Mike S provides (again--and this information very much needs to be repeated and emphasized and highlighted) the documented facts of how Abubakar Tariq Nadama was killed by chelation. See http://mikestanton.wordpress.com/2007/08/2...-over-tariqs-death/

Mike S also has some urgent and essential questions about the prominent DAN! doctor, Anju Usman, who referred Tariq to Dr Roy Kerry for chelation.

This is the same Anju Usman who is a featured speaker at the National Autism Association's upcoming conference http://www.nationalautismconference.org/allspeakers.htm , shoulder to shoulder with Thomas Insel of the NIMH.

Edited by author 08-23-2007 01:59 PM
Further to /m6567, here is the full text of the Mother Jones feature on the Judge Rotenberg Center: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/20...chool_of_shock.html.

Also there is a great essay by Tim Page in the current issue of the New Yorker about his life as a person with AS: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_page

Forgot to mention re /m6582 and /m6583 that MEG (magnetoencephalography) was all the rage at IMFAR this year, at least among the keynote speakers. I think it was Anthony Bailey who used the phrase "hair dryer on hormones" (or something like that) to describe the MEG set-up (here's one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Magnetoencephalograph.jpg ).

Thank you for taking the time to look at that paper. I really appreciate the explanation, and for reminding me that the question of whether or not the subjects are on medication is a big one.

It looks like one of those papers where the researchers were happy to find that autistics didn't have something that typically developing people did.

Thanks for the kind words, Michelle. i do sometimes worry about repeating myself. but, as you say, this sort of information needs repeating.

I have bought a DVD player so I'm looking for good autism related DVDs to buy.

Hmmm, I'm definitely not a good person to ask about autism DVDs. I haven't even seen Rainman, much less anything more recent. Totally clueless in the DVD dept...

Edited by author 08-26-2007 02:27 AM
In the "birds of a feather quack together" dept (well, it's late), and I'm sure other people have noticed this, but see the current Autism Research Institute splash page http://www.autism.org/ which proclaims a sort of unity in values, methods, goals, standards (etc) among the great pushers of bad science and quackery in autism. If you click over to the ARI intro page, you can see the list--of ARI's partner organizations--again, at the bottom http://www.autism.com/index.htm Here's the gang, with ASA leading the way (of course they would):

Autism Society of America
Talk About Curing Autism
National Autism Association
Unlocking Autism
Generation Rescue
Autism One
Medigenesis
Schafer Autism Report
Safe Minds
Treating Autism

The grand banner at the top of the page declares that ARI is winning the fight against autism one child at a time. Like the major battle current DAN! doctors Anju Usman and Roy Kerry waged against Abubakar Tariq Nadama, after which there was one less autistic child in the world. Forever.

Adam is an all around happy fellow, indeed.

Edited by author 08-26-2007 11:14 AM
Hi Michelle,

If your video: "Michelle Dawson on Autism in Society, Law and Science" is available as a DVD I would like to buy it.

The National Autistic Society has DVDs for sale. See http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=434.

I hope that someday videos by autistics which are now on Youtube will be available on DVD.

Hi Philip,

Not sure, but I think you can still order that DVD, see http://www.hrdp.qc.ca/fr/detail.php?id=419 . It should also be available from an organization in France (which carries a lot of CECOM's videos), but that would be the French version. It's expensive though (it was shot in 2004, in the pre-YouTube era). I'm not sure what I'd think of it now--I know a lot more now than I did in 2004.

I'd like to see Larry Arnold's DVD, because he makes these gorgeous videos (one or two of which I'm managed to see at least part of), even if I don't have a clue what they're about and don't understand most of what he says. I don't know anything about any of the other NAS DVDs.

Edited by author 08-27-2007 06:18 PM
Some responses to the Mother Jones feature about the JRC. From "An aversion to aversion therapy" http://ledger.southofboston.com/articles/2.../27/news/news02.txt :

--------------------------------------------------------- -----------------

State Sen. Brian A. Joyce, a Milton Democrat whose district includes the center’s 15-acre campus, has complained for years that students are subject to punishments that aren’t used on the worst criminal.

"People are incredulous that in 2007, we’re allowing this electric shocking of our most vulnerable and innocent citizens, children with autism or mental retardation," Joyce said. "If we were to apply electric shock to serial killers or terrorists, there would be worldwide outrage over cruel and unusual punishment."

Joyce says he’s frustrated that he has not succeeded after years of trying to halt electric skin shocks, and adds that 10 states have banned aversive therapy. He expects a legislative hearing to be held in December or January on his push to curb aversive therapy.

Another opponent of aversive therapy, Rep. Tom Sannicandro, D-Ashland, asked to receive an electric shock at a legislative hearing last year to see what it feels like.

"When it happened it was just unbearable," he said. "I was only shocked at the lowest level, and it felt like I was being electrocuted."

---------------------------------------------------------- ----------------

Matthew Israel appears briefly, to object to the Mother Jones story, where the largest amount of print was dedicated to an interview with him.

At the bottom of this article, there's a link to a long article he wrote in his defence, "Outrage over Jennifer Gonnerman's article,'School of Shock'". It's here http://ledger.southofboston.com/articles/2...27/news/news02a.txt He claims to be saving lives, and anyone who objects is ignorant and reprehensible, etc.

"Single gene may hold key to perfect pitch" http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...NStory/Science/home , Globe and Mail article, from which:

----------------------------------------------------------- ---------------

Only 1 in 10,000 people have perfect or absolute pitch, the uncanny ability to name the note of just about any sound without the help of a reference tone.

"One guy said, ‘I can name the pitch of anything -- even farts,'" said Dr. Jane Gitschier of the University of California, San Francisco, whose study appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

----------------------------------------------------------- ---------------

Scientists really do have so much fun...

Autism isn't mentioned in the G & M article (I haven't read the journal article yet; the abstract is here http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0703868104v1 ), and I wonder where that 1 in 10,000 figure comes from.

Uta Frith has speculated (in her introduction to Gilles Trehin's book Urville) that one-third of autistics have absolute pitch. If that's across the spectrum, there would have to be more than 1 in 500 people in the overall population with absolute pitch. If she means only the specific diagnosis of autism, that would still mean a rate of absolute pitch of more than 1 in 1500... But the one-third figure looks like a wild guess on Dr Frith's part. I still wonder about that 1 in 10,000 figure.

I don't know the absolute pitch research really well (yet), and then there's research into the inverse of absolute pitch, amusia (tone-deafness), a lot of it done by Isabelle Peretz at the University of Montreal (her page is here http://www.brams.umontreal.ca/plab/ where you can find her very well-organized papers, about multiple aspects of music). There's a lot of evidence that autistic musical savants invariably have absolute pitch, which sets them off from non-autistic expert musicians, many of whom don't have absolute pitch. There's at least some evidence that autistic savants in areas other than music are also likely to have absolute pitch. And non-savant autistics have shown better-than-typical (sometimes, much better-than-typical) abilities in pitch labeling, memory, discrimination and categorization (see work from Patricia Heaton as well as Dr Mottron's group).

Forgot to add re the absolute pitch study ( /m6597 ), there's a related website http://perfectpitch.ucsf.edu/ where you can take the test used in the study (see background info here http://perfectpitch.ucsf.edu/ppstudy.html , and there's a short linked interview with Dr Gitschier here http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/sept2001/perf.../perfectpitch2.html ).

Also forgot to add that amusia (which is considered to be a genetic condition) has a very high prevalence--4% of the population is amusic.

On Monday 27 August 2007 21:07:52 QT - Michelle Dawson wrote:

> I don't know the absolute pitch research really well (yet), and
> then there's research into the inverse of absolute pitch, amusia
> (tone-deafness), a lot of it done by Isabelle Peretz at the
> University of Montreal (her page is here
> http://www.brams.umontreal.ca/plab/ where you can find her very
> well-organized papers, about multiple aspects of music).

I've participated in research about absolute pitch before, but never read the results.