Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism
2nd Edition
Rivera
2015
Submitter: We had the following come in as an eBook request that I have turned down. On the outside this book looked promising, and then I got to the part about giving kids a compound that the Food and Drug Administration warns amounts to industrial bleach. Were open to different opinions, but this is a big old Nope!
Holly: The Autism Research Institute warns against it as well. Some libraries are very adamant in their collection policies that they cover all viewpoints. Others, like Submitter’s, can be more judicious. What say you, readers?
Promoting dangerous quack remedies seems to go beyond the bounds of including all viewpoints.
Not a librarian, but an autistic woman.
It’s up to the librarian, but I hope that they shelve this in the UFO section rather than the medical or child development sections.
It’s giving parents a way to abuse and murder their autistic children and get away with it.
With absolutely no hint of irony, they claim chlorine dioxide is different from bleach, but mercury in vaccines is all the same. This medical librarian begs you to give this book a hard pass.
I have ASD or Asperger’s or whatever you want to call it, and this makes me just plain furious. Even if a cure for autism did exist, I would not want it. I hate how society thinks all autistic people are little boys who do nothing but sit and stare off into space while drooling on themselves, and are nothing but a burden on their families. Like many female Aspies didn’t get diagnosed until I was an adult. Since then I’ve felt it’s been my “mission” to educate and encourage autism acceptance.
Hi, Lora. I wondered if you were on the spectrum too. Welcome!
absolutely disgusting.
As someone with Autism, I would reject this book in a heartbeat. Just the concept of “healing” is laughable at best, discriminatory at the least, and possibly lethal for anyone following this idiocy.
Covering all viewpoints is fine in the abstract. However, when a viewpoint is scientifically proven to be dangerous, people need to be protected from it.
Biiiiiig NOPE. All the NOPE.
I mean, there’s differences of opinion and then there’s “maybe we shouldn’t give our children something that will kill them”.
Just the front cover (and title) would make me want this not to be in the hands of anyone with kids, particularly special-needs ones who maybe can’t express “this is really painful and I am dying from it”.
I counter their mendacious quote with one of my own:
“”They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” — Carl Sagan.
“Recovery” — as if autism is a disease that you can cure?!
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/danger-dont-drink-miracle-mineral-solution-or-similar-products
The FDA strongly warns against this as well. Forget the book. Why are they still selling chlorine-dioxide on Amazon, complete with customer reviews telling people it prevents/cures Covid?
I say no, and I’m one who has very broad views about what should be in a library. MMS is a fake ‘autism cure’ sold by a quack outfit that claims you should give it to your CHILD. Nobody likes them except the few people who have fallen for them. The book is an ad full of provably false information, not an alternate opinion or interpretation of facts.
The FDA has published more than one warning about these guys: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-warns-consumers-about-dangerous-and-potentially-life-threatening-side-effects-miracle-mineral “The FDA recently received new reports of people experiencing severe vomiting, severe diarrhea, life-threatening low blood pressure caused by dehydration and acute liver failure after drinking these products.” I’ve heard reports of children having tissue sloughed off their intestines. It’s nothing but poison being sold for profit.
*shudders* MMS is so evil. Giving kids bleach enemas isn’t going to cure anything, it’s just going to destroy their intestines.
Jim Humble, BTW, is a former Scientologist who started his own cult, the New Genesis Church. And he conducts illegal human experiments on Ugadians, tricking them into thinking that MMS is “a gift from God.”
This is dangerous! There’s a line between “all viewpoints” and “this could literally harm your child”.
Everything in the example shown here is purely anecdotal and not backed up. The dismissal of FDA guidelines is bizarre as well. The FDA has nothing to gain from not telling people that giving kids poison is bad. Any parent desperate enough to make their child “normal” that they will try anything doesn’t deserve to be a parent. They’re saying through these actions that they’re ashamed of their child and only “fixing” them will make the child more acceptable. This should absolutely be pulled. This could be, quite literally, damaging–not to mention the bunk science that there is a cause of autism. I am on the spectrum and my mother knew from my early infancy that there was something “different” about me (so did my father, but he had a negative attitude about that, which is a whole other story). Unfortunately, there were was very little information available to the public at the time, and I wasn’t diagnosed until my late teens.
I’m tired of being told we’re not enough, that we’re less, that we need to be like everyone else, no matter the cost. So, your kid doesn’t look you in the eye, is non-verbal, or has a hard time socializing. SO WHAT? People who expect perfect children don’t deserve to be parents. If you don’t want an autistic child, don’t have children.
*end rant*
Questions for the submitter. Was this book available on interlibrary loan? Is it hard to find to purchase? Let’s say someone wanted to write about the history of harmful autism “treatment.” Could they find this book elsewhere for research purposes?
You wouldn’t really have to. Myles Power and Jeff Holiday have covered this book and MMS in general extensively on YouTube.
But that’s an analysis, isn’t it? It’s not the book itself. If someone wanted to write about this book, they need the actual book, not someone else’s thoughts on YouTube.
If someone made an ILL request, for whatever reason, they already know about this book and are specifically requesting it. I hold that to be different than it taking up space on the local shelves and being free to take as seriously as a rigorous ethical discussion of autism.
There are many cultures where it’s impolite for children to look elders straight in the eyes, and even adults don’t do that. Do they all need to drink bleach?
Not to mention how bad this is going to be for their gut flora and fauna, which is going to worsen the child’s condition even if it doesn’t kill them or dissolve their intestines.
People who do this need to have ALL their children taken away — who knows what terrible things they’re teaching/feeding their neurotypical kids? Jail them all for child abuse, I say.
“You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Would anyone keep a history book if it said that The Revolutionary War was fought to free America from France? I think not. Destash this non-science nonsense.
These decisions can’t be automated, because there isn’t a perfect mechanistic evaluation of them. I would reject it along with the tax fraud advice someone mentioned a few months ago.
“M” finally raises a few points worth considering. My own concern is that a Collection Development librarian is not a doctor, and the library’s collection should NOT be used with the assumption that every book in it has undergone peer review and is being recommended as “safe.” That’s a slippery slope that leads to not being able to provide users with diet books, alternative health care materials, or books on small religions that some folk have chosen to label as “cults.” Library browsing should have at least some degree of Caveat Emptor attached, just as Internet surfing does. I would certainly not feature or display this book, and depending on policy there could be an argument for not adding it to a collection, but selectors cannot be expected to run down FDA guidelines on each individual treatment recommended in a book of hundreds of pages.
I wonder if the librarians can answer this: if a library did stock this book and a parent borrowed it and gave bleach to their child, as they trusted the library to provide books with accurate health information, and the child was harmed, could the library be held legally responsible?
Not at all. This falls under the umbrella of giving a tax form is not “tax advice” or a medical or legal book as official advice. Obviously, if the library promoted this as a cure, that might be a different story. People are responsible for their own decisions. Ethically, we have a responsibility to provide quality information using the best tools available. In this case, there is plenty of evidence that this not a “best practice” and being universally panned as a practice by authorities (FDA, Autism groups, etc)
I would question the librarian authorizing the purchase of whether this falls within the scope of their policy. (I would also add that some specialty collections would want to have items in order to provide a defense of these methods.)
Call me a fascist if you must, but I draw the line at books that unironically give you advice that will lead to people getting killed. I have a shelf of such books of my own at my home, stored away to keep the stupid and the credulous safe. It’s placed in an inconvenient corner.
Why at home though? I wouldn’t waste the space on them, there especially.