Trolling against Poling

There is an excellent opinion article in Friday's Atlanta's Journal-Constituion by Dr Jon Poling. Dr Poling, for those of you who were under a rock about a year ago, is the father of Hannah Poling whose vaccine injury case before the Vaccine court was conceded by the government.

In his opinion piece Dr Poling touches on a range of topics from the myth of better diagnosis, to thoughts on investing research dollars, and even takes the time to smack down Dr Paul Offit (always a good time).

Go read the opinion, it is definitely worth it.

This article is being written about in some of the normal places. Harold Doherty at Facing Autism in New Brunswick has an entry here. Age of Autism has the full opinion here.

And then you have the other side of the commentaries, one written by Do'C on Autism Street here and Sullivan on LBRB wrote one here.

The right wing of the autism world doesn't seem to be mounting an effective response this time around. So lets look at what Do'C had to say. His first point is that :

Yep, Hannah Poling’s case was conceded, but contrary to popular internet re-interpretations which claim a court “decision” about autism causation, the case was apparently never actually heard by the court - and no court ruling about whether or not Hannah’s autistic features were caused by vaccination was ever made.

So the point that the it wasn't a decision by a special master of the court but rather by Department of Health and Human Services means that it wasn't the judicial branch of the government but rather the executive that made the "decision" is supposed to be important. Why it matters I couldn't tell you.

Next up, straw land:

Anyone who claims “better diagnosis” is solely responsible for the increase in autism diagnoses over the past couple of decades is pretty likely to be fairly scientifically illiterate. Writing to suggest that this may embody any representative scientific consensus, is nothing more than construction of a giant straw man argument.

So, no one claims that better diagnosis is involved in the increase of autism. Or as Do'C would have you believe, Dr Poling claimed that better diagnosis is "solely" responsible. The only problem is that he never said that. Regardless, lets see if we can find any references to better diagnosis by these "scientific illiterate".

Here is one on msnbc from Feb 12th of this year :

Recent data suggest a 10-fold increase in autism rates over the past decade, although it’s unclear how much of the surge reflects better diagnosis

Here's another from the Washington Post from 2007 :

The cases are rising, experts say, primarily because of better diagnosis and services: Parents and teachers are more attuned to the signs of autism, and doctors are better equipped to spot it than they were two decades ago.

Here is one from Autism Vox, a blog that was written by Kristina Chew before she went on to write at change.org :

But could it be that we are simply diagnosing autism better? That we ourselves have gained greater knowledge and understanding of autism, and are therefore counting cases of autism more and more accurately?

Finally here on page 10 of the decision reached by the vaccine court written by Special Master Hastings (as everyone knows, a real scientific "illiterate"):

Other experts argue that the increase in diagnosis does not represent a real increase in the incidence of the condition, resulting instead from a broadening of the diagnostic criteria for autism, improved recognition of autism, and other factors.

I think it is safe to say that it better diagnosis is commonly used. So survey says - one stack of straw for Do'C.

Next up Do'C take issues with Dr Poling's claim of "drowning in the red ink of educating increasing numbers of special-needs students" by showing a graph of the percentage of children served in California under IDEA vs the residential population over the past 10 years. This graph is a straight line implying that there has been a) no rise in the number of special needs students, and b) no rise in cost.

The problem is that the if a percentage is flat but the underlying population is growing then the actual number of students would be increasing. The other problem is that his chart has no information whatsoever about the costs incurred by the school districts while educating these children.

Lets not even talk about the fact that just because California has one pattern that not all other school districts in the country are the same. And lets certainly not discuss the differences in cost between providing relatively simple services such as speech therapy and the very costly proposition of providing a one-on-one aid for a child on the spectrum or a special purpose classroom.

None of that is apparently relevant. Just keep your eye on the nice flat line.

That's the end of my attention span for Do'C. So lets turn to what Sullivan has to say.

His main beef seems to be that:

why is it that people who claim to support “gene-environment” interactions seem to have disdain for the “gene” part? How are we supposed to separate the various autism subgroups without identifying the genes? And, if we identify genes, won’t their function give us some idea of what environmental causes might be worth studying?

For which he gets the "YOU'VE MISSED THE POINT" award of the year. The point that Dr Poling was making is that continuing to pour more research dollars into a fruitless search for a gene or genes that could be contributing autism is doing nothing to help create early interventions that could help prevent autism. His point was that if we can identify the environmental trigger you could change the course of the disorder.

There have been countless genetic searches done for the "smoking gun" gene that "causes" autism. It has yet to be found, most likely because it as a singular entity does not exist.

So instead of continuing to dig in the same haystack for that one piece of hay that might not even exist it might be time to consider switching to more other neglected areas that have more potential to show results.

I will skip Sullivan rehashing Do'Cs arguments - regurgitated straw doesn't taste good.

Sullivan's final point is that the entire reason for Dr Poling's piece is that this "is rather poorly disguised attempt to air his ongoing battle with Dr. Paul Offit." I think Sullivan has a point here, after a fashion.

There is clearly a disagreement between Dr Poling and Dr Offit. These two have been having a back and forth over these issues for a while in a variety of places, from journals to newspapers.

On one side you have have Dr Offit who represents everything that is wrong about the modern medical industry. He is an insider who has had large vested financial interests in one side of the argument winning. Autism is not his field, he just comments on it as a hobby.

On the other side you have Dr Poling who is the father of a child whose autism was caused by vaccinations. Dr Poling has done research with other scientists to try to determine how his daughter developed autism - and he found the answer. He helped to document how his daughter's autism was caused.

Dr Offit has repeatedly attacked him and the acknowledged fact that his daughters autism was caused by vaccinations. This is despite the fact that Dr Offit had no special knowledge of Hannah Poling's case or medical history. From all appearances he did it solely to protect his vested interest in the vaccine industry.

So whose side are you going to take? An industry-made millionaire or the father fighting for his child with autism?

It isn't a tough choice.