Articles relating to Autism
We should be grateful, I suppose, that autism is now finally getting attention from the medical community. As late as the 1990’s, parents were still being blamed for the condition by their pediatricians. And until recently the attempts by DAN doctors (Defeat Autism Now) to get at the medical roots of the condition were mocked […]
One of the maddening aspects of the dismissal of the environmental hypothesis for autism is that the counter-evidence provided is never allowed to be seen in context. The environmental hypothesis is rejected in favor of an ostensibly “pure” genetic hypothesis and that’s that. Evidence for the genetic hypothesis—which is indeed plentiful—is allowed to displace the […]
Sense and Nonsense about Autism: Beyond Genetics “Autism is currently, in our view, the most important and the fastest-evolving disorder in all of medical science and promises to remain so for the foreseeable future.” —-Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Columbia University’s school of medicine. A few months back David […]
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. […]
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 […]
The Rare Event: Toyota, Tasers, and Autism
The issue of sudden, rapid acceleration in Toyota vehicles presents an interesting case study of how our society approaches rare hazardous events, and a consideration of this history can shed light on how other such instances are handled that are of more direct interest to us here. It turns out that this issue has been […]