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| I've heard some say that because Jenny McCarthy says she cured her son's autism, that he must not have actually had autism, but rather he had mercury poisoning. Does this imply that autism is not curable? |
It depends on the speaker as to what this means exactly. Many neurodiversity proponents feel that a distinction should be made between people who have autistic traits with an underlying health condition causing them and people who have autistic traits as an inherent expression of who they are. How many autistic people fall into each group is hotly debated and sometimes ugly.
The medical definition of autism is simply about meeting certain criteria, regardless of the cause, so that complicates the issue further.
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| I'm wondering... what's the difference between autism and mercury poisoning? Can vaccines cause autism, or do they more often cause mercury poisoning, which just looks like autism? |
In some cases, the only difference is that the parents have figured out what's going on with their child. My personal stake in this is that my kids and I are mercury toxic due to my fillings. My symptoms are very different from my kids, and I think part of it is due to when the poisoning happened. For me, all my fillings were put in when I was about 11 or 12, but my kids were poisoned in-utero. My kids' symptoms are fairly mild (though it's quite the trauma to realize that they've got enough mercury to cause systemic health problems).
The other complication for mercury (where my reading has focused) is that as the body become more toxic, it has less ability to get rid of other toxins. My daughter (really all of us since there's a common source) is high in arsenic, and I don't think we have a specific arsenic source so much as I wasn't able to get rid of the arsenic I ran into in normal, everyday life. So other toxins can also accumulate leading to problems in how the body works. I worry about the heavy doses of aluminum nowadays in the vaccination schedule--if someone is already having trouble getting rid of toxins, adding that much aluminum could be really problematic (given that no one really knows how quickly healthy babies can excrete it, let alone less-than-healthy ones).
