See No Evil, Hear No Evil

Our children are toxic. A 1/50 incidence of Autism is not better diagnosis. That’s like saying our planet has always been overpopulated, we just didn’t know how to count before. From some 1978 estimates of 1 in 10,000, this is not Mendelian genetics we are talking about. It is also not just autism. It’s learning disabilities, allergies, asthma, autoimmune disorders, cancer. We are in crisis and the denialism around contributing factors is gilded in dollars shared by our government and corporate interests. The toothless regulation of pharmaceutical companies, Monsanto, sugar, and chemical lobbies is responsible for this. Where is the too little too late corrective response? Where is the tipping point collapse of the collusion? Where is the feverish search for what is making our children sick? If not only because our country will buckle under the weight of the needs of these children coupled with the chronic diseases of the baby boomers and their children?

Here is the Proposed Solution: Revisionist History

Redefine and eliminate the epidemic. Change the diagnostic criteria¹ so that Autism is not the cause for alarm we all thought it was, just as the canaries in the coal mine were beginning to look like backyard finches. Use a pharmaceutically-driven set of hand-waving criteria to ignore the plight of millions of families in this country suffering at the hands of modern medicine and a government-sanctioned pathological lifestyle (make sure to get your 8 servings a day of genetically modified, glyphosate-sprayed processed grains!). Enter the DSM-V. Under this rule,

The culminating shame of a profession marked by hack-science, placebo-driven assertions of medication efficacy, manipulation of data and a total absence of objective diagnostic markers. Psychiatry had a precious opportunity to achieve a rebirth – to look beyond the epiphenomena of symptom clusters in search of common biomarkers and underlying pathophysiologic mechanisms. It would not serve; however, the APA’s relationship with Pharma to diminish or render more precise the demographic of patients for whom medications may be indicated. So, at once, we continue to pathologize normative human experience to better sanction mass prescribing to a populace convinced they need these magic pills, but we stop the hemorrhaging on the pediatric statistics that directly implicate the medical-industrial complex and the consequences of reckless obstetrical and pediatric interventions. Done and done.

There is precedent for this diagnostic revision and many write about the misattribution of polio eradication to the Salk Vaccine in 1954 when, in reality, the diagnostic criteria were changed shortly thereafter to require 60 days of paralysis (rather than 24 hours) and to distinguish coxsacki and aseptic meningitis from what had previously been lumped as poliomyelitis – an insta-resolution to an epidemic. While infectious disease and fear-mongering around contagion is at the helm of pharmaceutically-driven mandates in the name of public health, public health today looks a lot more like autoimmunity, neurodevelopmental dysfunction, and cancer. The impact of these chronic diseases on our society will be crippling if nothing is done to change the course of incidence…but it seems like the DSM has found a solution. Denialism.

(1)

• 25% of children diagnosed with classic autism under the old criteria would not qualify for autism
• 55% of those with higher functioning autism would not qualify
• 75% of those with a diagnosis of Asperger’s would not qualify as being on the autism spectrum
• 85% of those with PDD-NOS would not qualify

This post originally appeared on Mad in America as See No Evil, Hear No Evil.