American models on a café terrace in Paris in 1925.
© Maurice-Louis Branger / Roger-Viollet

Key figures of the Lost Generation include Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Their works often explore themes of existential angst, the futility of war, and the alienation of modern life. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, for example, delves into the hollowness of the American Dream and the moral decay underlying the Jazz Age’s glittering facade.

But we have another “lost generation”; in fact several. 

The “Woodstock Generation” typically refers to the Baby Boomers, specifically those who were young adults in the 1960s and 1970s during the time of the famous Woodstock Music Festival in 1969. They are sometimes referred to as the “Lost Generation” in a cultural or societal context, as they challenged many conventional norms and values during a time of significant societal upheaval.

We danced, we sang, we had some of the best music ever and shocked the world by comfortable nakedness. For a time, we glittered on the world stage but then drugs, young-girl prostitution to get money for a “fix” and crime desperation ruined the dream and we were eventually very disillusioned.

The social upheaval and trauma experienced by those who fought in or were otherwise impacted by the Vietnam War, combined with widespread anti-war sentiment, led to references of this group as a “lost generation.” Some courageous youngsters were even spat on when they returned home (disabled vets included).

I’ve heard it said that in more recent times, Millennials who entered the workforce during the recession of 2008-2009 have occasionally been referred to as a “lost generation” due to economic hardship and job scarcity, affecting their financial and professional development. Many never got a job at all and without work or meaning or purpose in life you are indeed lost.

But I want to talk about yet another group referred to as a “Lost Generation” in a seminal 2015 paper published in The Lancet Psychiatry.¹ It grouped together adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and who were not diagnosed as children. 

They have struggled wretchedly, in a social and scientific environment which did not recognize their disability; indeed many were diagnosed or at least treated as bad people, personality disorder, antisocial behavior and many other labels that are dismissive or just plain derogatory.

Thing is, it’s not rare, especially if we include other developmental and mental health disorders, lumped together as “minimal brain dysfunction”, such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder.

Now we are having adults retrospectively diagnosed as ASD in childhood.

The Lost Generation in Mental Health

The “lost” mental health generation primarily comprises individuals who were children before the late 20th century, a period when awareness and understanding of ASD, ADHD, and bipolar disorder were significantly less than today.

Diagnostic criteria were not precise or more often non-existent. During this time, these conditions were often misdiagnosed as behavioral issues or personality traits, leading to inappropriate treatment or no treatment at all during their formative years.

As I said, it’s a very large group, certainly tens of millions in the USA alone. There is an argument I have made often that the problem is a straight spin off from mass vaccinations. Very contentious; very few dare say that. But in a couple of my books I have also pointed out that rise in supermarkets and junk food almost exactly parallels the deterioration in youngsters.

I am proud to claim that I was the first person in the world to spot the connection between the measles vaccine and ASD. This is back around 1983. I was seeing case after case of disastrous deterioration in young kids, starting within a day or two of the jab and sometimes so severe that pediatricians used the label “disintegrative psychosis”.

Thing is, I ask questions… a LOT of questions, including: “What happened around or just before this happened?” By the time I’d sat down with over a dozen weeping Mum’s and got their observations about post-vaccination disorders and it was all the same story, I realized there was a pattern.

I started writing and talking about it. But when it came to being interviewed for radio, I was obliged to say only “It seems as if this followed a vaccination…” That’s caution too far. But then, we’ve known for many decades the media are controlled from outside.

[a little Freudian subconscious blip there: I first typed merdia. Some of you may know that merde is French slang for “shit”!]

Autistic adults may go unrecognized or be diagnosed late in life. In fact, autistic adults are about 30 times less likely than children to be diagnosed. This is particularly so among doctors. In one study, 10% of patients at an institution had autism but went unidentified; they never received a proper diagnosis. In fact the word “autism” didn’t appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980. 

Individuals who have grown up without being recognized as on the autism spectrum often struggle with symptoms that were misunderstood, dismissed or overlooked during their childhood years. This late diagnosis can have significant implications for their social, professional, and personal lives. They might have struggled with school, work, relationships, and self-esteem, leading to feelings of isolation, alienation, and resentment.

But it’s not just ASD; ADD and ADHD have plagued many more kids. I myself am notably ADD; all over the place some days. It doesn’t stop you being a powerhouse (it may help that!) but it’s inefficient and at times exhausting.

And was certainly misunderstood by many teachers, who just assumed I was a jerk and many of those were stunned when I walked off with the prizes (Haha!).

Coping Mechanisms

It is a well-documented fact that many adults with conditions like ASD, ADHD, ADD and bipolar disorder develop various coping mechanisms and strategies to hide their symptoms. This phenomenon, often referred to as “camouflaging” or “masking,” involves individuals consciously or subconsciously managing their behavior to fit in with societal norms or expectations.

Masking behavior is particularly common among adults with ASD, including forcing eye contact during conversations, learning to script responses in social situations, or suppressing stimulatory tics and twitches (like hand flapping or rocking)—often called stimming. Some autistic individuals may also develop elaborate strategies to avoid situations that could reveal their autism, such as avoiding social events where they cannot predict or understand the behavior expected of them.

Infor graphic via SimplyPsychology.org Go visit!

Coping behaviors can make it challenging for others, including medical professionals, to recognize signs of autism in adults, contributing to late or missed diagnoses. So a member of your family who always seems cold, distant and mechanical may have Asperger’s syndrome, a relatively mild and common disorder on the autism spectrum!

In the case of ADHD or ADD, adults may develop strategies to manage their symptoms such as using calendars, alarms, and other tools to stay organized. Even that doesn’t work for me!

So, I return to my question: are you part of this particular “lost generation”? If so, just to know that is so has considerable healing potential—it’s hard to solve a problem if you don’t recognize there is a problem!

You don’t have to be a wreck or a failure, as I have explained from my own case. In fact there can be amusement to it. If you have watched the movie Salmon Fishing in The Yemen (yes, even the title is an uproarious joke!) you may have spotted Ian McGregor explaining to a potential girlfriend, “The good thing about Asperger’s is that you canna hurt my feelings.”

Keep smiling!

To Your Good Health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

P.S Have we a new “lost generation” on the way: kids with their lives and social development blighted by the stupid COVID restrictions? Why are they not factoring this in as an obvious toxic side-effect from their supposed “highly successful” measures? Put another way: how many tens of millions of kids have to have their lives ruined to save one person dying of COVID?³

SOURCES: 

1. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/110016
2. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(15)00277-1/abstract
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9764868/

Mr. Nasty—Marc Sircus of Medical Veritas used that statement to call me a madman and accused me online of being in favor of mercury, that I was stupid and had sold out (see link below) — all sitting comfortably in Brasil, where he thinks he’s safe from a libel suit. ₁ Sircus has no meaningful medical qualifications but he’s highly opinionated.

He does all his “research” on Google and proceeds to slag off doctors he doesn’t like from a safe distance.

Trouble is with people like Sircus, he doesn’t let mere facts from experts get in the way of his theories.

I have the last laugh however: because I have been a cutting edge physician for nearly 40 years, with a strong science base, and full-on clinical experience. I was one of the first EVER to write about autism and start treating it in the early 1980s. I am left the satisfaction—yet again—of being proved right.

The fact is Sircus is completely wrong: Some kids have autistic symptoms before their first vaccine. Kids get autism who have never even had a vaccination, never mind the mercury burden.

Scientists who disagree with non-medically trained fact-shy theorists like Sircus are not all rogues involved in a conspiracy. Andrew Wakefield, a real doctor who I find I can admire, seemed to be on the right lines when he found a rogue measles virus loose in the guts of many autistic kids.

But now even I am shocked by a revelation which might be the real reason kids get autism and how Tylenol and autism link. The science is very compelling on a topic where science is very difficult to interpret and the waters are very muddy.

In 2013 a landmark paper was published in The Journal Of Restorative Medicine by William Shaw, PhD, director of the Great Plains Laboratory, gathering evidence of a definitive link between acetominophen / paracetomol and autism. I should remark I was shocked mainly because this drug (known as Panadol) was in the UK 20 years ahead of the widespread use of Tylenol in the USA.

The abstract almost speaks for itself. Let me walk you through the key findings:

It appears that the marked increase in the rate of autism, asthma, and attention deficit with hyperactivity throughout much of the world may be largely caused by the rise in the use of acetaminophen in genetically and/or metabolically susceptible children, and the use of acetaminophen by pregnant women.

Toxicity of acetaminophen may cause autism by overloading the defective sulfation pathway catalyzed by phenolsulfotransferase, which is deficient in autism, leading to overproduction of the toxic metabolite N-acetyl-p-benzoquinone imine (NAPQI). Increased levels of NAPQI reduce the ability to detoxify a host of toxic chemicals in the environment, increasing oxidative stress, which leads to protein, lipid, and nucleic acid damage from free radicals.

We know for certain that autism in kids (which I was treating successfully as early as 1982 with a holistic dietary and detox approach), are susceptible to toxic overload. So anything which clobbers the ability to detox will result in a rapid and nasty toxic accumulation in these kids (including mercury, where present, but not confined to it).

Epidemiological evidence also supports the association of increased acetaminophen usage with autism, asthma, and attention deficit with hyperactivity. The marked increases in the incidences of autism, asthma, and attention deficit disorder in the United States coincide with the replacement of aspirin by acetaminophen in the 1980s.

Do bear in mind that association does not mean causation. But if you have a model which would explain the findings, then it becomes the current number one hypothesis, as in this case.

The characteristic loss of Purkinje cells in the brains of people with autism is consistent with depletion of brain glutathione due to excess acetaminophen usage, which leads to premature brain Purkinje cell death.

This is one of the characteristic effects of acetominophen / paracetomol.

Glutathione (a very important antioxidant) is depleted with excess intake of any toxin. Roughly, it’s one molecule of glutathione lost, for every toxic molecule got rid of.

The anomalous hair mercury concentrations of children with autism are consistent with exposure of growing hair proteins to NAPQI derived from acetaminophen, which competitively inhibits the reaction of mercury with hair sulfhydryl groups.

This is why people think that mercury is involved in causing autism. But as I said, kids without any mercury have autism. It’s not mercury, it’s the build up of any toxins. Heavy metals (don’t forget lead causes severe brain damage) are just part of the picture. That’s why no statistical correlation is found. It’s not the problem, whatever out-of-date fact-shy theorists want to believe.

Finally, large-scale faulty production of acetaminophen products, such that the labeled values were exceeded by the true concentrations, in addition to contamination with bacteria and tribromoanisole, may have greatly increased the chances of children receiving overdosages of acetaminophen and potential toxins for perhaps as long as a decade.

One of the puzzling aspects of autism is the marked increase in the incidence of autism that began in the United States in the early 1980s and has appeared to increase continuously since then. The highest incidence of autism has been reported to be South Korea, where the incidence is said to be one in 38 boys. It has been definitively proven not to be due to more aggressive diagnosis; it’s a real increase.

This is where epidemiology is important: making the right connection between disease appearance and causative agent is important.

One of the most notable cases of serious adverse effects caused by a pharmaceutical agent was the terrible developmental epidemic of the birth of children with seal-like arms and legs (phocomelia) that was linked to the maternal use of the sedative thalidomide 20–35 days after conception.

One of the clues that led to the discovery of thalidomide as the causative agent of deformed limbs was that it was much more commonly used in Europe than in the United States.

Is there a geographic region in the world in which the incidence of autism was much lower than that in the United States, so that a comparison of medical or dietary differences might provide a significant clue to the major cause of autism?

Yes there is: Cuba. The incidence of autism in Cuba is 0.00168% of the population compared with an estimate of as high as 0.50% of the US population. That’s over 400 times higher in the U.S! Yet vaccines are compulsory in Cuba, which has one of the most highly vaccinated populations in the world (99.7%).

So once again, that’s the death-knell to the vaccination and mercury theory of mercury. It is simply not supportable by any intelligent thinker (and no, for people like Sircus who love to twist other people’s words, I am not saying mercury is non-toxic).

What is highly significant is that, here in the USA doctors routinely advise acetominophen / paracetomol as a prophylactic for the fever that commonly accompanies vaccination, even up to five days beforehand. In fact, some kids get their first autistic symptoms before vaccination.

If high fever continues after vaccination in Cuba for more than 2 days, the parents are advised to visit the physician’s office where the drug metamizole is most commonly prescribed and NOT acetominophen / paracetomol.

Here’s the bottom line from the published article: there is clear evidence that increased acetaminophen use in genetically vulnerable children appears to be a major cause of the epidemics of autism, attention deficit with hyperactivity, and asthma.2

Mercury does not show up and there is no correlation with mercury levels in children, because it’s just one of thousands of toxins which can accumulate. Blood levels don’t count: it’s how fast the child can remove toxins and with a detox system poisoned by acetominophen / paracetomol, the child is in big trouble.

You can read the full Journal Of Restorative Medicine article (which has 83 relevant citations) for more facts. But I’d like to add this. Even after the paper was submitted for publication, yet another study came out, supporting Shaw’s research and also making the connection between acetominophen / paracetomol and autism:

Bauer and Kriebel, working at University of Massachusetts- Lowell, reported that prenatal use of acetaminophen was strongly correlated with autism/Autism Spectrum Disorder prevalence (r = 0.80) using all available country-level data (n = 8) for the period 1984 to 2005. In addition, the authors found that after acetaminophen became commonly used to treat circumcision pain after 1995, there was a strong correlation between country-level (n = 9) autism/ASD prevalence in males and a country’s circumcision rate (r = 0.98). A very similar pattern was seen among US states and when comparing the three main racial/ethnic groups in the US.3

They keep saying the jury is out. Well, it’s time the mercury dodos were ousted and replaced by intelligent dispassionate citizens. We need real answers, not pet theories.

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

Oxytocin was once thought to be an exclusively womens’ hormone and involved only in setting up uterine contractions during labor and squeezing the uterus empty after birth.

Now we know both sexes have it and it performs a great role in love and bonding: so much so it’s sometimes called the “love hormone” or the “cuddle hormone”.

Lots of oxytocin gets released at orgasm, in both sexes. Hmmm. Like to get regular injections for that, wouldn’t you!

The basic point, in Nature, is that the mother will bond with her newborn and love the child. Her nurturing desires are what will take care of the little baby for months, even years, to come.
With this new understanding of its essentially psychological role in humans, scientists have started to study the impact of oxytocin on a variety of social situations and interactions.

New research presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego has also traced oxytocin’s effect in boosting trust and empathy (to the point of increasing the wish to donate to charitable causes) and in reducing anxiety and stress.

Also, the higher your oxytocin blood levels, the higher the benefits of oxytocin, and your happiness and well-being will soar, at least for women.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, those women with higher oxytocin had more sex with fewer partners, reflecting more long-lasting relationships. They were likely to be liked by other people.

But the researchers were reluctant to allow that these findings might translate to men. However the study leader did admit to an earlier study which focused on men and found that men treated with the love hormone were more generous after watching public service ads.

Those on placebo donated to 21% of the ads, those on oxytocin 33%. Moreover, the men given the hormone donated 56% more money to the causes than men in the placebo group.
Oxytocin seems to control the balance between self and others in the brain.

Of course cynical advertisers are onto the power of oxytocin. Why are puppies in toilet paper commercials? Because pitchmen know people feel good about puppies — hopefully so good their brains will release oxytocin. That can make them more likely to buy the product.

But that’s exploitation, not science.

Could Oxytocin Help Autism?

Some people even feel it could help with autism. There is some human research that has found improved social function in people with autism after treatment with the hormone. In the future, targeting the oxytocin system in people with autism may be useful, especially when combined with behavioral therapy.

Predictably, there are the naysayers. Despite some of the promising new findings, Sue Carter, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was quick to warn: “People are trying to treat autistic kids [with oxytocin] in the absence of [definitive] research.”

It could have long-term negative effects. Well, she’s right of course. But you feel she’s coming from a party pooper perspective (try saying that 3 times fast!), rather than worthy scientific caution.

Now a recent study suggest air pollution may be a key factor (I was teaching that back in the 1980s).

Exposure to air pollution during pregnancy is already suspected of a wide range of negative effects on the fetus.

Having a mother who lived within 1,000 feet of a freeway while pregnant doubles a child’s odds of having autism.

The finding comes from a study looking at environmental factors that might play a role in autism. Researchers from the University of Southern California collected data from 304 California children with confirmed autism and from 259 children who developed normally.

Air pollution is particularly heavy within a 1,000 ft. of a highway. Children born to women who lived in this contaminated zone were 86% more likely to have autism than kids born to women who lived further from the freeway.

The effect was especially noticeable the third trimester: a 2.2 times (220%) increased risk of developing autism.

It’s becoming clear that a child’s genetic inheritance has a lot to do with whether that child has autism; for example, boys are far more likely to have the condition. But genes cannot explain why one child develops autism while another does not.

If living near a Freeway is a risk factor, what might trigger autism? Is it really air pollution? Or could it be the noise?

We don’t know and until researchers test the actual amounts of pollution pregnant mothers are exposed to, the question is uncertain.

The weakness of a study like this is that people who live near freeways might have other health-related problems, like poor housing areas and poverty. But it’s a good start at proving chemical overload may be a trigger factor.

Of course lead could be a factor too. We know that lead is a severe neurotoxin. Don’t forget that, although lead is no longer used in gasoline, there are millions of tons of leaded dust lying around at the edge of freeways, getting blown around a great deal in dry weather and washed into the water table in wet weather.

We know that lead is a severe neurotoxin.

_{[SOURCE: Volk, H.E. Environmental Health Perspectives, published online Dec. 16, 2010.]}

It appears that deaths from measles are falling rapidly. That’s cause for celebration. Measles is pretty deadly, never forget that. For sure, part of this decline is misdiagnosing the real cause of death. But I accept a genuine decline.

The researchers found measles deaths worldwide fell from more than 535,000 in 2000 to around 139,000 in 2010. That’s a pretty big fall off (75% drop). We can’t put everything down to faking results.

The big question is: how much of the fall is due to the measles vaccination program? How much of it would happen anyway?

It is idle (and stupid) to simply dismiss any benefits, just because the measles vaccine seems very likely implicated in toxic nerve inflammations afterwards. If there is good and there is harm, the question is: do they balance?

No deaths is good. Would you rather have no deaths and autism? Or would you rather have the deaths than risk that any medical interference might trigger autism?

If you think the answer is easy, you either don’t understand the question, or you are ignorant and prejudiced, in my view. It’s a very difficult epidemiological question and it polarizes even holistic doctors.

I’m talking a LOT of deaths, for heaven’s sake. Every single day measles still claims 382 lives worldwide — a vast majority of them children under 5. Almost half of those deaths (47 percent) occurred in India, and more than one-third (36 percent) in Africa.

Other areas in southeast Asia accounted for 8 percent of deaths; the eastern Mediterranean region, 7 percent; the western Pacific region, 2 percent; and the Americas and Europe less than 1 percent each.

In the United States there have been no reported measles deaths since 2008 and very few actual cases indeed. That can only be due to the vaccination program, since I see no big improvements in public lifestyle or nutrition over that period to account for overcoming the disease.

Of course health officials are crowing: Vaccination is the only way to prevent measles, they say. Mass vaccination programs around the globe “were the main driver behind the huge fall in mortality,” the researchers said, noting more than 1 billion doses of measles vaccine were dispensed over the past decade.

Nearly all cases that did occur stemmed from foreign travel, and a majority of those who developed the disease had not been vaccinated, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week.

Ah, well, they always say that. When people who have been vaccinated get they disease, they STILL mark it down as “not vaccinated” because, they say to themselves, there must have been a mistake, or the vaccine “didn’t take”!

And of course they still quote the “discrediting” of Andrew Wakefield, even though he was NOT discredited. Wakefield found that autistic kids were harboring a rogue measles virus in the gut.

But they sent in a journalist hack to discredit him and so now they don’t have to look into any problems caused by vaccination: there aren’t any, it was just a nasty, twisted doctor!

All in the garden is sweet smelling roses!

[April 23, 2012, The Lancet, online]

Have we been missing something all these years? Obviously, the main cause of weight gain is over-eating. But is there something behind that—something driving the overeating—that nobody has noticed?

I think so—and now people are beginning to recognize its importance.

Other Causes

We know that MSG in food is addictive and causes people to over eat.

We know that eating carbs is highly addictive, with people being driven by blood sugar spikes, followed by a drop in blood sugar. Refined carbs are the worst.

A few of us pioneers back in the 70s and 80s discovered that food addiction is often related to food allergies and that too drives people to binge eating. In fact it’s the chief mechanism behind eating disorders, if only more people knew it.

We know that insulin resistance (the early stage of diabetes) blocks glucose uptake by cells, which is then diverted to the liver and stowed away at fat.

We know that psychological hang ups can lead to “comfort eating”.

But there is something else? You betcha…

Antibiotics!

I could kick myself for not thinking of this, decades ago. But we know that farmers feed their livestock on antibiotics, to make them grow. Pigs, lambs and sheep can be up 40% bigger and fatter, because of this antibiotic treatment. But we never thought “well, that must apply to humans too”; duh!

Of course it applies to humans.

If we feed ourselves incessant antibiotics, exactly as happens to young kids these days, due to the idiotic parental obsession with getting “treatment” for every cough, cold, snotty nose and sore throat that comes along, we are raising our kids exactly the way farmers fatten their herds!

Does this make sense? When somebody lays it out in front of you, then it’s easy to join the dots: we are dooming our citizens to be grossly overweight by the unnecessary use of dangerous and powerful antibiotics.

Scientific Proof

To investigate whether overusing antibiotics could also play a part in the rise of obesity, researchers fed infant mice low doses of penicillin to mimic doses given to farm animals. After 30 weeks, penicillin-fed mice were between 10 and 15 per cent bigger and twice as fat as drug-free mice.

When the team looked at the mice’s gut bacteria, they found that the antibiotic-fed mice had a different complement of bugs to the untreated mice. Low doses of antibiotics had seemingly shifted the balance of certain gut microbes, reducing the numbers of Lactobacillus, which is a “good” bacterium linked to a lower risk of cancer recurrence.

This is the classic “dysbiosis” I write about. But the problem is actually much bigger than that (see below).

First, the researchers wanted to prove it was the altered bowel flora to blame, not some other pathway affected by antibiotics. So they turned to germ-free mice, which are bred in a sterile environment and have no gut bacteria. These mice were given gut bacteria transplanted from the mice fed antibiotics and, just 5 weeks later, the once germ-free mice were 35 per cent larger than mice with a regular microbiota.

There is more: in the initial experiment, the biggest mice were those that had started antibiotic treatment from birth. Even mice that were only given drugs for four weeks ended up as large as mice on antibiotics for the full 30 weeks.

This suggests that gut flora may be most vulnerable to disruption in the earliest moments of life. Children are exceptionally at risk, exactly as I said above.

But still: it’s even worse!

Antibiotics used to treat children may also have a detrimental effect on their immune systems.

Readers of my new book “Fire In The Belly” (Fire in the Guts) have already been introduced to the concept. It’s one of the biggest breakthroughs in understanding the full importance of the human microbiome (sometimes you will see the scientific word micriobiota). It means the composite of all the microbes living in your gut: bacteria, viruses, protozoa, molds and even parasites. It’s important to us and directs how our body responds to challenge.

The bugs down there in the warm and dark of our intestines actually educate the newborn’s immune system and teaches it what to do. It’s very important that a child is inoculated, at birth, with this gift from Momma’s bowel. Without it, the child will grow up with a malfunctioning immune system. He or she will grow up with food allergies and other miseries.

Of course, if Momma already has messed up bowel flora, from the days when SHE took antibiotics, than the child is not given the “real deal” but dysbiotic organisms instead.

In a separate study in mice, this same research team mimicked the short courses of higher dose antibiotics that young children tend to receive for infections, to see if this typical manner of administering antibiotics was bad. They found that levels of important T-cell signaling chemicals were abnormally low, meaning the immune systems were compromised.

But it’s worse even than THAT!

We now know the microbiome also educates the brain and nervous system. It’s incredible but true. Again, without healthy bowel flora, a child’s neurological growth is stunted. This may even be the real cause of the rise in autism. Bad bowel flora (including the notorious measles virus found in the gut by Andrew Wakefield) may result in the abnormal physical signs of autism spectrum disorder.

It’s all new and wildly different to anything we imagined back in the 1980s, when doctors like me were sounding the alarm but we didn’t have the least idea what was happening and why; only that we must stop taking so many antibiotics and try, with probiotics, to get our gut flora back to normal.

It’s so very important to all of us to stop using antibiotics, except as a life saving necessity, that you need to learn and understand alternatives. If you haven’t already got a copy, you may want to go over and get my encyclopedic compilation of safe, natural antibiotic alternatives, “How To Survive In A World Without Antibiotics”. You can read more about it here:

Weight gain

So, back to where we started, which is that antibiotics dispose to significant weight gain. As use of this class of drugs has soared in recent decades, so has the incidence of obesity.

In other words, our epidemic of obesity is probably driven by antibiotic overuse; especially the feeding of food livestock with antibiotics.

Let me emphasize that it’s a real effect; no question. Another recent study, from Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, followed the development of 28,000 babies. The results showed that those infants given antibiotics within the first six months of life were more likely to be overweight at age 7, even if their mother had a healthy weight (International Journal of Obesity, DOI: 10.1038/ijo.2011.27).

It’s Down To The Quality Of Your Sh*t

OK, I’m being deliberately provocative (as usual!) The scientific word for shit is feces (proper English spelling faeces, since it’s a Greek word, not an American word).

It’s an important health-quality issue. For example feces that float in the toilet pan and stick to the sides has undigested fat; often it signals liver disease, since bile is needed to emulsify fats, to enable digestion.

But the actual make up of our feces, in terms of the organisms present, has emerged in recent years as possibly the number one health issue. As I said in “Fire In The Belly”, it’s probably true that most or all diseases have an element of this problem.

Hippocrates, 2,500 years ago, was in no doubt. He remarked that, “All diseases start in the gut”.

Now we understand the concept of our human microbiome (the DNA make up of the other passengers in SS Human), we can see there are very far reaching consequences indeed from the unwise or careless use of antibiotics.

You may want to worry more about what’s coming out of your backside than what you put in your mouth! You know, Winnie the P….

The links for those manuals:

Fire In The Belly

How To Survive In A World Without Antibiotics

[SOURCE: This man Martin Blaser is where I got most of the scientific info: http://www.med.nyu.edu/biosketch/blasem01/publications]

What are we to make of this? Scientists have genetically engineered mice whose symptoms closely mimic autism in humans.

Autism is characterized by problems with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and restricted interests and behaviors. The “autistic mice” showed similar traits.

Unlike ordinary mice, the genetically engineered versions showed little interest in interacting with other mice. While regular mice vocalize when they’re together — especially in response to receiving something highly rewarding such as sugar — the autistic mice stayed quiet. The autistic mice also excessively groomed themselves, suggesting a repetitive behavior.

So is autism genetic? It’s widely accepted that a single gene isn’t to blame for autism, but that a variety of genes and environmental influences play a role. There are inherited traits, it is true. But only about 3% of autism cases are linked to any one gene abnormality.

One thing researchers didn’t find when they engineered their autistic mice were alterations in brain structure that have been associated with autism in humans, such as a temporary increase in brain volume seen in infants and toddlers who go on to receive an autism diagnosis.

Of course, one cannot accept a mouse model as fully representative of the human condition. Mice cannot talk and autism is essentially a breakdown in communication and social interactivity.

The study is published in the Oct. 5, 2011, issue of Science Translational Medicine.

Now a new study has shown yet again that exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines in infancy or in the womb is not associated with an increased risk for developing autism.

Of course mere facts and good science don’t worry the Internet “experts”, who ramble on about conspiracies to hide the truth, as if every scientist and doctor in the world was a corrupted puppet of Big Pharma.

They have their prejudice and are not going to let mere evidence sway them from their rigid views.

The fact is, as I have said often, kids get autism who have never had any vaccinations, never mind whether with mercury or not.

Moreover there is the problem of explaining why boys have a far higher incidence of autism than girls. That suggests genes are at least partly involved. Mercury should not selectively attack one gender or the other.

This latest study should put the mercury theory to bed once and for all (provided Joe Mercola and writer’s like him get a grip on the evidence). It showed that children who developed autism spectrum disorder (ASD) actually had less exposure to vaccines with mercury than children who developed normally.

Researchers even looked into the possibility of damage caused by vaccines given to the children’s mothers while they were pregnant and still found no connection. Thimerosal was removed from most vaccines given to infants and children soon after the study participants were born. The one exception is most flu vaccines, which still contain the preservative.

The ASD controversy rages still and we are not really any nearer understanding this awful impediment.

Dr Andrew Wakefield’s study showing autism was associated with “rogue” measles virus loose in the gut of autistic kids is the only study to date which has shown any connection between vaccination and autism. The only one, ya hear? [Gawsh, I’ve lived in the US so many years now I’m starting to sound American!)

Of course they trashed Dr Wakefield with an unprecedented “witch hunt” style personal vendetta against him. But I think he might have had something: I know kids who have not been vaccinated but developed autism. They had a vaccinated sibling with autism and so may have “caught” autism, which would fit with the rogue virus model.

Meantime, cases of autism continue to rise throughout the world. The CDC now estimates that as many as one in 110 children in the U.S. develop autism, though in other countries the actual incidence is hotly debated, never mind whether it is rising or not.

Let me finish by repeating the hard-to-swallow truth: that children with the greatest mercury exposures had slightly lower rates of autism than those who received fewer mercury-containing vaccines or none at all.

This was a very nicely designed and carried out study that should be the end of the discussion. Anyone still touting the mercury story is stuck to yesterday’s science.

[Freed, G. et al. Pediatrics, March 1, 2010, Parental Vaccine Safety Concerns 2009.]

You may have seen a recent breakfast piece in the USA, about a boy who had OCD (quite severe) but it turned out to be the consequence of a strep sore throat. Sep 24th, see the OCD video here.

His mother Beth Alison Maloney wrote a book about the journey back to wellness, Saving Sammy: Curing the Boy Who Caught OCD.

It’s a powerful story, not least because Sammy could have been a prisoner for life of this dreadful incapacitating condition; but by chance his mother hit on the cure, when the family doctors missed it.

I believe in all cases of so-called mental illness, doctors MUST look for physical causes and exclude them. But doctors get lazy, make assumptions, cut corners and deny the many successful recoveries that occur outside their particular box.

The question hangs: how many cases of psychological disturbance, Tourette’s, autism, OCD and other disorders really have a physical basis? I know I first found international acclaim just by investigating foods as the cause of such conditions and nobody was more astonished than me to find how common it was and how easy the recovery, once the right cause was found.

There is still the question of scientific studies and finding the truth. By coincidence, a new study arrived only this week, which tried to find an association between strep and tourette’s syndrome, tics, or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It was published in the advance online edition of Neurology, and looked at data from 4,774 children and young adults in the U.K. 129 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 108 patients with Tourette’s syndrome, and 18 with tics.

The researchers — who included Anette Schrag, MD, of the Institute of Neurology at University College London — checked all participants medical records, looking for any pattern of strep infection within two to five years of diagnosis of OCD, Tourette’s syndrome, or tics.

It’s frustrating that they found no statistical evidence of a connection. But that’s how science is. It can lead to breakthroughs; it can cause muddles and block the path forward for years.

I think it was a good study and a good attempt. But the fact it failed to find any link means that further studies needed, costing a lot more money, will probably not now be carried out.

SOURCE: Schrag, A. Neurology, Sept. 30, 2009; advance online edition.