Autism's false prophets, Offit's false arguments, selective omissions, and chelation denialism

The book "Autism's false prophets" by Paul Offit is not just yet another book about autism. Huge quantities of this exceptionally evil concoction are being handed out free through the American Academy of Pediatrics to any parents who express the wrong sorts of doubts.

It contains relatively little scientific argument, consisting instead mainly of ad-hominem muck-raking and "you can trust us" assertions of the supposedly superior authority of big wealthy institutions. But even where it strays into actual science it contains major errors.

Before examining those errors you should be aware that Offit's book uses a very peculiar system of citing which gives no citation indications on the text pages, but only in a back section. This peculiar system (which I've never seen in any other document) is ideal for when you wish to deceive readers about what is genuinely evidence-based and what is mere false assertion -- as in the following examples.

One of the errors is Offit's notion that mercury removal could not possibly enable recovery from mercury-induced injury. Offit's reasoning is that "Once a brain cell is damaged by a heavy metal like mercury, it is permanently damaged" (page 145). And so removing the mercury cannot reverse the "damage". And "therefore" chelation for autism cannot work and must be mere quackery.

Firstly, let us for the moment take as accepted Offit's false notion that "damage" of neurons must be involved in autism. Immediately after this critique of the science he presents his scare-anecdote about an utterly irrelevant case of incompetent misuse of EDTA: "And then the unthinkable happened....." (Arrgghh!!!). Curiously he gives twelve citations for that ONE utterly irrelevant scare-drivel anecdote, and yet in respect of his key assertion about damaged cells, there is no citation of evidence whatsoever. But of course that's not really a problem as it is the Infallible True Prophet Offit who is proclaiming it, in whom the reader has been given total faith by this stage; and it's a fair bet that the twelve drivel citations were padded in there to hide the non-existent evidence about "damage", for that's how such propaganda trickery always works (see e.g. the UK COT's deliberately deceitful statement against vitamin B6).

All manner of body cells have extensive systems in place for repairing themselves. They're doing it all the time. So on quite what basis does Offit assert that neurons "damaged" by mercury cannot be "repaired"? And why does he cite no evidence for this key, highly-heretical assertion?

But anyway, Offit errs more fundamentally, by making that false assumption that mercury neurotoxicity works only by "damaging" neurons, with no other neurotoxic processes involved. You will see in my 1993 paper there is not the slightest hint of it involving neurons being "damaged", nor indeed any "damage" being involved in autism causation at all. Rather autism is difference, not disorder (-- as the book's very own dedicatee "real heroes" Kathleen Seidel and Camille Clark would very much agree!). I can only guess that logical consistency is as alien to Dr Offit as is evidence-basing of his key assertions.

In reality mercury has potential to affect neurons via its pro-oxidant effect, and via its interference with all the enzyme pathways that involve zinc (in other words just about all of them). And last but not least, as my update review explains, mercury binds to DNA and thereby reduces gene-expression, which the antiinnatia theory had already indicated would cause autism.

The mechanism by which mercury causes autism therefore does not involve any damaging of neurons. So lowering the mercury levels, such that the DNA has less of it binding and inhibiting the gene-expression required for normal development, would indeed enable recovery, providing it is done before the brain has become too fixed by maturation. Offit's reasoning is therefore doubly incorrect.

[Temporary note: I am busy at the moment but will come back to add yet more false arguments his book presents against chelation. His case consists entirely of falsehoods, unbecoming of such a highly-qualified researcher.]

You can also see that on page 115 (refs page 269) Offit cites the Nelson and Bauman paper but fails to give the citation of the Bernard et al which it attempted to debunk, nor any mention of the authors' later resounding rejoinder. I leave you to form your own judgement about this selective mentioning of only one side by such a highly-qualified multi-millionaire. Especially given the seriousness of the subject, potentially trying to deprive tragic victims of a valuable therapy, and Dr Offit's heavy financial interest in the question of the safety of vaccines.

Offit deploys that misinformation there in a second false argument in terms of autism and mercury poisoning being "two disorders". And yet an elementary knowledge of mercury toxicity tells us that there is far from "one disorder" that constitutes "mercury poisoning". I can only guess this heroic multi-millionaire was too busy struggling to make ends meet to find the time to properly study what he was publishing about.

A third false argument of Offit is his comparison of autism epidemiology with other epidemiology (on pages 110-111). He states that epidemiology of effects of certain vaccines was able to show up even the causation of some very rare hazards (intussusception, thrombocytopenia, and Guillain-Barré syndrome) resulting from them, and "therefore" the epidemiological studies of autism would have this same power to utterly rule out even very slight involvement of vaccines. Personally I think the autism data is too unclear to resolve whether or not there is rare harm caused by vaccines anyway, but that's beside the point.

What is the point here is that the epidemiology of autism is affected by two starkly obvious major complications which did not affect the epidemiology examples cited by Offit. Firstly, autism is very far from being something that can be clearly "yes/no" identified as can the above-named three conditions. Secondly, the autism epidemiology data has huge variance, far from all of it explained, but reasonably suspected to be caused by some changes of awareness and of diagnosis, and not least by other environmental factors such as dental mercury (as my update review will make clear).

That is, the autism data has a huge level of "noise" in it preventing hearing of the exquisite signal that Offit claims could be clearly not heard. Or in another analogy, the autism data is a very crude unfocussable lens through which to search for the tiny pinpoint he claims ought to be visible if vaccines even rarely caused autism. So again, we see a crudely incorrect argument from this highly-qualified, highly-awarded author who has made millions from touting his medical products.

(Whether Offit's legal-liability-exempt profitmaking products are a quackery scam is besides the point, but in view of all the above one does have to wonder -- and indeed it does turn out that the rotavirus that he's earned millions from has been judged unneeded by 27 of 29 nations, and was only accepted in the US thanks to himself voting it in.)
And Offit's "rotavirus vaccine may be linked to a small increase in a life-threatening type of bowel obstruction, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday..... ."

In 2009, the American Academy of Pediatrics presented the “President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service” award to Dr Paul Offit.

See also my important further article

Paul Offit betrays his serious aversion to honesty"

More about Dr Offit here. And here and here.

There is only one autistic/ASD syndrome!

There are many thousands of autistics, and each one is unique.

But I resolutely reject the notion suggested by some, that there are "many autisms", for the following reasons.

The world has been aware of the autistic syndrome/Asperger syndrome for nearing 70 years now. Many people have spent much time trying to delineate separate subdivisions within that syndrome. The result has been a resounding lack of finding any such subdivisions. Even attempts to show any certain distinction between "Aspergers" and "high-functioning autism" have drawn a blank [as per Tony Attwood's review linked at end here].

Meanwhile there are certainly great variations in how autism manifests. And there is much reason to believe that the etiological (causal) factors can be quite different in different cases.

Years ago when I was first writing down the antiinnatia theory of autism I wrote a paragraph which explained about this. But because the paper (as published in 1993) was already rather long, I cut that paragraph out before publication. I'll now reinstate it here, in concept at least (as I don't remember the original wording).

Autism(/ASD etc) is like a tree. Just as a tree has many roots, so autism has many causes. Just as a tree has many branches, so autism has many characteristics and signs (notwithstanding the dumbing-down to a "triad of impairments"). But also, just as a tree has only one trunk, so autism/ASD/Aspergers/etc has only one central causal, definitional mechanism/concept, namely antiinnatia.

We can elaborate this metaphor of a tree by thinking of it as grounded in some rather peculiar soil. At the northwest corner there is a lot of (say) uranium in the soil, whereas at the southeast corner there is none at all. In consequence of this the leaves of one corner of the tree contain a lot of uranium while at the opposite corner there is little or none. But all are part of the same tree.

But....!
Notwithstanding the above, it would be wise for autism research to recognise various distinctions, such as male/female, and late/early onset. And another distinction I would suggest to be particularly important.

The evidence concerning this is is more fully elaborated in my update review, but I will briefly outline it here. According to my update of the theory, the autism increase has been caused by mercury (from non-gamma-2 amalgams); whereas the pre-increase autism had generally minimal involvement of mercury. (But it couldn't be zero as no-one has ever lived in a zero-mercury environment.)

It follows that within contemporary autism/ASD/Aspergers/etc we are looking at two substantially different things. On the one hand the minority (10-20%?) who would have been autistic/etc even if the increase had not taken place. These would be the "true" autism/etc, so to speak. On the other hand, those cases caused by mercury intake. These latter are very likely to have a variety of mercury-specific symptoms accompanying their antiinnatia-caused symptoms.

It follows that any research that just lumps together both these groups is liable to learn little about either. Indicators towards distinguishing between the two are likely to include: age of onset, number of maternal amalgams, level of indoor mercury vapor, results of porphyrin tests or hair mercury tests. Meanwhile, mercury levels in blood or urine are most unlikely to be worthwhile distinguishers.

It may be possible to discern the two categories in bimodal distributions and or scattergrams, getting beyond overly simple averaging of the whole autistic category.

Review of Asperger's/Autism relationship by Tony Attwood.

The politics of autism research

"...gene is mythical part of living structure which in reactionary theories like Mendelism-Veysmanism-Morganism determines heredity. Soviet scientists under leadership of Academician Lysenko proved scientifically that genes don't exist in the nature."
From Soviet Encyclopedia circa 1950

Huge numbers of words, including several books, have been written about allegedly unworthy deeds and motives of various people and groups involved in autism research. Depending on which side you prefer to believe, those involved in Defeat Autism Now, SafeMinds, Age of Autism, etc, are either evil profiteering quackery-merchants or else great heroes standing up to an evil profiteering medical establishment.

In my view, such conspiracy theorising does little to resolve any of the scientific questions. In my experience as a theorist, researchers almost never actually falsify their raw data (though in respect of commercially-criticial trials of therapies it may be less rare). I wouldn't have been able to so easily formulate coherent theories time and time again if that data were not founded in reality.

But I do think that anyone coming to look at autism research, and the forthcoming (non-/)reaction to my update review, would be well advised to be aware of some of the potential political factors that could be intruding to distort the science from its unbiased path. So I will just put these few thoughts here on the subject.

Some elements of the political context could be that:

1. Some people wish(ed) to blame vaccine manufacturers, or other medical institutions, for causing the autism of their children (and associated alleged increase). (the "heretics")
   
2. Some of those accused by the above wish(ed) to prove that there was no such causation, and or increase. (the "establishment")
   
3. Some professional researchers might conceivably wish to spin out the progress of science into false trails, so as to prolong their own professional research careers rather than resolve questions as promptly as possible. And some may fear losing their jobs if they raise the 'wrong' questions or publish the 'wrong' results. (the "careerists")
   
4. Some others may wish to falsely declare a crisis, and or falsely proclaim treatments, in order to profit from gullible customers. (the "quacks")
5. Yet others (the "establishment" again) may wish to falsely discredit valuable treatments as supposed quack remedies, because they undermine their own plans to market licenced pharmaceuticals for the same condition.
   

Malign motives can be attributed to all sides. And false claims can be shown on all sides, naturally enough given the human talent for making mistakes. And so little or nothing of the science is proven by any of the associated slime-throwing.

I'll just put below here my own impressions of how the science has been distorted in recent years, by way of enabling some anticipation of how my own update review will be misrepresented in due course. Please note that none of this is my certified testimony as to the truth of anything; please verify for yourself if you wish to take a firm view of any of it.

Firstly (see disclaimer above), autism had a most unhelpful tendency to become noticeable at just about the same age as some vaccinations are injected. And some of the heretics were noticing an increase in prevalence which aligned with increased vaccinations. Their reasonable suspicion was reinforced by the lack of any other obvious causal change, because the dental profession continues to assert that they're still using those same old amalgams tried and tested over 150 years, and so approximately no-one has noticed the huge unannounced changeover to non-gamma-2 amalgams.

The heretics of necessity tended to be rather amateurish, undertrained, underqualified and underfunded people. They naturally made plenty of mistakes, especially in the early years.

The establishment could have responded to the MMR and thimerosal theories with some sound science. Instead, some absolutely stupendously abysmal papers were published, such as Madsen in respect of Denmark. Such rubbish could be excused if it were coming from the amateur heretics, but coming from supposed leading expert scientists and published in supposedly top-rating journals any notion of good faith bungling was much harder to find credible.

The result of these abysmal publications (and the associated persecution of Andrew Wakefield) was a huge increase of distrust of the establishment. In reality there was soon enough sufficient sound science to radically marginalise the vaccine theories anyway. But now that the establishment has gained an image of untrustworthiness, that sound science is very much harder for the heretics and the general public to believe. Everything can now be rationalised away as lies and propaganda.

Associated claims from the establishment have been that the increase was not real, and that autism was almost entirely of genetic causation. Again the establishment used abysmal papers to justify its denialism. Again they unnecessarily undermined their own credibility.

It appears that those claims of no increase and no environmental cause thereof are now floundering in the face of a reality that is simply too big to be pretended away (though the NHS as recently as 2009 has published yet more rubbish in defence of that flat earth).

Which brings us to the present stage of this parade of denialisms. This is exemplified by a number of the highest-ranking research professionals touting blood levels of mercury as a supposedly useful means of showing that mercury has not been involved in autism. Any even slightly competent researcher should be well aware that using blood (or urine) measures of mercury is a great way to get the false negative that they want so as to put everyone off the trail to the real cause of the increase. Even my common-or-garden mere general practitioner (family doctor) was able to tell me back in 2004 that blood mercury is a useless test for chronic mercury poisoning. So how come these spectacularly-qualified supposedly leading expert researchers don't know even this most basic fact of what they are publishing about?
Reference for blood mercury: Mutter, Naumann, Guethlin. Comments on the Article "The toxicology of mercury and its chemical compounds". Crit Rev Toxicol 2007 37:537-549.

Meanwhile the other two papers (by Ip, and Soden) which are deployed as supposedly showing no mercury involvement have also been exposed as severely flawed, in this review by DeSoto and Hitlan.
(http://www.ane.pl/showarticle.php?art=7021)
So the case against mercury involvement rests on three papers all of which are fit only for the trashcan. Need I say more?

We can now look forward to hearing this same pseudo-expertise rolled out again as "professional" "expert" testimony to also "disprove" my update review on the pseudic grounds of a supposed lack of difference of mercury in autism.

One may hypothesise that there are malign motives at work, of (1) wishing to deflect blame from the medical establishment's endorsement of dental amalgam, and or (2) wishing to avoid identifying the real environmental cause so that these same researchers can enjoy decades of prestige and income at our expense on a wild-goose chase among any number of other non-causes of autism. One may also hypothesise (3) that some researchers are in an embarassing position, because they fear having their careers destroyed and ending up on the dole if they ask the 'wrong' questions or publish the 'wrong' answers.

Those are only unproven hypotheses. It is nevertheless difficult for me to suppress suspicion that the malign spirit of Lysenkoism is very much alive and distorting the world of professional autism research in the western world. On the other hand again, I would be wary of attributing evil to all the people involved. My observations of other "controversies" indicate that the most stupendous obtuseness can be achieved even by highly intelligent people having no possible selfish motive for their denialism (and this for reasons that were explained in my unpublished theory of neuroticism; btw, the low-neurotic can be even more denialic than the high).

Hertz-Picciotto et al 2010 very misleading about mercury

Contrary to widely-promoted assertions, the Hertz-Picciotto et al 2010 study does not in the slightest constitute evidence that mercury has not been involved in causation of autism.

They found no association of mercury blood levels with autism. Which is not surprising as the autism would be caused not by mercury in blood but by mercury in brain cells. It's been known for decades that blood levels of mercury are near-useless as an indicator of body burden of mercury and chronic mercury poisoning.

“The distribution of mercury into the body tissues is highly variable and there appears to be little correlation between levels in urine, blood or hair and toxic effects.” —NIDH/ADA Workshop on Biocompatibility of Metals, Journal of the American Dental Association 109 (September 1984).

Further references for the uselessness of blood mercury levels can be found in the critique by Joachim Mutter of the fraudulent SCENIHR report, and in Mutter, Naumann, Guethlin. Comments on the Article "The toxicology of mercury and its chemical compounds". Crit Rev Toxicol 2007 37:537-549.

Even my mere common-or-garden general practitioner ("family doctor") was able to tell me years ago that a blood test of mercury would be worthless for diagnosing chronic mercury poisoning.

A great way to get the wrong answers is to ask the wrong questions. A far more right question to have asked would have been whether there is an association between number of mothers' amalgams (i.e. a cause) and autistic behaviors (i.e. the key effect of interest). Some such studies have already been done and found significantly positive results. They are far easier to carry out than this one requiring going round sucking blood from children rather than just counting their mothers' fillings.

Another right question would be the association of lack of outdoor air with autism, and again significantly positive results have been found by Waldman & Adilov.

More advanced understanding of antiinnatia; this post is not for beginners here!

Don't start your reading here, first study the 1993 paper and the home page here.

It is mainly about concepts. Sound science cannot be founded on concepts alone, but science gets in a muddle if the concepts are not properly clarified. So this can be important.

The nature of the autistic syndrome.

An expression "the autistic spectrum" has become popularised. This is regrettable because it promotes a fallacy that autism variation is all or mostly on one dimension from mild to severe. A more reasonable concept is that autism, Aspergers, and related things such as dyslexia, are all part of the autistic syndrome, that is tendency to clustering together of certain characteristics. This clustering is many-dimensional, with the number of dimensions being equal(ish?) to the number of characteristics whose expression can be affected by antiinnatia. In practice, as generally found with factor analysis, there would be a smaller number of main/most important dimensions (such as predisposition to allocating attention to the behaviors of others), some mediumly important ones, and a lot of less important ones.

The inclusion of such things as dyslexia (or what might otherwise be called language disabilities) is warranted by the finding of these being found associated in twin studies, and their symptoms falling within the same theoretical framework of suppression of innatons.

The nature of antiinnatia factors

The 1993 paper indicated that both environmental and genetic factors would be antiinnatia factors. We might add that perhaps epigenetic, genomic imprinting or mitochondrial factors could also have antiinnatia effect.

In any case, there is no reason to suppose a yes/no distinction between variables that are antiinnatia factors and those that are not. Instead, like autism itself it is a matter of degree with no clear cutoff.

And one would expect some antiinnatia factors to be "purer" (more non-specific) than others. This can arguably be seen in the social class differential graphs of my 1993 paper (graphs of table 1 added in author's reprint). The "pure" would be due to the purer antiinnatia, while the "complicated"/"organic" would be due to the less pure causing what we might call side-effects. (I discussed this variable purity of antiinnatia factors already in the 1993 paper itself.)

The numerous antiinnatia genes in combination would act as a relatively pure, general antiinatia factor, even though any one of those genes taken in isolation might have some idiosyncratic side-effects.

One would expect some grossly injurious process such as an untimely bash on the head, or a severe infective brain inflammation of viral encephalitis would have substantial side effects.

I would reckon that mercury, while a relatively pure antiinnatia factor, would be less pure than the 'portfolio' of antiinnatia genes, due to its interference with thiol-dependend enzymes, and its tendency to generate oxidative stress.

One can then go on to reasonably expect that there would be some other factors which have more or less of antiinnatia factor effect. And obviously any gene specifically related to language function is going to tend to be a factor in suppression of at least language function, and hence favour outcomes with a bit of resemblance to autism even though arguably not properly considered a true antiinnatia factor.

Why mercury supposedly could not get to DNA to cause antiinnatia!

Wegener's collossal epoch-making discovery of continental drift was dismissed with derision by the community of professional geologists for 50 years, apparently merely because he was unable to show any mechanism by which the continents might drift. That was even though his deriders were in no position to show anything that would prevent the continental drift. And was even though volcanos have long made it reasonable to believe there is a layer of molten rock under the Earth's crust.

A similar situation exists in respect of the incorporation of environmental mercury into the antiinnatia theory (in the forthcoming update review paper). 'Skeptical' nitpickers could say that there is no demonstrated means by which mercury ions could reach the DNA in order to attach to it as per the theory. They would point out that the DNA is in working normal life not loosely and openly floating around in body fluids but instead is confined to a very controlled environment of proteins such as histones and secluded away inside the protective membrane of the cell's nucleus which in turn is some way in from the cell's lipid bilayer outer membrane. They would further point out that the DNA is to a large extent tightly curled up in condensed inactive form, further inhibiting unconstrained access by rogue mercury atoms. They would claim that mercury would have already bound with sulphydryls of proteins before it could get to the DNA. They would claim that mercury is bound much more strongly to other things than to DNA (though not sure if there's any real evidence on that).

Those who dismissed Wegener's continental drift theory could not show any videos or even photos from under the Earth to substantiate their assertions. And likewise those who would dismiss the idea of mercury getting to the DNA can't actually show any proof that mercury never gets to it. And despite even some of those queries listed above being true, they do not genuinely undermine the case, as I will now explain.

The antiinnatia theory does not entail a notion that most or even a high proportion of gene-expression is suppressed by antiinnatia. If it were then it would surely result in non-life or at the very least a being that had little resemblance to a human. On the contrary, antiinnatia theory entails only a very small proportion of gene-expression being suppressed, perhaps 1/1000th or less to produce an autism diagnosis condition. Furthermore it is not being suggested that all children exposed to mercury become autistic, rather only a small minority. And even they only become affected by the mercury after 18 months or so, in accordance with the evidence shown in the update paper.

Furthermore there is the fallacious notion that mercury is absolutely a "bad" "toxic" thing such that the organism's mechanisms could only be designed to keep it out. On the contrary, the whole point of the antiinnatia theory is that antiinnatia is highly advantageous provided it does not reach the excessive levels which manifest as autism.

And so, at lower levels, mercury as an antiinnatia factor would not be opposed by the organism but actually positively selected for. There would be natural selection positive selection of processes (or 'faults') which passively or even actively admit mercury to access the DNA. I don't mean flooding the DNA with mercury, but merely allowing just a very few atoms of Hg to sprinkle themselves sparsely on the DNA. DNA strands are rather complex molecules. It is quite conceivable that there are occasional locations among all that complexity at which a mercury atom could find itself relatively welcome and unrepelled.

That is clearly a far from unreasonable concept. Everyone is free to choose their own reckoning of the burden of proof in this matter, but it looks to me like the common-sense burden of proof lies with any "skeptics" to show that the mercury could not even occasionally, even after 18 months constant exposure, even in very modest doses get to the DNA, rather than the burden being to show that it does.

Should I say that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"? No, because there is not an absence of evidence. In the update review I will show the compelling abundance of other (including non-biochemical) evidence that mercury is an antiinnatia factor. That's what gives me faith in the unseen, faith that the binding to DNA that has been decisively shown in vitro also occurs in living human beings.

Causes of autism - update of unchallenged theory

This is a website relating to the unchallenged theory of autism, IQ and genius (the antiinnatia theory). An update review paper is being prepared for publication. Meanwhile you can download the original 1993 publication here . Be sure to print it out rather than trying to read on screen.

I cannot put the update paper on a website before it has been accepted by a journal. But in the interim I can send you a copy by email if you email a request for it to rpclarke [at] autismcauses[dot]info .