WHEN I GRADUATED FROM UCLA MEDICAL School as a pediatrician in 1972, I was told if I had even one autistic child in my practice it would be unusual. Today most of my practice (250–300 active patients at any time) is composed of children and young adults diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, something we were never prepared for in medical school. General pediatrician practices now have between six and twelve children on the spectrum or with significant learning difficulties. I have heard from parents that their pediatricians were as unprepared as I was for this onslaught. So how is it that in thirty years the rate of “autism” in American children has gone from nonexistent to affecting nearly 1 percent of the total population or even higher?
To understand this change, let me give you some history. After I failed handwriting in the third grade, my teacher joked that I should become a doctor. Growing up, I enjoyed math and science, liked working with people and children, and did not envision myself in a lab with test tubes, so medicine, and in particular pediatrics, became my goal. I was extremely thankful to be accepted into UCLA Medical School, and I remain thankful for the wonderful training, for my internship and residency in pediatrics spent at Los Angeles County–University of Southern California Medical Center, with rotations through Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. What I learned within these institutions gave me an excellent background in infectious disease, immunology, allergies, and more. The professors and the medical system to which I was exposed formed a dynamic, exciting system. There was still the expectation that a physician would use a combination of clinical skills and emerging technologies to help advance their understanding and take their research to new levels. Medicine was viewed as a frontier that needed to be consistently explored. This expectation was quickly dropped when it came to researching the causes of a rising disease called autism.
I entered private practice in Tarzana, California, with optimism and excitement. I built the third largest pediatric practice in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. On a busy day, I could see up to fifty-two children. I would never let a sick child wait for an appointment if it were at all possible. I was taught preventive medicine in medical school; I was a good pediatrician if few children needed admittance to the hospital. The United States has evolved rapidly to a system where hospitals encourage admissions, however. Sadly, our collective “health” now boils down to dollars and cents.
Back then, for example, the standard practice was to postpone immunization for a child if he or she had a cold or a fever; parents would bring the child back for the shots once he or she was healthy. Economics now dictates that we limit visits. The more we bill at one time, the better, so let’s vaccinate them with everything we can give them while they are here in the office, all in the name of efficiency.
What new vaccines are being added to the roster of necessary childhood vaccinations, and why? How many readers are aware that the fairly recent decision by the Academy of Pediatrics in 1991 to give a hepatitis B vaccine in the newborn nursery1 (the most dangerous adjustment time in a baby’s life) was not made on the rational basis of medical efficacy but, in large part, due to the sticky issue of political correctness? It would not be PC to point out the limited number of cases where a child might be returning to a high-risk home, so let’s vaccinate all the infants. (For the record, I never have given that shot in the nursery, and many pediatricians now have no problem if parents elect to defer that vaccination until later.)
In the early eighties I met the woman who would become my wife. Around fifteen months after we met, Elyse developed a mysterious illness that at that time had no name—she was suffering sudden severe headaches, overwhelming fatigue, constant short-term memory issues and often periods of severe brain fog, fibromyalgia muscle and joint symptoms, fevers, and swollen glands. She visited various doctors all around the country, but she remained miserable and undiagnosed. Her blood work came back positive for an astounding number of viruses—almost every virus she was tested for excluding HIV. While she tested positive for Epstein-Barr, CMV (cytomegalovirus), HHV6, rubeola, and rubella, to name a few, it was rapidly obvious that while some of these titers might represent a potential virus to target, others were just false activation from a dysfunctional or misdirected (perhaps an unidentified virus or retrovirus) immune system. With these test results in hand, it seemed logical to suspect that some of these viruses (not as a new acute infection, but with the new concept of reactivation) were causing an impairment of her immune system or that somehow her immune system was making mistakes. Healthy patients do not run around with three or four active viruses in their bodies, or even multiple elevated titers—although some of the medical profession didn’t see any significance to the results of these blood tests, whether true viruses or just false titers, there was no direct evidence as far as they were concerned that this was causing harm (retrospectively this was a very large mistake).
She was sick and scared. As a physician I felt helpless, and we turned to prescription-grade vitamins and amino acids, thinking maybe they would help address any imbalances in her system. She took sixty-eight supplements a day, leaving little room for food with all the liquid she needed to swallow them. It was years before she would have a diagnosis. It is both sad and ironic that some of the same treatments tried on her then and others we never would have allowed (because they were potentially harmful) are being used on children today with about the same success rate of close to nothing. Of more concern is preliminary evidence (with formal study being planned) from NeuroSPECT testing showing potential increased stress to children’s brains when they undergo some of the more untested treatment ideas (including chelation, hyperbaric oxygen, and megasupplements).
We were married, and her symptoms continued. One night at dinner my son, around four years old at the time, said, “Dad, why are you sending Mom all over the country? Why don’t you just fix her?” This began my journey into the complex workings of the neuroimmune system and how it controls the body and our brains.