The story on autism is at once highly promising and depressingly grim. The promising part is that the condition is coming to be understood and so remedies are forthcoming. The grim part has to do with the recognition that this is entirely a man-caused disease. Nature did not conspire against our children in this case. We did so inadvertently, but the mistakes we made are being propagated forward by default and also by design. And therein lies the scandal. We can lay the blame for continuing autism epidemic at the feet of the Centers for Disease Control, of the Food and Drug Administration, of the National Institutes of Health, and of Big PhRMA. Even the Environmental Protection Agency does not entirely escape blame.

Some decades ago an autistic child was brought to the Harvard Medical School and the Chair summoned the class of medical students and urged them all to become acquainted with this case. He said to them: “You may never have a chance to see another case like this in your entire career.” Decades later, the incidence of autism in male children has risen to 1% in this country, and a recent paper in the premier Journal Lancet reported incidence to be 2% among boys in Great Britain. That’s the country that tried to discredit Roger Wakefield, MD for suggesting that the country’s vaccination policy was a contributing cause in the epidemic. (more…)

The March 12 issue of Science News previews an article about to be published in Nature Neuroscience which proposes that autistic children actually experience intense emotional reactions when looking at faces, and hence avoid eye contact. In a controlled fMRI study comparing autistic children with normals, they found as expected that the autistic children averted their gaze from images of faces presented to them in the chamber, but in the event of familiar faces, or of those with obvious emotional expressions, their amygdalas registered a strong response. No such activations were observed among normals. At the same time, the brain regions associated with facial perception showed minimal activity in the autistics.

As it happens, a strikingly evocative story was just told by a home-NF-user parent of a PDD child on the autism list server:

“It is interesting how the level of awareness on a child manifests in the weirdest ways…
N has been progressively getting more aware, and the last three weeks he was angry. This is a sweetie 6-year-old boy, and the more aware he was getting, the more aggressive and angry he became… A few days ago, he walked up to me and punched me in the eye… Then he cried his eyes out, begging for forgiveness and saying over and over he did not know why he did it… (more…)

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein

The debate continues on the various lists about the value of QEEG-based information to drive protocols. Whereas the fissures in the field are not as severe now as they once were, a divide still clearly exists, with people encamped comfortably on one side or the other. Each side claims to have science on its side, but if truth be told, we are each reinforced in our approach by what amount to a succession of dramatic case histories, plus a sprinkling of supportive studies.

What matters in determining which side of the divide we are most comfortable with is not simply the accumulating data, however, but who we are as scientists or clinicians. It is our personal style in confronting new information that determines which kind of evidence we will attend to. When this orientation is then graced with clinical success, it is continually reinforced. With a technique as powerful as neurofeedback, such reinforcers are plentiful. (more…)