Tragedy.
August 26th, 2005Taken from the Pittsburg Post-Gazette:
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
By Karen Kane and Virginia Linn, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A 5-year-old Monroeville boy died this week during a medical treatment that’s being touted by some as a cure for autism.
The autistic boy died while receiving chelation — an intravenous injection of a synthetic amino acid known as EDTA, for ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the practice only to treat heavy metal (such as lead) poisoning. The treatment is becoming increasingly popular, though still controversial, for autism.
Police are investigating the boy’s death, which occurred Tuesday morning in the office of Dr. Roy Kerry in Portersville. Kerry did not return calls today.
An autopsy conducted today was inconclusive. Results on the cause and manner of death are pending additional testing that could take up to five months to complete, authorities said.
My heart goes out to those parents. There is absolutely nothing in the world worse than losing a child. This story also really scares me.
It doesn’t scare me in the sense that worry something similar will happen to Rubén. I think he’s in very good hands with his current set of practitioners, and I don’t believe we’ve ever remotely gambled his safety in our efforts to heal him. What scares me is wondering how the general public (and our government) will react.
I did a quick net search just prior to writing this post, and it seems that the net sceptics out there who fancy themselves quackbusters are all a’quiver, licking their chops with what can only be called barely-concealed glee. Already they’re calling for this doctor’s head. I had personally never heard of him prior to this incident, but I did a quick net check on him, too. The guy’s been practicing for forty years. And he’s probably almost as devastated as the parents. This was apparently this child’s third round of EDTA-IVs. I wonder what was amiss this time? Is it something ANY other practitioner could have foreseen? Was the EDTA perhaps a trigger in a complex chemical interaction between it and the other drugs/supplements he was taking? Or maybe he had another (undiagnosed) condition that led to his little heart stopping. We may never know…
And something bothers me about the way this was reported. “Touted by some as a cure for autism?” Touted by whom? I don’t know of a single practitioner or parent who sees intravenous EDTA (or any kind of chelation, for that matter) as a catch-all cure.
Most of the parents and practitioners we know were absolutely rocked by this news. Dr. Usman, Rubén’s DAN doctor, was reportedly particularly shaken. She had lost her own daughter to an allergic reaction, and hearing of this must have brought all that pain right back to surface. I choose not to imagine what that must have been like. I can only hope she’ll continue practicing…
Most of the other parents on the mailing lists we frequent (which includes us) are unified in the decision to continue chelation and other biomedical intervention. I do hope that this gives certain parents pause, though. I cringe at some of the posts I read with parents megadosing their kids on everything under the sun in pursuit of the “silver bullet” that will make their kids “whole” again. Even for María José and myself, who always try to let reason and caution dictate our treatment decisions, it serves as a tragic reminder:
Slow. Steady. Balance the body chemistry, heal the gut, and gently nudge the body in the direction of wellness.
