scarlettrose wrote:Newberry, I totally agree that alt. therapies should be held to the same standard. At the same time, I don't think they should be necessarily pulled off the market if they are found *lacking*.

Because most of these therapies have their share of loyal devotees due to their own personal experience, many of whom would probably not care what the science said. As for everyone else, it would be up to them to make up their mind based on the information made available.

If they are not found to be dangerous then I don't think there is reason to pull them off the market.

Hurley maintains that the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 is one of the worst laws on the books. Shielding vitamins and herbal concoctions from FDA testing, it requires only that no curative claims be made for such "dietary supplements." In the prologue, Hurley shows that curative claims are made, anyway, and the users of an herbal salve were able to sue when the stuff ate their flesh. Subsequent chapters cite cases that also show that per-dosage amounts of dietary-supplement ingredients are often improperly listed; that greater than standard recommended daily amounts of most vitamins wreak havoc in the body; and that natural doesn't mean safe or effective. He notes the high proportion of convicted felons in the supplement industry, sketching the careers of several of the most egregious, including best-selling self-help health author Kevin Trudeau. He points to research that nullifies common knowledge about the effectiveness of virtually all dietary supplements; food, not pills, is the optimal and probably the only means of properly ingesting vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and so forth. He puts all such substantive information in the context of plenty of absorbing and moving stories of death, deceit, and political chicanery. Truly a good book that is good for you. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A federal vaccine court in Washington is confronting the contentious and highly emotional issue of whether early childhood vaccinations might have caused autism in thousands of children. Virtually every major scientific study and organization that has weighed in on the issue has seen no link.

(snip)

What confuses the issue is that infants are routinely vaccinated at the age when autism first emerges, and understandably distraught parents, searching for a cause, often latch onto vaccination as the likely culprit. But in Michelle’s case, experts testifying for the Department of Health and Human Services said that home videos and professional records showed early symptoms of autism starting well before she received the measles vaccine.

In 2004, the prestigious Institute of Medicine concluded that neither the preservative, known as thimerosal, nor the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was associated with autism and that various hypotheses about how they could trigger autism lacked supporting evidence. Even after thimerosal was phased out of pediatric vaccines, autism rates did not fall.

So, do you in fact approve of the continued use of flu vaccine with thimerosal, even for small children?

Also, do you think Bush's flip flop on the issue says anything regarding the influence of pharmaceutical money over government?

So you endorse continued research into the thimerosal/autism link?

Get real. It's a discussion forum. We are not bound to treat both sides evenly. We can advocate. Can I make a thread with the title, "CocoRosie is the best!"? Or do I need to phrase it as "CocoRosie may or may not be the best and I'm not allowed to have an opinion either way?"

Rick Reuben wrote:New article on autism and environmental triggers from Monday's Boston Globe:
under suspicion

"Environmental research will be a much bigger field going forward," said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "A lot of parents have been telling us about their concerns; now we're listening very closely."

Until recently, about 90 percent of autism research has focused on genetics, and only perhaps 10 percent on environmental factors, said Dr. Gary Goldstein, chairman of the scientific board of Autism Speaks, a national research and advocacy group. In the coming years, he expects the ratio to be 1 to 1.

Dr. Martha Herbert, a Harvard neuroscientist and Massachusetts General Hospital neurologist, said a few years ago, autism researchers would be marginalized if they talked about environmental factors. But now, "any major article or proposal concerning the causes of autism is coming to be considered incomplete if it doesn't talk about a potential role of environmental factors."

It's a tough road. The pharmaceutical companies hold such influence over the journals and the research system, and they want environmental factors off the table. Now the pesticide manufacturers and bio-food companies will start trying to discredit research into those potential contributing causes of autism.

For years, many parents have argued that the smoking gun was thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in many vaccines. But studies have failed to bear that theory out, and autism rates continue to rise even though thimerosal was removed from most childhood vaccines several years ago.

The dispute over thimerosal long tainted the whole idea of environmental triggers for autism, discouraging scientists from entering the field, some researchers and parents say.

Rick Reuben wrote:

newberry wrote:The dispute over thimerosal long tainted the whole idea of environmental triggers for autism, discouraging scientists from entering the field, some researchers and parents say.

Fixed it for you. Some researchers are still looking at thimerosal- sorry if that gives you an ulcer.

Through the medical treatments aimed at detoxifying their bodies of heavy metals and regulating their immune systems, my boys are doing extremely well today.

Hmmm...so strange that detoxifying of metals would have any effect on autism, since mercury in vaccines can't *possibly* play any role in causing autism...