Reply #151: No you are. This is one time right now.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

Congressional Testimony of Bernard Rimland, Ph.D., November 19, 2003
AUTISM IS TREATABLE!

Thank you for inviting me to participate in these
important hearings on the crucial need for more
effective treatments for autistic children.

I am Bernard Rimland, Ph.D. My Ph.D. is in experimental
psychology and research design. My specialty
is research methodology. I have been a full-time research
scientist for over 50 years, 45 of those years having been
devoted to a 7-day-a-week search for effective treatments
for autistic children.

My autistic son Mark was born in 1956. At age 5
we were told that he was hopeless and untreatable and
that we should institutionalize him. We did not. He was
still in diapers at age 7 and did not ask or answer a question
until age 8. Today, at age 47, he is an internationally-
recognized artist who has been interviewed on national
TV, including the CBS, CNN and PBS networks
as well as a Japanese television network.

My 1964 book, Infantile Autism, destroyed the prevailing
belief that autism was a psychological disorder,
caused by bad mothering, which could be treated with
psychotherapy for both mother and child. My book also
demolished the myth that mainstream professionals could
be counted upon to base their practices on objective,
scientific evidence, rather than dogma. Even today dogmatic,
rather than pragmatic, beliefs prevail. (See, for
example, the FDA policy on the non-treatability of autism,
which follows.)

Frustrated by the apathy and indifference of the
status quo, I founded the Autism Society of America in
1965, and the Autism Research Institute in 1967, to help
bring about needed change. I founded the Autism Research
Institute for the explicit purpose of determining
the cause of and identifying effective treatments for autism.
I thank you for holding these hearings, which are
40 years overdue.

Today, for the first time in history, there are successfully
treated autistic children — living, breathing,
speaking autistic children — living among us and enjoying
their lives. These mainstreamed children, who
no longer carry the dread label “autistic,” owe their liberation
from autism to treatment modalities which were,
and still are, ridiculed, reviled and rejected by most of
the recognized authorities in the educational and medical
autism establishments. Nevertheless, the new treatment
approaches are rapidly convincing many of the
most skeptical critics.

Many of these recovered autistic children are the
sons and daughters of physicians, conventionally trained
M.D.s who looked at and wisely rejected the sparse and
faulty options offered by conventional medicine. You
can see and hear eight of these enlightened doctors tell
their own stories on videotapes available from the Autism
Research Institute: “Physicians who have successfully
treated their own autistic children.”

These videotapes
were made at panel presentations at the 2001 and
2002 conferences of the Autism Society of America.
The research program of the Autism Research Institute
devotes serious consideration to all forms of treatment
for which there is significant evidence of benefit
to autistic children, including both behavioral and biomedical
approaches.

A major reason for my founding the Autism Society
of America in 1965 was to advance the cause of early
behavioral intervention, commonly known today as
“ABA.” I was firmly convinced by my research that this
form of treatment could bring about remarkable improvement
in many autistic children, despite its rejection by
most professionals who were considered authorities on
autism. Today the mainstream community fully accepts
the value of ABA, although it took well over 20 years
for ABA to receive mainstream acceptance.

Now that the behavioral approach is widely accepted and has
reached the mainstream, we are devoting most of our
efforts to advanced and effective biomedical treatments.
We feel that drugs are not the answer—no child is autistic
because of a deficiency of Ritalin or Risperdal. All
drugs confer significant adverse side effects.
By 1995, the beginnings of what is now widely
recognized as an epidemic of autism were clearly evident.

Also clearly evident was the fact that a great many
autistic children were showing remarkable improvement
that could be attributed to treatments that did not involve
the use of drugs—treatments that were commonly
regarded as “aedge of autism research. The title, Defeat Autism Now!
(DAN!), was a response to the complacency and lack of
urgency that were so evident at NIH, and at the medical
schools, where research on the treatment of autism was
virtually non-existent, except for experimental trials of
various drugs designed for use on adults.

The Defeat Autism Now! movement
has proven extremely successful.
We have recently completed our 12th
DAN! Conference in Portland Oregon,
and the next DAN! Conference is
scheduled for the Washington, DC area
April 16-18, 2004. We also have held
a series of mini-DAN! conferences for
the training of physicians and other
healthcare practitioners, and are developing
a curriculum for teaching nurses
how to implement the DAN! approaches
to diagnosis and successful
treatment of autism. (See
www.AutismResearchInstitute.com or
www.DefeatAutismNow.com.)

There
are at present several hundred DAN!
physicians in the U.S. and some overseas.
Most important, there are thousands of children,
many, as noted above, the sons and daughters of DAN!
physicians, who are no longer diagnosed as autistic and
who have been mainstreamed in their school systems.
The DAN! program is having excellent success!
Despite the obviously good results we are achieving,
there are a great many obstacles to overcome.

One
major obstacle is the obstinate insistence by the Food
and Drug Administration that there is no effective treatment
for autism, and that it is quackery to claim otherwise.
I would like to submit as part of my testimony the
following letter written by myself and Jon Pangborn,
Ph.D. (also the father of an adult autistic son) to Mark
McClelland, M.D., Commissioner of the FDA. Note that
the FDA claims on its website that autism is hopeless
and untreatable, despite a great deal of scientificallydocumented
evidence to the contrary. In our letter of
May 8, 2003 to Dr. McClelland, which has yet to receive
a satisfactory reply, I cite some of the evidence
which disproves the contentions of the FDA policy statement.

For example, I cite, and placed into evidence, 22
published studies, based on research conducted by scientists
in 6 countries, demonstrating that vitamin B6
(usually in combination with the mineral magnesium)
brings about highly significant improvement in autistic
children and adults. Eleven of these studies have been
double-blind, placebo-controlled experiments, and many
have used objective physiological measures, such as improvement
of various electrophysiological indices of
brain function, and the reduction or removal of abnormal
substances in the blood or urine of autistic children.
(My son Mark has been taking 1,000 mg/day of vitamin
B6
each day for 40 years. I doubt that there
is a healthier person on this continent.)
Action is needed!

Let me close with a concrete proposal
and a challenge:

I urge that the Federal Government
undertake the evaluation of autistic children
who have been treated by the doctors
in our Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!)
movement, as compared to children
treated by physicians who adhere to the
conventional, much less effective treatment
modalities.

I propose that the NIH fund immediately,
on a high-priority basis, a
low-cost telephone or mail questionnaire
survey of 1,000 parents of autistic children,
divided into two groups:

Group A. Parents whose autistic children have
been patients, for one year or longer, of 25 DAN!
doctors selected by the Autism Research Institute.
Twenty patients would be selected randomly from the
pool of autistic patients treated by each of the 25 DAN!
doctors.

Group B. Similar to Group A, except that the
children would be from the practices of 25 pediatricians
selected by NIH or the American Academy of
Pediatrics.

The survey would ask for such information as:
1. The child’s symptoms, pre- and post-treatment.
2. Any objective criteria of improvement (e.g.,
mainstreamed? IQ improvement? Speaking? Number of
words/sentences? etc.).
3. The parents’ rating of improvement (10-point
scale).
4. Which treatments were provided?
5. Which treatment modalities have helped the child
most?
The parent responses to questions 1, 2, and 3 would
be analyzed by judges who are blind to whether the patients
were in Group A or Group B. This would be an
excellent launching pad for a long-neglected and longneeded
federal program of research on effective autism
treatments.

The hour is late — let’s move ahead!
There are at present
several hundred DAN!
physicians in the U.S. and
some overseas. Most
important, there are
thousands of children,
many, as noted above, the
sons and daughters of
DAN! physicians, who are
no longer diagnosed as
autistic and who have
been mainstreamed in
their school systems.

The DAN! program is having
excellent success!lternative medicine.” (Much of alternative
medicine is better described as “intelligent medicine.”)

In January, 1995, together with two esteemed
colleagues, pediatrician Sidney M. Baker, M.D., and
chemist Jon Pangborn, Ph.D., whom I regard as the
world’s most knowledgeable experts in the metabolism
of autistic children, I convened the first Defeat Autism
Now! Think-Tank, comprised of approximately 30 carefully-
selected physicians and scientists on the cutting edge of autism research.


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