Autism

The topic of autism rates has gained immense attention with RFK, Jr’s ascension to the post of HHS secretary and his claim that within a few months he will have identified the cause and find a cure.  That is pure bullshit, particularly since the only clear established association is genetic and I will be interested to see how he fixes that.  Supposedly the incidence and prevalence of autism have soared in recent decades.  There can be relatively quick rises in disease prevalence, for example lung cancer and emphysema when smoking became very common.  But we also repeatedly see that changes in diagnostic criteria can also be responsible for rises or declines in disease prevalence.

Which brings me to the general background of what the real story is here.  The medical profession over the last few decades, often in league with the pharmaceutical industry, has created a series of either new or expanded medical conditions which then require treatment.  This trend is driven entirely by a desire to make money, a whole lot of money, and disregards real patient welfare.  The effort starts with changing the criteria for diagnosis of a condition or creating an entirely new set of symptoms or criteria for an alleged condition.  Suddenly, a whole lot of people who didn’t know they had an illness or who were just different in some way, are diagnosed with a condition, which of course then needs to be treated.  From the perspective of the medical profession and the drug industry, the longer they need to be treated the better.  No effort is put forward in regard to prevention or cure; just expanded diagnosis and treatment.  Prevention and cure would end the gravy train.

Think of ADHD.  Every young boy who displayed typical young boy behavior–high energy, easily distractable, etc. suddenly had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and consequently needed to be medicated.  Go look at the change in criteria and rise in diagnoses and how much the drug companies made from ritalin and other medications used to treat these boys, most of whom were actually displaying age-appropriate behavior.  This was dangerous to these young children and it labeled them in a negative manner.  But the medical profession and the drug companies did quite well, thank you.

Gender-disaffirming care is the most despicable example, where whacked ideologues are infesting schools to persuade children they were “born in the wrong body”.  The doctors who then treat this non-existent disorder make a lifelong fortune treating these poor souls, who suffer multiple physical and mental health issues from the treatment.  And so on, with medical condition after medical condition.  It gets to the point where anyone who is healthy feels left out, and a large percent of the population comes to enjoy their status as sufferers or “victims” of some medical condition; a status which excuses all manner of life failures.  Then we get the patient advocacy groups, which raise large amounts of money for “awareness” and which are also highly motivated to increase the pool of diagnosed patients.  Check out how much money the leaders of these advocacy groups are paid.  It is always all about the money.

And so it is with autism.  Ask ChatGP or some other AI engine to create a history of autism definitions and diagnostic criteria for you.  Check the correlation of changes in those criteria with the number of cases.  Look at the history of the various autism advocacy groups.  Find out how much is spent and the trends in spending on diagnosing and treating autism every year.  Get the numbers on the rise in autism treatment centers.  As with ADHD, suddenly any child who is a little different in any way in how they learn or interact is “autistic”.  And of course they then need treatment, lots of treatment, lifelong treatment.

There are children who have a severe disturbance of their ability to interact with the world.  I doubt that the proportion of these children has changed over the years.  The US seems to have a unique problem in regard to alleged autism and the other countries with apparent rises in autism also have the history of changed diagnostic criteria.  If the source were vaccines or environmental toxins, what reason could there be for it not showing up in other developed countries.  Some genetic link appears to exist.  If the cause is primarily genetic as indicated by research, and one would suspect it is, there would be no reason for a massive increase in prevalence.

The bottom line is that the supposed rise in autism incidence and prevalence is driven by changes in diagnostic criteria, which in turn were motivated by a medical groups and drug companies looking for yet another big revenue stream.   My fear, completely justified, is that RFK, Jr. will use this as an opportunity to create his own fake research blaming vaccines or environmental toxins, to help his pals in the legal industry from whom he rakes in millions of dollars.  As I keep saying, always follow the money.