Tag: autism

I have heard these stories a thousand times. I am a board‑certified pediatrician with 46 years of clinical experience. I’ve practiced in group and solo settings, served as Director of Pediatric Education for a residency program, and received numerous awards for child‑health initiatives. My solo practice had 3,500 general pediatric patients. I spent five years as Medical Director of the Autism Research Institute.

By caring for and consulting on more than 600 children with autism from 5 countries and 20 states, and hundreds of children with complex chronic illnesses, I have a unique clinical perspective to share, which mirrors what these families shared today.

My concerns about vaccine safety began in 1999 after my patient experienced a severe and irreversible reaction following a vaccine I gave. Despite exhaustive efforts to identify another cause, I could not. The trajectory of my career changed. I left a secure academic position I loved and opened a solo practice dedicated to children whose medical needs were not being met.

During my career I learned an extraordinary amount from parents who are usually perceptive observers of their children’s health. At ARI we partnered with families to identify medical problems that were overlooked. Their insights guided our research and these actions should guide our actions today. Families directed us to treat gastrointestinal dysfunction, immune dysregulation, and impairments in detoxification pathways. Collaborations with international scientists helped identify mitochondrial dysfunction, methylation abnormalities, cerebral folate deficiency, and prolonged cell danger responses.

Most pediatricians do not know about these issues. Addressing these problems often resulted in measurable improvements in autism symptoms. Some children initially diagnosed with moderate to severe autism entered kindergarten no longer meeting criteria for autism because their medical problems were treated. Other severely affected children treated as toddlers have gone on to college without knowing they once carried an autism diagnosis. 

My concerns about vaccine safety extend far beyond the narrow question of whether vaccines cause autism. Autism and complex chronic illnesses are profoundly heterogeneous. In my experience, antecedents, mediators, and triggers vary widely among children. Vaccines contribute to oxidative or mitochondrial stress in all children. In some kids; they amplify pre‑existing vulnerabilities. For others, early-life factors—such as C‑section birth, antibiotics, or prematurity — create antecedent conditions that interact with later vaccines and precede neurodevelopmental regression.

In 2005, I gave grand rounds at the university where I had been chief resident. Simply raising the possibility that the accelerated vaccine schedule might contribute to rising autism prevalence resulted in my adjunct faculty appointment not being renewed. At the time, I used a modified schedule that reduced aluminum exposure while remaining fully compliant with Virginia’s school requirements. 

 In 2006, I met with AAP leadership to discuss vaccine safety concerns – which were dismissed. Despite no research funding from government or pharma, I published a dozen studies in my spare time. One 17‑year project examined whether autism risk could be reduced by applying insights learned from families. After seven years, my autism prevalence was 1 in 297—at a time when the national rate was worse than 1 in 50. I submitted the findings to the AAP in 2013, expecting interest in a six‑fold reduction in such a serious public health problem. I received no response. 

My clinical observations—confirmed by independent data mining—was that children who got more vaccines were more likely to develop chronic illnesses. In my practice, under‑vaccinated children had lower rates of chronic diseases. 

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I found a large Facebook group of parents of autistic kids that was willing to allow me to do a survey.

So I asked one question: “If your child became suddenly autistic within 90 days after a vaccination, how many normal days did you observe between vaccination and the sudden onset” where “normal” means you observed behavior similar to the period before vaccination. 79% of parents answered 0 or 1 day.

That statistic is inconsistent with the claim that “vaccines don’t cause autism.”

What it shows is that the vaccine is the start of a cascade; if there is a sudden regression, 80% of the time, the day of vaccination is the last normal day of a child’s life.

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If I had walked into my fourth-grade classroom in 1978 and told my teacher that one day virtually every school district in America would have multiple classrooms dedicated to children who could not speak, who required one-on-one aides, who wandered, who self-injured, who had seizures, who would require lifelong care, she would have assumed I was describing some dystopian science fiction novel. Yet here we are. Why are we just accepting it?

Country artist Tyler Hudson came bombing through the U.S. last week (he’s a Texan living in Australia), and one of his Instagram posts about autism did something that really doesn’t happen to me anymore after 22 years as an autism dad: it choked me up.

His post was a read-aloud excerpt from his new book, “The Missing Lyrics,” that discussed a poem written by his NT (neurotypical) daughter about his teenage son with profound autism, whose name is Lyric.

I was fine until these words:

“He’s never been to a party, never walked into a friend’s house … if I could cure him I would. Acceptance looks really nice on a T-Shirt until he bites himself so hard he bleeds. If I could cure him I would … It’s love that makes us fight for a cure, a life.”

I want to personally thank Tyler Hudson and his family for reigniting something in me that’s faded with time and with my focus on optimizing my son’s life: outrage.

I’m 57 years old, which means I have one advantage in this conversation that many people don’t: I remember the world before profound autism became commonplace.

That’s not nostalgia talking. It’s memory.

I went to elementary school in the 1970s. I played Little League. I rode my bike around the neighborhood until the streetlights came on. I went to church, summer camp, birthday parties, county fairs, airports, shopping malls and movie theaters.

I sat in packed gymnasiums and crowded cafeterias. I stood in line for the Scrambler at the fair behind a hundred kids I’d never met. I was surrounded by children everywhere I went, constantly, for my entire childhood.

Looking back, I can remember many of them. The kid who always picked his nose. The kid who couldn’t stop talking. The class clown, the bully, the shy girl, the future valedictorian. I even remember the girl in my sister’s grade with Down syndrome, because there was exactly one.

What I cannot remember — not a single time, not once, not anywhere — is a child who couldn’t speak. A child who wore a helmet because he smashed his head into concrete.

A child who shrieked uncontrollably for hours. Parents wrestling a teenage son twice their size to keep him from hurting himself. A mother scanning a parking lot in a panic because her nine-year-old bolted and can’t say his own name.

I’ve asked hundreds of people my age the same question, and I get the same answer every time, usually after a long pause and a puzzled look. They don’t remember it either. (Ask a former nurse or teacher over the age of 70, and you’ll get the same response, too.) If those children existed in our world, they were so extraordinarily rare that none of us ever encountered them.

Today, they are everywhere. And the most astonishing part isn’t that our world changed. It’s that we’ve stopped acting like it did.

Think about that for a minute. If I had walked into my fourth-grade classroom in 1978 and told my teacher that one day virtually every school district in America would have multiple classrooms dedicated to children who could not speak, who required one-on-one aides, who wandered, who self-injured, who had seizures, who would almost certainly require lifelong care, she would have assumed I was describing some dystopian science fiction novel.

She would have asked what happened. She would have wanted to know what we did about it. Any reasonable adult in 1978 would have.

Yet here we are. We built an entire infrastructure around this new reality — special education departments, behavioral therapy franchises, sensory gyms, respite care agencies, Medicaid waivers, sibling support groups, adult residential services, a whole professional class of people whose careers exist because of it.

We did it fast, and we did it without ever really pausing to say out loud what the construction of that infrastructure implies. You do not build all of that for a population that has always been there. And somewhere along the way we collectively decided to stop asking the most obvious question in the world:

How the f*&^ did this happen?

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