By Steven Salzberg for Forbes magazine
If you’re reading this from anywhere but Chicago, you just missed
the Autism One conference, which ends today. This conference,
run by Jenny McCarthy and Generation Rescue, purports to tell parents “the
truth” about autism.
The conference is a veritable festival of unproven claims,
offering a powerful but false message of hope to parents who are desperately
searching for new treatments for their children. It’s also a nexus for
anti-vaccinationists, who run special seminars educating parents about how to
get vaccine exemptions so that they can enroll their unvaccinated children in
public schools.
A look at the presentations reveals that rather than presenting
“the truth,” one speaker after another is making unsupported, unscientific
claims and then offering their own special therapy. The one thing that most of
these presentations have in common is that the speaker is making money from
selling their so-called treatments. For example, Anat Baniel offers her
self-named “Anat Baniel method” and is promoting it through ads in the
conference program. Other speakers are offering special diets, hyperbaric
oxygen therapy, and in perhaps the most damaging treatment, Mark and David
Geier’s chemical
castration therapy. Mark Blaxill is
there, still pushing the thoroughly disproven link between mercury and autism,
and hawking his book on the topic.
The other major theme of the conference is conspiracies: how the
government, big pharma, and the scientific establishment are all conspiring to
hide “the truth” about autism, which the speaker will reveal to the audience.
Coincidentally, many of the speakers also offer treatments, for a fee.
This year’s speakers include Jenny McCarthy and Andrew
Wakefield, as usual, but also a new entry: Luc Montagnier.
