Autism is rising at an epidemic rate in this country. Remember all that "for the children" stuff with the Clintons. Remember Rob Reiner talking about the wonders of a baby's brain. Meanwhile, early intervention...0-3 programs in this country have been savaged. Many parents who seek answers about their child's disability are shut down by managed care gatekeepers.
Recently talking to a young mother, she was informed by her doc that mercury had been taken out of the vaccines.....yeah...I doubt it. But that is probably what the doc had been told...and everyone trusts the doctor.
You would think so. But when it comes to potentially neurotoxic agents as a by-product of something that is perceived as "good," people take a "see no evil" approach to the issue.
This is especially true of LEGAL psychiatric drugs. The profession only looks into neurotoxicity questions when forced into it, and long after much damage has been done. Even then, they acknowledge the problems and do nothing about it.
A perfect example is neuroleptics (antipsychotics). It took them 2 decades to begin to acknowledge the neurological wreckage these drugs cause. But even then, they simply put the appropriate warnings in the PDR and kept on truckin'. Now in the last few years, we're beginning to hear the first whiffs of potential neurotoxicity problems with SSRIs.
Thanks for continuing to highlight this issue. We need to know a lot more on this as well as progress on related issues such as the role of neurotoxic agents in Parkinsons and Alzheimer's. When the U.S., with 5% of the world's population, produces 25% of the Alzheimer's patients, something is wrong.