The evidence of the corruption of autism research

The evidence has now grown to the point where any reasonable person can conclude that autism research (in the US, UK, and their commercial allies) is being severely distorted by corrupt motives. The corrupt agenda is (1) to hide the fact that the true cause of the increase was dental amalgam mercury, and (2) to hide the fact that removal of the mercury by chelation is the most effective treatment (indeed cure), so that the victims can be forced instead onto patented quack pseudo-treatments that Big Pharma hopes to roll out at immense profit in due course.

There's a popular myth that corruption in science consists mainly of people falsifying their data, like hitting the delete key and substituting some false numbers to fit the required conclusions. But from studying many papers over the years, I have concluded that such outright fabrication is actually rather rare, at least in a field such as autism research.

Instead the corruption works in ways that are more subtle, but also more solidly demonstrable. Instances of these more subtle distortions can individually be pretended to be mere misunderstandings or mistakes. Thus any particular case cannot alone constitute proof of corruption. It is only when a pattern of such "mistakes" begins to show up that the conclusion of a trend of corruption becomes clear. That's what is happening now.

The techniques of this subtle corruption include:
-selecting methods which are well-known to be incorrect;
-making agenda-convenient errors in one's calculations;
-avoiding and even preventing proper studies being carried out which would provide the honest answers;
-misrepresenting the literature by pretending into non-existence the truthful evidence while prominently trumpeting the worthless studies as supposedly sound evidence; and
-deploying false arguments (including attacking of "straw man" positions).

The great thing about these techniques is that only people with sufficient knowledge and understanding can see through what is going on, and they are usually the same people who are career-compromised by being stuck in the corrupted institutional setting. This corruption thereby sucks in and corrupts honest people too.

One way to produce misleading false negative results is to select tests which are well-known not to work. It has long been known that blood and urine levels are useless as tests of chronic mercury poisoning.

In this connection I draw to your attention this quotation from 1964:

“Those investigators who have studied the subject are in almost unanimous agreement that there is a poor correlation between the urinary excretion of mercury and the occurrence of demonstrable evidence of poisoning.”
‑‑Goldwater LJ, Ladd AC, Jacobs MG: Absorption and excretion of mercury in man. Arch Environ Health 9, 735-741 ( 1964)

and also this joint statement of the National Institute of Dental Health and the American Dental Association in 1984:

“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.

Even my general practitioner was able to tell me this in 2006. It is the reason why Holmes used hair mercury and Bradstreet used chelation challenge instead of just measuring blood or urine. Hertz-Picciotto et al. (2010) used this well-known-useless blood mercury measure and found no difference between autistics and controls. Meanwhile DeSoto and Hitlan (2010) have shown that the other two studies that supposedly show no mercury-autism connection, Ip et al. (2004) and Soden et al. (2007), were flawed to the extent that they actually show the opposite. Those three very misleading studies have since been cited by certain senior experts as the supposed proof that there is no involvement of mercury in autism.

Rush et al. (2009) purported to show that chelation causes more harm than good, but in reality their procedure was utterly unrelated to any real-world chelation therapy. It purports an ignorance of even the most basic principle of chelation therapy (namely removing the toxin from the body) and substitutes a straw-man fallacious in-situ “detoxification” concept of its own. It is just as impossible to carry out a test of chelation in vitro (or in this case "in tissue") as it is impossible to venture out on a test drive of a car engine which is standing isolated from the car body on a mechanic's bench. When a dentist drills your tooth it instantly creates more pain than was there already. But we don't validly infer from that that dental treatment is counterproductive; because the treatment has to be evaluated as a whole.

The latest of these misleading studies, being widely paraded in triumph, is:

Cao Y, Chen A, Jones RL, Radcliffe J, Dietrich KN, Caldwell KL, et al. 2010. Efficacy of Succimer Chelation of Mercury at Background Exposures in Toddlers: A Randomized Trial. J Pediatr. Epub ahead of print. DOI:10.1016/j.jpeds.2010.08.036.

The NIH would have you believe that this shows
"Succimer found ineffective for removing mercury"
(In other words chelation supposedly can't help autistics, in defiance of all the huge "merely anecdotal claims" that it does.)
In reality, these investigators selected a useless procedure that any half-competent person would know would produce the wrong result. I explained in a previous post that there are many ways of using or misusing a chelator, some of which are sure to make matters worse rather than better. Here's a well-founded comment I found about this trash: "This trial had severe flaws in the dosing protocol - very large doses of DMSA (400mg+) were given to children once a day continuously for nearly a month along with some minerals (including iron and copper which Andy does not recommend) but without specific antioxidant support. I really feel sorry for the kids participating in this study. Unfortunately there will be some people who glance at the headline and wrongly conclude that DMSA is not a useful chelator."
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Autism-Mercury/message/288097

Meanwhile, several years on, no official trials have been carried out to test whether chelation does not work. The one trial that started was halted by the US medical authorities.

Oh, but hang on, the website of Pretend-to-Research-Autism mentions that the NIMH is running "three major trials of the chelator N-acetyl-cysteine". But NAC is definitely not a chelator. It certainly doesn't equate to the genuine protocols that huge numbers of parents have been having such success with (thus producing the "spontaneous" recoveries their doctors are now starting to report). Those same "Research Autism" charlatans place a maximum danger warning against chelation despite failing to cite a single shred of evidence of that supposed danger.

You can also see elsewhere here the abundance of consistently false arguments deployed in the supposedly-wonderful books by Paul Offit and Michael Fitzpatrick.

There's also last year's report from the UK NHS, wheeled out to pretend that there's been no increase anyway (the same NHS that resorts to so many untruths to prevent me getting treatment for the disability it caused).

So you can see here what looks to me like all the distortions I listed above being deployed in the service of a crime against the victims of this catastrophe which was caused by experts in the first place.

If the average person or even average graduate applied to become a researcher at any of these institutes they'd be laughed out the door. And likewise if they tried to get a publisher for one of those books. The people who are involved in making these "mistakes" have passed through numerous years of university education, have very advanced qualifications, not infrequently have been awarded superlative honours for their supposedly great contributions to science. And yet is it these supposedly great intellectual superiors who are producing and endorsing this trash-"science" in the service of an ongoing abuse of victims.

But I see no reason to believe that all those involved are consciously engaged in deceit (under duress or not). Many people are compromised by tendencies to suppress from consciousness any disturbing doubts, questions and facts. They eagerly "learn" "authoritative" information unquestioningly. They unconsciously avoid the inconvenient ideas and choose the personally convenient ones instead. They "sincerely" believe their falsehoods. And yet, still, there is no honour in their conduct here. Self-serving false beliefs are no more worthy for being "sincerely" believed, any more than a tiger's conduct can be classed as acceptable on the grounds that it has no sense of anything wrong with killing people.