“These children are the orphans of the health care system and we want medicare coverage to cover the costs of an effective scientific cure for autism.”

Words used a little carelessly.

I have seen the effects that intensive one on one therapy has on autistic children. It’s wonderful and my son, now 21 has benefitted from it. It does not cure our children, but it does make them better. This truly is a wonderful thing and I applaud these efforts.

How much better is mostly dependent on how high functioning they are. My son, David, was placed in the same program as, Nick, a low functioning autistic child. My son, a highly functional, though classically autistic, made progress socially and academically. There was no change in Nick. The success of ABA and other such programs is limited by the functionality of the autistic children. ABA and other behavioral training can only take our children so far. The next step necessarily must be medical.

The need to prove that vaccines are or are not the cause of autism is a barrier to this next step. Not because it steals resources. We should know if vaccines causes autism or like smoking makes it more likely and if so why. But because it blinds the medical community to associations that might help but can’t be looked at because they might link vaccines to autism.
The second impediment to the next step is that autism is a brain issue. Because it is a brain issue there is no way to penetrate the blood-brain barrier to treat it. That makes autism untreatable. The fault in this thinking is the assumption that autism originates in the brain. That is not necessarily so. The autistic brain may develop that way because that is what the genes instruct it to do. Or it may develop that way because because of the environment it is in. That environment is a result of what does or does not get through the blood brain barrier.

This is the reason that the MMR data (note I said data not what was concluded from them) is so important. The data showed that there was measles virus in the intestinal flora and in the spinal fluid. That can only happen if the blood brain and blood gut barriers are compromised in some way. The polarization in the vaccine debate prevents this thread and other such threads from being explored.

The idea that there is no epidemic supports the idea that autism is behind the blood brain barrier and will never be treatable. I don’t subscribe to that idea.

I know that you do not want to turn your blog into a vaccine site. But the next step has to be a medical one. It is not possible to discuss the next step without touching on subjects that can be linked to vaccines.