed my baby. I took vitamins during pregnancy, but never drank alcohol. I ate all the right foods, and endured the occasional headache without reaching for an aspirin. I was determined to do nothing that would harm the baby in my womb, and do everything once my baby was born to give him the best start he could get in life.

Except for a milk allergy that gave him colic his first few months, my son, Chris, was a lively, contented baby who always wanted to be around people and always seemed to be doing things ahead of schedule. He had begun saying words at seven months and speaking in full sentences at age two. At two and a half years, he could identify the upper- and lower-case alphabets and numbers up to 20. He could name every card in the deck, and had created a card-identification game to entertain himself and our family. He was beginning to recognize words in the books we read together each day. One doctor told me he was cognitively gifted.

I remember that, for several weeks following Chris’s third DPT shot, when he was seven months old, there was a hard, red, hot lump at the site of the injection. I called my pediatrician’s office and was told by the nurse that it was “a bad lot of DPT vaccine,” and not to worry about it. I asked if I should bring Chris in for another shot, because I thought she meant the “bad vaccine” might not have been strong enough. I wanted my baby protected.

The day of his fourth DPT and OPV shots, when he was two and a half, Chris was healthy except for slight diarrhea left over from a 48-hour bout with the stomach flu he had had at the beach three weeks earlier. He had just come off of a round of antibiotics because, back then, antibiotics were given for everything from flu to pneumonia. The pediatrician, as well as the nurse preparing to give Chris his shots, said he didn’t have a fever, and that a little diarrhea didn’t matter.

Several hours after we got home, I realized how quiet it was in the house, and went upstairs to look for Chris. I walked into his bedroom to find him sitting in a rocking chair staring straight ahead, as if he couldn’t see me standing in the doorway. His face was white and his lips were slightly blue. When I called out his name, his eyelids fluttered, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his head fell to his shoulder. It was as if he had suddenly fallen asleep sitting up.

This was unusual—I had never before seen him fall asleep while sitting up. When I picked him up and carried him to his bed, he was like a dead weight in my arms. I remember thinking that maybe he was so tired because of what had happened at the doctor’s office, or maybe he was having a relapse of the flu. Chris slept in his bed without moving for more than six hours, through dinnertime, until I called my mom, who told me to try to wake him.

I climbed into Chris’s bed, lifted his limp body, and cradled his back against my chest as I rocked us both from side to side, calling out his name. I could feel him struggling to awake. He began mumbling the word bathroom, but he couldn’t sit up on his own or walk. I picked him up and carried him to the bathroom, where he had severe diarrhea and then, again, fell asleep sitting up. He slept for 12 more hours.

This was 1980. I had been given no information by my doctor about how to recognize a vaccine reaction.

In the following days and weeks, Chris deteriorated. He no longer knew his alphabet or numbers, and couldn’t identify the cards he once knew so well. He would not look at the books we had once read together every day. He couldn’t concentrate for more than a few seconds at a time. My little boy, once so happy-go-lucky, no longer smiled. He was now listless and emotionally fragile, crying or becoming angry at the slightest frustration.

Chris’s physical deterioration was just as profound. He had constant diarrhea, stopped eating, stopped growing, and was plagued with respiratory and ear infections for the first time in his life. The pediatrician told me it was just a stage he was going through and not to worry about it. After eight months of such deterioration, I took Chris to another pediatrician. He was tested for cystic fibrosis and celiac disease, but the tests came back negative. None of the doctors knew what was wrong with my son, who had become an entirely different child physically, mentally, and emotionally.

It would be another year before I stood in my kitchen and watched the Emmy Award–winning NBC-TV documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette, produced by consumer reporter Lea Thompson in spring 1982. I called the television station and asked to see the medical research that had been used to document the show. There, in the pages of Pediatrics, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and The British Medical Journal, I found clinical descriptions of reactions to the pertussis vaccine that exactly matched the symptoms I had witnessed my son have within four hours of his fourth DPT shot.

I learned that, in 1981, the British National Childhood Encephalopathy Study had reported a statistically significant correlation between DPT vaccine and brain inflammation leading to chronic neurological damage,17 and that the UCLA-FDA study published in Pediatrics in 1981 had found that one in 875 DPT shots is followed within 48 hours by a convulsion or collapse/shock reaction just like the one my son had suffered.18 As I leafed through more than 50 years of medical literature documenting the fact that the complications of pertussis disease, or whooping cough, were identical to the complications of whole-cell pertussis vaccine, I was stunned. I felt betrayed by a medical profession I had revered all my life.

The day Chris had his vaccine reaction, he should have been in an emergency room, not unconscious in his bed. As his mother, I should have had the information I needed to recognize what was happening to him and take steps to deal with it, including calling my doctor and, later, making sure the reaction was recorded in his medical record and reported to the vaccine manufacturer and health officials.

At age six, when Chris could not learn to read or write, he was given an extensive battery of tests that confirmed minimal brain damage that took the form of multiple learning disabilities, including: fine motor and short-term memory delays; dyslexia; auditory processing deficits; attention deficit disorder; and other developmental delays. He was removed from the Montessori school he attended and placed in a self-contained classroom for the learning-disabled in public school, where he stayed throughout elementary, junior, and high school, despite repeated unsuccessful efforts by the schools to “mainstream” him.

As a teenager, Chris struggled to deal with the big gaps between certain aspects of his intelligence—such as his creativity and his unusual ability to think on an abstract level, mixed with his inability to concentrate for long periods of time or to organize and process certain kinds of information he saw or heard. He was angry and frustrated because he couldn’t do what his peers could do, and was troubled both in and out of school. After working in a warehouse and mail room following high school, he eventually earned an associate degree in video and film production at a school where a third of the students are learning disabled and receive in-depth tutorial support. Chris is now making his way in the world using his creative gifts. He continually adjusts for the learning disabilities that will always be a part of who he is, but that he is determined will not define who he is.

The Vaccine Reaction Pattern Repeats Itself

My son’s vaccine reaction nearly a quarter century ago is identical to those that Harris Coulter and I reported in 1985 in DPT: A Shot in the Dark, and those that thousands of other mothers have reported to the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) for the past 22 years.19 These mothers tell us how they took healthy, bright children to doctors to be vaccinated and, within hours, days, or weeks, their children got sick, regressed, and became different children. Whether a child recovers, is left with minimal brain damage as my son was, or is more severely injured—as was the case with the children who were awarded nearly $2 billion in compensation under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 20—a pattern of common experience emerges. This pattern, repeated over and over in homes across America, has contributed in no small way to why the issue of vaccine safety will not go away.

Mothers call the NVIC and describe how, within days of vaccination, their babies run fevers; scream for hours, fall into a deep sleep, and wake up screaming again; start twitching, jerking, or staring into space as if they can’t hear or see; are covered with body rashes; become restless and irritable; or have a dramatic change in eating or sleeping habits.

Others describe a gradual deterioration in overall health, a picture that includes constant ear and respiratory infections and onset of allergies, including asthma; unexplained rashes; new sensitivity to foods such as milk; persistent diarrhea; sleep disturbances that turn night into day and day into night; loss of developmental milestones such as the ability to roll over or sit up; loss of speech, eye-contact, and communication skills; development of strange or violent behaviors that include hyperactivity, biting, hitting, social withdrawal, and repetitive movements such as flapping, rocking, and head banging. Older children and adults complain of muscle weakness, joint pain, crippling headaches, disabling fatigue, loss of memory, or being unable to concentrate and think clearly.

Depending on the child and the specific therapy interventions, there is either gradual full recovery or the child is eventually diagnosed with various kinds of chronic health problems. My son regressed after his DPT shot but stopped just short of autism. Why? I don’t know. Vaccine-induced brain injuries appear to be on a continuum ranging from milder forms such as ADD or ADHD and learning disabilities to autism-spectrum and seizure disorders to severe mental retardation, all the way to death. On this continuum, and often coinciding with brain dysfunction, is immune-system dysfunction ranging from development of severe allergies and asthma to intestinal bowel disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes.

Genetic and Biological Vulnerability

Many of the parents who contact the NVIC report that their child suffered previous vaccine-reaction symptoms that were written off by their doctors as unrelated or unimportant. Others say their child was sick at the time of vaccination, often on antibiotics. Still others describe strong family histories of autoimmune disorders such as thyroid disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes, and severe allergies to milk, pollen, medications, and vaccines. Still other babies, especially those who die after vaccination, were born premature, had difficult births, were underweight, or had histories of health problems before receiving multiple vaccines.

How Many Vaccine-Injured Children Are There?

But how many children have vaccine reactions every year? Is it really only one in 110,000 or one in a million who are left permanently disabled after vaccination? Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler observed in 1993 that less than 1 percent of doctors report adverse events following prescription drug use.21 There have been estimates that perhaps less than 5 or 10 percent of doctors report hospitalizations, injuries, deaths, or other serious health problems following vaccination. The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act contained no legal sanctions for not reporting; doctors can refuse to report and suffer no consequences.

Even so, each year about 12,000 reports are made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System; parents as well as doctors can make those reports.22 However, if that number represents only 10 percent of what is actually occurring, then the actual number may be 120,000 vaccine-adverse events. If doctors report vaccine reactions as infrequently as Dr. Kessler said they report prescription-drug reactions, and the number 12,000 is only 1 percent of the actual total, then the real number may be 1.2 million vaccine-adverse events annually.

The larger unanswered question that haunts every new vaccine mandate is: Has the repeated manipulation of the immune system with multiple vaccines in the first three years of life, when the interrelated brain and immune systems develop most rapidly outside the womb, been an unrecognized cofactor in the epidemics of chronic disease and disability plaguing so many children today?

A Vacuum of Scientific Knowledge

When you look at the possible biological mechanisms for vaccine-induced neuroimmune dysfunction, including chronic inflammation, the scientific picture is complicated by the presence of potentially toxic components added to vaccines as stabilizers, preservatives, and adjuvants. These include many substances—heavy metals such as mercury and aluminum, yeast, monosodium glutamate (MSG), formalin, and antibiotics—that, together with residual DNA and possible adventitious agent contamination from animal and human cell substrates, have unknown biological effects.23 For example, the monkey virus SV40, which contaminated oral polio vaccine given to American children until 1999, has been found in children and adults suffering from bone, brain, and lung cancers, as well as from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.24

There is an astonishing lack of basic scientific knowledge about how viral and bacterial vaccines, given in combination, act to disrupt brain and immune-system function in the human body at the cellular and molecular levels.25, 26 Pre-licensure studies conducted by industry to demonstrate the safety of new vaccines rarely study large numbers of children given the experimental vaccine in combination with other vaccines,27 and follow-up for serious health problems following vaccination is limited to a few days or weeks.28 For example, the flu vaccine that the CDC recommends all healthy babies get has never been studied for safety when given in combination with other vaccines.29

In addition, there have never been any large, prospective, long-term studies comparing the long-term health of highly vaccinated individuals versus those who have never been vaccinated at all. Therefore, the background rates for ADHD, learning disabilities, autism, seizure disorders, asthma, diabetes, intestinal bowel disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, and other brain and immune-system dysfunction in a genetically diverse unvaccinated population remains unknown.

This vacuum of basic scientific knowledge fatally compromises the statistical conclusions of every recent epidemiological study conducted by government and industry to try to prove that vaccines do not cause chronic health problems such as autism. The recently released Institute of Medicine report that denied a causal relationship between autism and vaccines and called for an end to all research into vaccine-associated autism relied almost exclusively on epidemiological studies.30 Researchers conducting epidemiological studies to estimate the incidence of disease in vaccinated individuals often look at old medical records to do their statistical analyses. But the scientific truth about a vaccine’s ability to cause chronic health problems has not been determined with any degree of certainty because so little research has ever been conducted into the biological mechanisms involved in vaccine-induced brain and immune-system dysfunction, and all of the participants in epidemiological studies are vaccinated.

It is possible that when all children were exposed to only DPT and polio vaccines in the 1960s, a tiny fraction of those genetically susceptible to responding adversely to vaccination were affected. But with the addition of the combination measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to the routine vaccination schedule in 1979, and then the Hib, hepatitis B, chickenpox, and pneumococcal vaccines in the late 1980s and 1990s, far more of the genetically vulnerable are now being brought into the group of vaccine-adverse responders.

Government and industry refuse to investigate the genetic and other biological high-risk factors for vaccine-induced chronic health problems. But independent research is being conducted at the M.I.N.D. Institute at UC Davis, and by other nongovernment, nonindustry researchers around the world. Their research may well eventually confirm that there is a critical interaction between a child’s genetic susceptibility to respond adversely to vaccination and one or more cofactors, such as a coinciding illness or concurrent exposure to medications or other environmental toxins while in the womb or after birth.

A Primitive Inflammatory Response Gone Wrong

However, the damaging effects of vaccines in the genetically vulnerable is potentially only one part of the explanation of why there has been an explosion of chronic disease in ours, the most highly vaccinated population in the world. Mass vaccination with multiple vaccines in early childhood has removed most natural infection from the human experience. This human intervention is only about 50 years old. When you consider the evolution of human beings and our place in the natural order, an order that was created long before Edward Jenner first came up with the idea of vaccination, 50 years is a very short period of time.

Humans and infectious microbes have coexisted for as long as we have walked the earth, and the human immune system has developed an efficient way of meeting the challenge from viruses and bacteria. When infected with viruses, parasites, and cancer cells, the body’s first line of defense is for the cellular, or “innate,” part of the immune system to mount an inflammatory response, which then signals the humoral, or “learned,” part of the immune system to produce anti-inflammatory chemicals and antibodies that resolve inflammation so that healing can take place.

“Babies are born with a very immature cellular immune system,” says Lawrence Palevsky, MD, a New York pediatrician and cofounder of the Holistic Pediatric Association. “Childhood viral infectious diseases like measles, mumps, and chickenpox initially stimulate the cellular part of the immune system, which leads to the production of the signs of inflammation—fever, redness, swelling, and mucus. This cellular immune response stimulates the humoral part of the immune system to produce anti-inflammatory chemicals and antibodies that assist in recovery from these illnesses. This natural process helps the cellular and humoral immune systems mature. A healthy, mature immune system for children requires an equal balance of cellular and humoral immune-system responses.”

Palevsky points out that vaccination largely bypasses the cellular immune system in favor of stimulating the humoral part of the immune system. “Vaccination does not mimic the natural infection process. Although vaccines stimulate production of antibodies in an attempt to artificially induce immunity to disease, chronic inflammation can be a by-product of vaccination by disrupting the balance of cellular and humoral immune-system responses, especially in those children genetically predisposed to inflammatory conditions such as autoimmune disorders.”

Philip Incao, MD, a holistic family-care physician in Colorado, agrees: “Physically, health is about balancing acute inflammatory responses to infection, which stimulate one arm of the immune system, and chronic inflammatory responses to infection, which stimulate the other arm of the immune system. Overuse of vaccines to suppress all acute, externalizing inflammations early in life can set up the immune system to respond to future stresses and infections by developing chronic, internalizing disease later in life.”

Back to Nature: The Paradigm Shift

The questions being raised about the wisdom of using large numbers of vaccines to suppress or eradicate all infectious disease are understandable in light of the fact that so many highly vaccinated children and adults are chronically ill. However, the challenge to our system of mass vaccination is also part of the move by educated healthcare consumers away from a technology and a medical model that many believe has failed. Intuitively, people in many technologically advanced countries are becoming increasingly skeptical about not only the safety of vaccines, but also the toxic properties and overuse of prescription drugs and the risks of medical tests and invasive surgeries.

Among the top ten causes of death in the US are toxic reactions to correctly prescribed drugs, which make more than 2 million Americans seriously ill every year and kill 106,000 more.31 The realization that dentists have filled our mouths with silver-mercury amalgams and doctors have injected mercury-laced vaccines into our children’s bodies are just two examples of why people are beginning to distrust what doctors and public health officials tell them to do.

A 1998 survey found that 39 million Americans made more than 600 million visits to alternative healthcare practitioners in 1997—more than to primary-care physicians.32 These patients paid most of the $21.2 billion costs out of pocket when insurance plans would not reimburse them, citing a desire to “prevent future illness from occurring” and “maintain health and vitality.” Healthcare professions including chiropractic, naturopathy, homeopathy, acupuncture, and other modalities offering a drug-free way to maintain health are becoming more popular as people realize they are healthier when they take fewer drugs and vaccines.

As a new model for staying well struggles to replace an old model that has failed too many, a mighty battle is taking place in the offices of pediatricians, who face increasingly well-educated, independent-thinking parents who demand to be equal partners in making healthcare decisions for their children. At no time is that battle more fierce than when an articulate parent, one who knows more than a pediatrician about vaccine risks, begins to ask questions and demand answers instead of blindly trusting and offering up a child for vaccination.

Educated parents, who suspect that their children are genetically at risk for vaccine complications, are challenging the utilitarian rationale adopted by public health officials to justify forced vaccination. The ideas that everyone has to get vaccinated for the “greater good,” and that it is acceptable for some children to be sacrificed for the welfare of the rest, does not feel quite right when one-size-fits-all vaccine policies end up targeting the genetically vulnerable as expendable.

The right to know and the freedom to choose were the reasons I joined with Kathi Williams and other parents of vaccine-injured children, who 22 years ago launched the organized movement for vaccine safety and informed consent in this country. I knew then that I wanted to work to empower other women who become mothers to believe in and stand up for our right to make informed, voluntary decisions about vaccination for the children we love more than we ever thought we could love anyone.

When it comes to the complex job of raising a child day to day, we mothers are on the front line. But when we enter the often paternalistic world of science and medicine, we are made to feel as if we are not smart enough, educated enough, or rational enough to make our own good decisions about what is best for the health and well-being of our children. It is in pediatricians’ offices, public health clinics, and hospital corridors where we have been most conditioned to feel incapable and helpless to do anything other than what we are told to do.

In reality, we are more than capable of using our intelligence, our hearts, and our mothers’ intuition to demand to know the truth and make informed choices about any medical intervention that carries a risk of injury or death for our children. No one has more of a right to do this than we, the life-givers, life defenders, and primary caretakers of our children’s well-being.

Once you have gathered all the information you can find about infectious diseases and vaccines and have spoken to one or more healthcare professionals, you will know what to do. Once you have made a vaccination decision for your child, don’t second-guess yourself. You have made an educated, conscious choice, and no matter what happens, you have been the best mother you can be. As mothers, it is all we can do.

http://www.nvic.org/vaccination-deci...fvaccines.aspx

Please refresh my memory. What examples are you talking about?

No, you are not "justified" in your concern. You consistently fail to come up with a justification other than an emotional one: it makes you feel nicer to avoid the scary chemicals even though you have no clear rational reason to do so.

I don't trust chemicals over nature, especially when there's absolutely no proof that a healthy immune system cannot do the job that nature intended.

Vaccine's Safety A Crime Against Humanity | NWO |...

And that is your choice as a parent to make. As far as comparing this discussion with his claim regarding efferent vision (which I know everyone is trying to do so they can indict me with the inability to know what is true and what isn't), your believing in the validity of afferent vision is fine with me. I hope you at the very least take a wait and see approach until further proof comes in one way or the other. That's all I can do because nothing I say in defense of his claim will convince any of you that science may have been mistaken, and the same could be true for vaccines, although the damage already done by the vaccine industry could be incalculable.

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

You seem unable or unwilling to face the actual point once again. The "wait and see" approach is just an excuse to ignore evidence.

That's not true because the evidence does not conclude that vaccines are safe for all children. There are other ways to build our children's immune systems. The wait and see approach is the smart approach to take. It warrants being cautious especially when it comes to injecting something into a child that could inadvertently hurt him.

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

But I am glad you agree that when you user your standard for determining what is true would also result in the flat earth being possibly true.

My standard for determining what is true is based on science, and so far the science isn't looking good.

[The Lone Ranger]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

My standard for determining what is true is based on science ...

[Adam]

Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger

Remember, when peacegirl says "science", she isn't really referring to what the rest of us mean when we use the word, but has "clarified" the definition to better reflect what she thinks it should mean in what she imagines the real world to be.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

My standard for determining what is true is based on science,

How can you possibly claim that you base your standard of truth on science, when you have demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that you don't know what science is or how science is done?

[Stephen Maturin]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

I don't trust chemicals over nature, especially when there's absolutely no proof that a healthy immune system cannot do the job that nature intended.

You realize, don't you, that "chemicals" and "nature" are about as far from mutual exclusivity as you can get absent total synonymy.

Also, nature doesn't have intentions.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

That's not true because the evidence does not conclude that vaccines are safe for all children. There are other ways to build our children's immune systems. The wait and see approach is the smart approach to take. It warrants being cautious especially when it comes to injecting something into a child that could inadvertently hurt him.

By those standards, we should stop transporting children in motor vehicles forthwith. After all, we're quite sure that vehicular transport will result in serious injury and death for some children, and there are other ways to get the little tykes from Point A to Point B. Surely we should be cautious before strapping a child into a conveyance that could inadvertently hurt him.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

I actually found that paper very interesting and disturbing and will be following up on that research. How you read my not giving a fuck into my post is the big mystery.

I did too (instant cord clamping is being discouraged), but it does not rule out the possibility that the latest vaccine schedule could be causing harm to vulnerable children.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

You realize, don't you, that "chemicals" and "nature" are about as far from mutual exclusivity as you can get absent total synonymy.

Technically you're right. I was talking about unprocessed chemicals.

A natural ingredient is a substance that occurs in nature and is either unprocessed or separated from its natural state.

Did You Know...
"Chemical-free" products are not chemically free?
Even though the word "chemical" has gotten a bad name of late, everything in the world is made of chemicals, even us. Water, air and food are literally composed of thousands of chemicals. The only thing that would truly be chemical-free would be an utter vacuum - devoid of everything!

Did You Know...

All of nature is a chemical factory?
A cucumber contains over 160 different chemicals and a strawberry contains over 130 different chemicals - all from natural sources! The air we breathe contains oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, among many other gases.

P&G Beauty & Grooming | Natural Ingredients vs. Man-Made Ingredients

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Also, nature doesn't have intentions.

I didn't think you would take that comment literally.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

That's not true because the evidence does not conclude that vaccines are safe for all children. There are other ways to build our children's immune systems. The wait and see approach is the smart approach to take. It warrants being cautious especially when it comes to injecting something into a child that could inadvertently hurt him.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

By those standards, we should stop transporting children in motor vehicles forthwith. After all, we're quite sure that vehicular transport will result in serious injury and death for some children, and there are other ways to get the little tykes from Point A to Point B. Surely we should be cautious before strapping a child into a conveyance that could inadvertently hurt him.

It's not that easy to get little tykes from Point A to Point B, especially if grandma lives in the next town, so we do the next best thing which is to transport them using car seats and seat belts. The rare occasion that a child could get hurt by a seatbelt cannot compare to the potential danger of vaccines. The verdict is still out on just how dangerous.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by thedoc

How can you possibly claim that you base your standard of truth on science, when you have demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that you don't know what science is or how science is done?

That's just not true. The problem with the scientific method is that the conclusions drawn are often unreliable. Empirical studies are limited to what they can prove, especially when you're talking about the body with hundreds of chemical reactions that have specific functions and are orchestrated specifically for certain jobs. Any insult to this intricate system could cause a cascade of undesirable events.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Well now, there's a spirited defense! "Yeah, the statements are false. All right, they're mostly false. Hell, they're almost totally false. However, they're not completely false so give the guy a break!"

Yes, they are indeed completely false. O'Shea wrote that "There's no blood-brain barrier in infants." Not "the blood-brain barrier isn't fully developed until X," not "the blood-brain barrier is more permeable until X," but instead the blood-brain barrier doesn't exist at all in infants.

I think the following statement comes close to what he meant to say when he said the BBB doesn't exist. I don't believe he was wrong when saying this, especially when it comes to the purpose of his statement which is that metal ions can get into an infant's brain. If this is true you are splitting hairs.

"The blood-brain barrier is not intact in infants until at least 6 weeks of life. This is why a newborn with a fever must be subjected to a spinal tap to rule out meningitis. Any virus or bacteria that a newborn is exposed to can go directly to the nervous system. This is why the Hepatitis B vaccine at birth is so dangerous. Between 1991 and 1999, when the shot contained Thimerosal, giving it at birth would have resulted in mercury crossing into the brain since the blood-brain barrier was not yet intact. As a nurse, I'm concerned that this information about the normal timing of a blood-brain barrier forming is not more readily known.

Blood brain barrier

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

O'Shea also wrote that "Infants don't produce bile." Not that "infants have a poor biliary excretion of mercury" but rather that infants don't produce bile [U]at all. Both claims, as O'Shea presented them, are 100% false. Infants do in fact have a blood-brain barrier. Infants do in fact produce bile. Not even the whale.to crazies cited in your response say otherwise.

You are catching him on a technicality. The excretion rate of mercury is much slower than adults. That means that an infant's biliary system for all intents and purposes does not work well, and could contribute to thimerosal poisoning.

Infants excrete mercury more slowly than adults.

ARL : Mercury Toxicity

Originally Posted by peacegirl

But that is just not the case Stephen. You are assuming a lot. They want validation because their fears are not unfounded and they're doing everything they can to prove it.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.

Facts are definitely in evidence. Objection overruled.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Take Ranger Mike, for instance. He's a birther, a 9/11 troofer, a Sandy Hook denier, etc. The pig farmer who runs whale.to believes in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a barrelful of other loonery. In an sane wold, such people wouldn't get the time of day from anyone. However, this is not a sane world. There's a huge market for fear mongering and other forms of irrationality, and clowns like these are more than happy to serve as suppliers.

But you're entire argument hinges on anything but the facts.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

It's not an argument; it's an approach, and it's served me quite well.

I don't see how it has served you well if your goal is to be unbiased.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

He doesn't have to be right all of the time in order to be right most of the time, or even some of the time.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Generally speaking, I agree. The fact that a moron/lunatic believes X does not make X ipso facto moronic and/or loony; X needs to stand or fall on its own merits, independent of the believer's shortcomings.

There are, however, only so many hours in a day. All of us have methods for determining which claims we'll dismiss outright and which we'll examine in greater detail. My method involves, in part, checking out the messenger. If the messenger adheres to any preposterous viewpoint -- for instance, that Protocols of the Elders of Zion is real and warrants persecution of Jews -- vastly heightened scrutiny of all his views is necessary. If the messenger adheres to multiple preposterous views (say, Protocols, Obama is ineligible for the presidency, the Aurora theater shooting was staged, Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, the holocaust never happened, etc.), then the chances that person has anything worthwhile to say on any subject become vanishingly small.

I don't know anything about Mike Adams other than what I have read on his website. I don't go looking for reasons to dislike someone before I even hear what his message is. That would exclude people unfairly and prematurely. That being said, it does surprise me that he would be on the fringe when it comes to the conspiracy theories he has been accused of.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Under the above-described circumstances, rejecting out of hand everything that comes from a multi-loon makes sense. In my extensive experience, you'll be rejecting incorrect claims/beliefs far more often than you'll be rejecting correct ones. On the rare occasions that following this approach leads to you reject a correct claim, the time and trouble you've saved is more than sufficient compensation.

I'm not interested in sifting through a mountain of shit in the hope of finding a "nugget of truth." In my book, that's a quintessential fool's errand.

But what if your metholodogy is wrong? What if you first read what a person has to say before condemning him by searching out the gossip. Maybe in so doing you would find a mountain of truth atop a "nugget or two of shit".

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Yes, get started. Prove to me that you don't side with the FDA.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

And I'm obliged to provide this proof because ... ?

Because it would help me to know where your allegiance lies.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

The dumbass moniker was for the chiro who wrote the article. I've dealt with dozens of chiros over the years, and most of them go out of their way to tell you that their training lasts longer than that of M.D.s. Yet this O'Shea clown wrote that infants have no blood-brain barrier and don't produce bile. Any moron with a computer and internet access could find out that both claims were false with just a couple of minutes research. O'Shea either knew the statements are false, in which case he's a liar, or didn't know they're false and couldn't be fucked to do a tiny bit of research, in which case he's stupid and lazy.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

But what he wrote is not completely false according to what I've been reading. See above article.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Yes, the statements at issue ("There's no blood-brain barrier in infants" and "Infants don't produce bile") are completely false. See above.

I wasn't referring to that article. I was referring to another article which supports the fact that infants cannot excrete mercury at the rate adults do, which could pose a serious problem.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

No it isn't.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

The guy's making overblown claims directed to frightened and grieving parents, and supporting them with patent falsehoods. That's contemptible. It warrants all the written derision we can send his way, and maybe a whole lot more. I'm certainly not going to hunt O'Shea down, drag him from his house into the street, and beat him with a baseball bat until he shits himself, but I wouldn't shed any tears if someone else did.

You're being too hard on him. There is a nugget of truth to these two statements, even though they were exaggerated. The anti-vaxers are drawing in more and more adherents. Are you going to beat them all (figuratively) with baseball bats, or are you going to take time to see why this issue is not going away?

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Thanks for asking. I'm trying to do a little each day so I don't get overwhelmed. All I have to do is find some silver shoes and jewelry to match my dress. I found a dogwalker who lives right near me, which is a big relief since I'll be spending two nights at the hotel where they're having the wedding.

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Cool. Sounds like things are coming along nicely. It also sounds like your household's like mine in one major respect -- it's all about accommodating the dogs.

show spoiler

Flossy and Zsa Zsa sharing a bed that's too small for either of them individually:



Zsa Zsa and Buddy enjoying some couch time:

Your dogs are very sweet. Yes, we're both kindred spirits in this regard. My dogs come first. If they weren't well taken care of, I wouldn't be able to have a good time.

[LadyShea]

LOL Maturin is a total crazy dog lady...he sometimes pretends that we don't know.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by Adam

According to the WHO, prior to widespread vaccination starting in 1980, measles killed approximately 2.6 million deaths per year. In 2011 (the last year for which they appear to have data), the number of deaths was approximately 158,000. So, that's approximately 2.4 million lives saved per year, and that's just for measles. Unless the "extent of the damage" is equivalent to 2.4 million people dying every year, then that's an easy net win for vaccination and, again, I'm only using the numbers from a single disease.

Are there 2.4 million people out there dying every year that you think you can pin on vaccination?

And how are you so sure your stats are correct? This may open your eyes.


WHY AUTISM WILL NEVER BE SOLVED WITHIN THE CURRENT MEDICAL PARADIGM

What?? You don’t like hearing that? Does this position seem in any way harsh, overly pessimistic or cynical? Well for your consideration, this is just a dose of tough love compiled from observations and research we have undertaken over the last seven years, combined with logical forward conclusions based around the illogical modus operandi of our “modern” medical research and testing paradigm.

But for all of you who are seeking real answers and help for your families because you’re currently doing your best to deal with various degrees of Autism, don’t feel that this seemingly dead-end proclamation applies exclusively to you, because the title of this writing could be just as accurate if you substitute for “Autism”, any of the words “Obesity”, “Diabetes”, “Heart Disease” or even the big C-word “Cancer”. This essay may be a little long, but I hope that anyone who actually desires to see real answers for the biggest challenges to the health and future of our world will put on their thinking-cap and bear with me for just a few minutes.

Our conventional modern health system is completely broken, and without the highly unlikely prospect of ripping it out by its very deep roots, the terminal flaws are not going to be repaired. This is a formidable beast that knows very well how to feed itself, and one quite comfortable with where it resides. The only substantial protection for we the people, is to aggressively educate ourselves and do everything in our power to protect and preserve our rights and freedom for independent choices and options regarding the health and medical care for our families. Ongoing access to nonconforming information will always represent your most effective tool.

Now I know that this prospect may not ring a happy note with the many who would be far more comfortable with their continuing blind belief that what we have surrendered and entrusted over the decades to the medical and drug establishment has been utilized in good faith and with the best of intentions, but folks, maybe our loudest wake up call to date has now arrived. Adults may choose to ignore and abuse themselves as they please, but the skyrocketing rate of Autism that is savaging our youth and threatening no less than the very fabric of global society is now the latest and most caustic symptom of the even more massive problem.

Face it people – we’re all suffering under the biggest and most dangerous marketing scam in history. We’ve turned the control and future of our most prized possession in life – our health, over to bureaucratic whim, the processed food monopolies, and a massively powerful for-profit pharmaceutical industry that hocks their wares to us using the very same strategies and tactics that have been applied to create motivations and promote our need for and regular consumption of everything from potato chips, to video games to the latest and greatest pair of sneakers.

But I don’t mean to digress, because I probably grabbed your attention to this rant because of the provocative title that makes reference to the disturbing topic of Autism. Well, as both opening evidence and as a bottom-line summary of my premise, let me recap the completely obvious: A couple of decades of massive effort and hundreds of millions of public, foundational, governmental and corporate bucks have been dumped into this apparent black hole of research…and to what current status? By any measure, the statistics depicting the impact of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD’s) have gotten worse, not better, each and every few years – now diagnosed in at least 1 in every 88 children. Putting this figure in tragic perspective, that’s more kids than are being stricken by diabetes, AIDS, cancer, cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and Down syndrome – all combined. May I now please call for any evidence in pleading the case that the system is somehow working??

The passionate front line in these efforts has always been and remains the countless individuals and families out there who have been contributing their time and money with the best hopes of bringing help to those in their lives who are already affected. Now virtually all they continue to hear back from the de facto leadership in the fight is that next to nothing has yet to be revealed, but the battle must go on at all cost and our best strategies now lie in earlier detection of symptomatic toddlers and in prayers that the drug empire will arrive on its proverbial white horse delivering a bucket of new pills and vaccines along with cooked-up pitches for ill-fated attempts to reduce future incidences by some ridiculously small margins. So the same folks who have been championing the efforts all along are now being left holding the empty bag, while holding their still suffering children.

Our organization fully appreciates the loud and frantic debate that there may indeed be a multitude if not a hundred different and interacting factors that are contributing to ASD’s alone, so yes, the detective work is laborious to say the least. However we truly believe that when considering the unprecedented escalation in diagnosed cases over the last couple of decades, logic suggests that there may be no more than a handful of contributing factors that are actually responsible for the vast portion of the straight up spike in incidence. So for us, rather than devote our resources toward trying to locate 95% of the hundred or more triggers responsible for maybe 5% of the cases of Autism, we choose to try to target and isolate the 5% of factors that just may be responsible for 95% of the spike in occurrence. This strategy just seems to make the most sense at this critical point in time.

I don’t wish to come off as some Gloomy Gus here, so as to not bury the lead story and have you go off and pull a blanket over yourself in a corner somewhere, let me first share with you that there are indeed real answers here currently, with more on the way, for the causes, reversal and prevention of ASD’s along with a broad array of many of the other most prominent conditions that are plaguing the health of hundreds of millions of children and adults of our world. But if you’re sitting around waiting for the drug companies and/or the FDA to tell you about them and bestow their blessings, then we’ll still be having this same discussion twenty years from now. Don’t take this as a call for or any expectation of overthrowing the system. My only intent here is to present a logical case that might get a few more people out there to wake up and smell the complete inefficiency of the very parties that they are expecting will uncover and deliver the answers. It seems to us that the only viable interim solution is to have more people gain the education and empowerment to take charge of things for themselves.

First let me start by asking for a telling show of hands: How many of you out there, when you picture in your mind the drug industry, think of a bunch of guys in white research coats with name badges, eyeglasses, comb-over hair, Petri dishes and test tubes who are selflessly and sleeplessly laboring and endeavoring to find cures for the medical woes of the planet? One… two… I see a few hands going up out there. You folks can go back to sleep now.

And how many out there believe in the long perpetuated scenario that despite the fact that the drug empire certainly needs to remain viable and highly profitable in order to continue to serve as the vigilant and steadfast guardians of public health, the vast majority of the people and intentions of this industry still no doubt offer our best and greatest hope in advancing public health in the face of ever-mounting challenges to our wellness and healthy lifespan? A few more hands are up now, but you folks are still living in a dream world, so start studying-up while there’s any time left. There’s plenty of research and exposes available out there that have been written on this subject, so just do a little searching.

So does that mean that we and the rest of you still without your hands raised believe in the inherent and pervasive “evil” of Big Pharma, the FDA and the rest of the entrenched medical establishment? Absolutely not. We may just logically recognize that there are far more business interests behind creating long-term, symptom-mitigating treatment strategies, than in finding natural, non-patentable and non-proprietary means to do the same, or in teaching simple and effective preventative practices (God forbid…). We simply believe that this is a case where the public have unwittingly allowed a fox to be in charge of the henhouse and are now expecting unrealistic results.

The primary foundational platform for nutrition and the other natural sciences is the validated assumption that whether your personal belief is that our human race originated through divine creation, millions of years of tweaking evolution, or because we were dumped off hitchhikers from passing extraterrestrial travelers, the fact is that the human body with all its countless integrated systems and functions is a true miracle to behold. And when it works, it works with extraordinary efficiency. Therefore the first area of investigation and suspicion that a natural practitioner looks to when there is disruption of wellness in a person, is what aspects aren’t working properly. Restore proper fuel (nutrition), organ functions, immune system response, and reduce toxic load and exposure, and son of a gun, more times than not, things start workin’ again.

In stark contrast, the notion that has been developed and sold by much of modern medicine and virtually all of the pharmaceutical community is that we are all hapless potential victims of every new mutated pathogen, rogue gene, disease and disorder that this dangerous world throws in our paths, and the best way to deal with all the mayhem is not through proactive actions or education that would promote superior lifestyle changes to restore bodily defense and balance, but the initiation and protracted use of drugs that have absolutely no intent or expectation of fixing the problems, but are instead designed to mimic or confound normal bodily regulation systems in order to keep the patient in a perpetual state of reliance on those drugs. The earlier in life one starts on drugs, the longer they will be both physically and mentally dependent on layered and cascading courses of medications. This is the harsh reality, which represents nothing other than a downward spiral for proper long term health management.

Unfortunately these two philosophies about the sources and paths to wellness are not only highly divergent in strategy, but represent virtual polar opposites with respect to how results are assessed and measured. The ideal outcome for natural medicine is to provide proactive preventative strategies and then be confident that an ongoing healthy report card is sufficient retrospective evidence of the wisdom of such strategies. Ideal outcome for conventional modern medicine has been reduced to reactively waiting until negative symptoms and conditions develop and then prescribing drugs and other courses of care to try to counteract those symptoms perpetually. “How long do I need to stay on these drugs Doc?” Answer: “How long to you want to live?”

Understand that the resulting process that has been established and refined within the last century through the FDA here in the U.S. may initially have had the best intentions of providing a proving ground to protect the uninformed and unwashed masses from being subjected to promoted drugs and other treatments that might be anywhere between ineffective to dangerous. But very unfortunately this same process has now been adulterated into being used to redefine and exclusively own such terms as “disease”, “treatment” and “cure”, and the game has been rigged to exclude virtually all protocols, products and services outside their powerful and growing purview from being considered as valid, effective or legitimate.

So let’s return to Autism specifically in order to illustrate this point: We certainly stipulate that the medical research community at large is aggressively looking for answers, but those answers must necessarily involve connections to some responsible pathogen, autoimmune disorder or genetic abnormality if counteracting pharmaceuticals are to be created, tested and eventually made available. For example; if a yet to be identified virus was isolated as a primary culprit in the formation of Autism disorders, this would mark a clear path toward development of a vaccine, and if indeed the inflicted damage to the child or adult is not found to be irreversible, then a remedy might also be possible and of value to those already affected. That would sure be great, but not many of us are still holding out for that prospect.

So what other productive directions should research take? Over the last number of years we have heard of literally dozens of different theories about potential standalone or cumulative causes of the symptoms of Autism and related disorders. Just a few of these would include countless dietary implications, vaccine damage, digestive disorders, lead poisoning, mercury poisoning, maternal obesity, increases in cell phone towers and other resulting electromagnetic fields (EMF), combustion exhausts, pesticides, household cleaning chemicals…the list goes on and on. However, these all do have at least one factor in common: How on God’s green earth would you ever prove any of them to be the sole or pivotal causative factor in retrospect?

Because most of the theories proposed contend that there has been damage inflicted on the brain and/or other parts of the neurological system, and since prominent conventional wisdom is that such tissue may be compromised permanently, this presents a virtually impossible task of proving the associative cause(s) of the damage. I recently was a guest on a webinar presented by a medical doctor who was citing and reacting to studies that seemed to support much higher incidence of Autism in children who as infants were fed formula diets, especially soy-based formulas. The doctor made the comment that although these studies were very provocative, they reflected only retrospective studies with a good measure of anecdotal reporting by parents, so what was really needed was more “forward-looking studies” in order to assemble more empirical data.

Really doctor?…This depicts the ridiculous corner that linear thinking and outdated FDA testing protocols have painted us all into, which does not bode well at all for productive real answers in this day and age. In example; I’d like to propose a new Autism test program that I know all you expecting and new parents are really going to want to jump aboard. I’d like you to help prove my theory that soy baby formula dramatically increases the odds of children developing ASD’s. I think I need a few hundred of your babies please. Per FDA testing protocols, half of our test group of infants will be given non-soy formulas to serve as our control group (we can’t have any infants exhibiting psychological/placebo influences from the process), and the other half of the infants will be regularly fed the suspect soy formulas. In a year or so we’ll all get back together and see just how many of your children have developed various degrees of Autism! This could really help a lot of kids in the future, and really make me famous. Deal?

Are you freaking kidding me? Recall that our antiquated FDA testing protocols were obviously initially established to try to distinguish any benefits, as well as side-effects, in symptomatic test patients using both active drugs and placebos, with the expectation that the prospective drugs would create far more good than harm if and when they were ever released on the masses. But there’s absolutely no precedent or protocol (and very rightly so) for testing exposures or treatments of any sort on healthy people (especially infants I hope) in order to try to quantify the expected infliction of negative symptoms.

And there in a nutshell, wrapped up with a bow, lies the central core problem if we expect our conventional medical paradigm to ever come up with the answers for all those children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders: The system is not in any way set up to test or acknowledge anything that is intended to treat disorders with unknown causes, and we can in no ethical way expose asymptomatic people/children to any theorized contributing factors in order to try to induce negative symptoms and conditions.

So please think about this: How in the world would we ever possibly prove that because infants and young kids were exposed to vaccines, mercury, lead, household cleaners, soy formulas, teething rings or anything else, that this has produced even one existing case of an ASD? You can’t just orchestrate new exposures of such things to healthy kids and “wait and see what happens” – especially if your supposition is that the damage may be permanent. Due to the fact that a baby’s developing brain and other organs are like little sponges in their abilities to absorb chemicals and other toxins at rates 10-20 times that of adults, it’s only common sense that we all just agree to agree that toxic exposures for them should to be kept to an absolute minimum.

The same challenge holds true for the EMF-overload folks. Is there a chance that the brains and development of sensitive children could be disturbed by the increasing countless of millions of fields and frequencies that modern electronics are flooding into the environment upon all of us? Sure!, why not? We totally acknowledge that one of the most pronounced attributes of ASD’s in both kids and adults is extremely heightened sensory input that results in compromised and overburdened processing, but again, how would we ever expect to prove this premise? Could we all somehow agree to turn off every cell phone transmission tower for a few years so we’d be able to do a forward-looking study to watch for lower incidences of new ASD’s? We’re not in any way trying to be flippant or disrespectful here; we’re just trying to be a little realistic.

But here’s our main challenge to credibility as proponents of the natural sciences: By most current definitions, Autism is considered a “disease”, and therefore the only legal “treatments” that the standard of care can accept and promote, are drugs or other protocols that have been onerously paid for and then passed through the FDA approval process. By exception and exclusion then, any and all other potential remedying modalities are by default, illegitimate and illegal. See the fun here?

So for the very many of us who know that such processes as nutritional improvement through specific dietary therapy are capable of dramatic and consistent benefits and even reversals in many cases, we have even another very special problem. Without a proven and accepted cause for the condition, each case of any person who appears by any measure to improve or return to normal after using such a dietary protocol, will be deemed anecdotal. Line up another 100 kids, or 1,000 kids who likewise improved or were re-diagnosed – sorry, but both individually and collectively, they’re all no more than anecdotal, non-scientific evidence of any results.

This my friends, is the fatal flaw in the conventional wisdom and logic (if you can even call it that) and the reason why the drug empire is scrambling to develop drugs that they hope to convince government, practitioners and parents, will either offer some concocted hint of protection against children developing new cases of ASD’s, or offer parents some higher levels of relief from the extreme behaviors that their kids are exhibiting, because this can understandably be very demanding work that might potentially represent a lifetime of assisted care. But hey, why not come up with some more pills to help Mom cope at the same time.

So this represents the research conundrum and dirty little secret that very few in the autism research community will ever tell you about. We can’t just keep pouring the vast majority of money and resources into tried and fruitless dead-ends. The broken paradigm must necessarily get out of its own way so that the highest potential, least expensive and safest non-pharmaceutical strategies can be revealed and implemented on a broad scale or we will surely experience a social and financial nightmare of unimaginable proportions and consequences.

The two primary camps in Autism theory and research continue to be divided between those who believe that an affected infant’s/child’s brain structure and development has been damaged as a result of some genetic variance and/or destructive autoimmune response, and those who believe that the majority of cases must be brought on or at least triggered by one or more environmental factors before and/or after birth, which might include various toxic exposures and early dietary patterns.

Those who suspect or believe that these conditions are caused by neurotoxic reactions of vaccines, heavy metals, toxic chemicals, etc., follow maybe the most disturbing and depressing paths of all, because virtually all of these theories assume the occurrence of actual brain damage, and therefore their main missions are to champion the causes of primary changes in the medical system and public education that will hopefully result in reduced incidences in new cases. They are therefore looking to their own tragic losses in the hopes of saving others. So very disturbingly, these theories don’t extend much hope for the vast majority of those kids and adults who are already affected.

Within the environmental factors team, there are still major disagreements about what I would call damage versus disruption. Almost everyone agrees that one of the obvious and primary manifestations of the various causative factors is the disruption in the sensory and communication pathways that impairs behavior, socialization and learning, but still in great dispute is to what degree the brain is actually being damaged, possibly beyond repair, as opposed to primarily being disrupted in function?

Resulting from our seven years of experience, we tend to fall mostly on the disruption side of this debate. We feel we can logically take that position because of our ability to witness and hear about hundreds of children and many adults who have experienced reversals and reached points where their learning and socialization were able to return to that expected for their respective ages. In any case however, logic also suggests that the longer that even disruption is allowed to take place, the more one might suspect that damage and debilitation in perpetuity could result.

Is it possible that in some cases vaccines and other non-natural exposures can inflict actual cellular damage to a forming brain and other tissues? Absolutely, but remember that the vast majority of young children these days receive at least their normal schedule of vaccines, and obviously the majority of kids seem to escape at least the most impactful forms of ASD’s. Whether or not symptomatic children have received their vaccines, we have often times seen dramatic improvements and reversals through specific dietary therapy. Although we have come to believe in the concept that a young child may indeed reach and cross a total toxic load tipping point under the immune and toxic burdens of vaccines, it also makes sense to us that more than just vaccines are at work here in most cases.

Bear with me for yet another analogy to illustrate this disruption concept: Imagine a busy traffic intersection in any active city, and that a passing truck drops off a huge boulder that comes to rest in the center of that intersection. What is bound to occur? Maybe some of the cars are slowly able to work their way around the rock or attempt to find much longer ways around by locating alternate routes, but this inevitably turns into a virtually impassable snarl in traffic. The longer that the blockage remains, the greater the backup that is produced. At some point someone may be able to approach the center of the problem and remove the boulder to order to eventually allow the flow of traffic to return to normal, but of course the longer that the obstacle was present, the longer it would take to expect to restore normalcy.

In this story, think of the automobiles as communication within the human neurological system and the boulder as an impediment to that communication. We believe that this analogy may apply to the majority, if not the vast majority, of the explosion of cases of ASD’s. We even think that we know what the boulder is actually made of in most instances. You can read all about our particular theories and supporting research at No Harm Foundation.

So on the other side of things, where might the drug folks be taking our future? If the research community spearheaded by Big Pharma indeed believe that the best direction for new drugs is in attempting to reduce future incidence as opposed to much expectation of reversing the disorders in current cases, then what might they have on the drawing board to assist all the countless affected families continuing to try to cope and plan for the future of their children? Well, here’s a clue: These drugs may be more intended to provide relief to the parents than to the suffering children. If you can’t actually fix the kids to any significant degree, then at least sedate the heck out of them in order to make them more manageable.

But at some point this begs another and fair question: Are there those in the pharmaceutical industry who are actually searching for answers for prevention or treatment that would not involve the development of one or more prescription drugs?

In assessing the answer, here’s a simple but hopefully instructive little story: I give you a basket and tell you that I’ll give you $10 if you go into a nearby field and bring it back full of apples. What are the odds that you’re going to return to me with that basket instead full of rocks, and then ask for your money? Not great, for at least two reasons: First, I asked you for apples, and it’s not likely that the rocks will please me. Second, in your search for fresh apples, you’d most probably be looking upward into the trees for the fresh fruit, and not low on the ground where you would instead find the rocks.

There’s an old joke about a man who approaches a guy intensely looking around at the ground in a parking lot after dark. He asks what the man is doing and if he can be of help. The second man responds that he’s looking for the car keys he dropped. The first man asks where he last recalled seeing them. The second man points over to an area a good twenty yards from where they are standing. “Well if that’s the case, then why in the world are you looking around where we are now?” The second man responds, “The lighting is better over here.”

The same can apply to drug research. Scientific studies and research dollars are quite focused regarding discovery and outcome, and inherently to the exclusion of directions that might lead to results that do not have profit making potential. Am I suggesting that there are no researchers for Big Pharma who have interest in locating the truth…regardless of where that truth takes them? Nothing of the sort. But please understand that there is far less money and other resources being offered up for research that has no potential to result in anything of proprietary value, and without the engine of such profit potential present, there is simply far less energy to back other investigations. So see, they’re all looking for apples, and only ones that can be patented.

Ok, so where might we start finding the real answers for this huge mess? Well, the very first thing to do is to stop following a classic definition of insanity, which is doing the same wrong thing over and over with the expectation of achieving different results. We know that the statistics are continuing to go in the wrong direction, and obviously the last thing that we can hope to expect from the FDA, any other levels of government or the drug industry, is divergent thinking and actions. Our children simply don’t have that much time. It’s unreasonable to look for useful and passionate natural and preventative strategy advice from your government. That’s just not what they’re set up to do.

Instead, I strongly suggest that you as individuals and parents voraciously educate yourselves as to the lies that have been told to us for a very long time about the true sources and necessities of proper nutrition and about achieving and sustaining wellness. The purpose of this particular writing is not to attempt to provide that specific education, because there are plenty of excellent researchers, practitioners and authors out there that you can utilize in your journey. Please just don’t ask them if their natural strategies and best attempts to help improve the wellness of you personally or your child, is “FDA Approved”. There is a ridiculously logical answer to that question, and hopefully you will now have a better appreciation of what that is.

Be far less afraid of trying to supply superior nutrition to your infant or young children than of the next highly experimental drugs that are coming down the pike. Sure, a little more food costs and self-education may be required on your part, but that will represent your most risk-free option and a very good first effort. The drugs will always be there waiting for you, trust me.

Just as important will be your vigilant and persistent protection of your freedom and rights to health choice in order to preserve your options at this time and in the future. There’s not enough money and resources available in the world to fix all the sickness that exists right at this minute, let alone to handle all the new kids and adults who may be likewise destined to be stuck in the broken system if the trends are not reversed and the projected statistics are realized. Don’t look to the government for the answers! YOU, and only you, are the master of your own fate, so just accept and get comfortable with it.

We are increasingly confident that the only big answers for the health of the people of this nation and of this planet will only come from advancements in delivering better foods and superior nutrition. Boat loads of more drugs will never represent adequate answers. Witness that people are taking more drugs than at any other time in history, and they’re only getting fatter and sicker. You certainly don’t have to take it from me. Just take a look around and then use your own common sense and expanded education to locate and prove the truth to yourself and guide your way through all the disinformation. You owe it to yourself and to your family.

Rant | No Harm Foundation

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Surely we should be cautious before strapping a child into a conveyance that could inadvertently hurt him.

You are absolutely right, we should just sit quaking in the backs of our caves waiting to die. Once we are all dead nothing worse will happen to us and nothing will be able to hurt us. The cautious way is the best way.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

That's just not true. The problem with the scientific method is that the conclusions drawn are often unreliable. Empirical studies are limited to what they can prove, especially when you're talking about the body with hundreds of chemical reactions that have specific functions and are orchestrated specifically for certain jobs. Any insult to this intricate system could cause a cascade of undesirable events.

Yes, undesirable events, like easily preventable diseases, via vaccine.