Autism’s False Prophets – Book Review

Dr. Paul Offit is a chief of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a vaccine researcher.

He is also an outspoken critic of those who say vaccines cause autism.

As a result, he has been called, among other things, a prostitute for the pharmaceutical companies and has received threats against his own life and that of his children.

Every week he gets hate mail.

In his powerful and absorbing book Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, Dr. Offit examines the the theories of those who hold that vaccines cause autism as well as the claims of others who have held out false hopes of unproven autism cures.

Parents of children with autism are understandably impatient with mainstream medicine, which has failed to identify a cause or offer a cure, Dr. Offit notes.

“Many parents of children with autism are tired of the glacial pace of medical research,” he writes, “and tired of slogging through hours of behavioral therapy, and tired of watching children improve at rates so slow it’s hard to tell if they are improving at all.”

It is no wonder parents grasp at hope when it is offered.

One of the first to offer such a hope was Bruno Bettelheim, a Viennese-born psychoanalyst who blamed autism on cold and unfeeling parents, in particular, the mothers of autistic children.

Bettelheim said he could cure children of autism by replacing their mothers’ “black milk” with a nurturing, supportive environment.

His claims soon caught the media’s attention. He was invited on such national programs as The Dick Cavett Show and The Today Show. Eventually, however, his ideas and treatment approach were discredited.

That such a bizarre theory that so cruelly shamed parents was given credence shows how desperate parents, and how credulous the media, can be.

But parents are not the only people who are vulnerable to the promise of a cure or at least a treatment, Offit shows; therapists, teachers and health-care providers are vulnerable as well.

Offit describes how, in the 1990s, a professor of special education began to promote an autism treatment called “facilitated communication”.

The theory on its face is strange. It held that autistic children were uncommunicative because they were not able to master the motor activity required for speech.

This disability could be overcome, the theory held, with facilitated communication in which an adult “facilitator”, by providing “counterweight”, helped guide the autistic child’s hands to letters on a keyboard so the child could communicate what they were thinking.

“The results were amazing,” Offit writes. “With the help of facilitators, children with autism typed out messages that filled their parents with hope.”

“I am trapped in a cage and I want to get out”, one wrote.

“I am intelligent and educated,” wrote another.

“Autism held me hostage for seventeen years but not any more because now I can talk.:

An institute was formed, and thousands of parents, teachers, therapists and healthcare providers were trained in the technique. “By 1993, hundreds of schools and centers for disabled children had adopted facilitated communication,” Offit writes.

But there were skeptics. How was it that children who in other tests had been found to be severely retarded were now able to write sophisticated poetry, essays, and engage in philosophical discussions? And how was it that they could type long paragraphs free of spelling errors?

So someone did a simple experiment. In the experiment, the child and facilitor would be shown a picture and they would then work together to type out the name of the object of the picture, standard facilitated communication.

The trick was that the facilitator and the child could not see the image the other was viewing.

What the researchers found was that when, for example, both the child and the facilitator were shown the picture of a key, the child would type out the word key.

But when the child was shown the picture of a cup and the facilitator was shown a picture of a hat, the child typed out the word hat.

“Clearly, the facilitator was subconsciously doing the typing,” writes Offit.

Yet, despite the evidence, many parents and practitioners continue believe in “the miracle of facilitated communications”, writes Offit.

Offit goes on to describe other theories that continue to have staunch advocates despite scientific evidence that theories are not true.

Perhaps, the most fervent of these advocates are those who blame vaccines for autism despite the fact that repeated studies conducted in the U.S. and abroad have failed to find a link.

These anti-vaccine activists not only do nothing to help those with autism, Dr. Offit argues, but they put children in danger by discouraging vaccinations that prevent dangerous infectious diseases.

Dr. Offit’s accounts of how the anti-vaccine ideas gain currency, passionate support, and media attention, and how they then come unravelled when subject to scientific scrutiny is fascinating journalism.

Autism’s False Prophets is a thoughtful, passionate book that anyone who is interested in autism or the autism debate should read.

Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
Paul A. Offit, M.D.
September, 2008 
Cloth, 328 pages, 12 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14636-4
$24.95 / £14.95

Tags: Autism, Book Review, Chelation, Vaccines

Category: Autism, Book Review