Look, I'm not saying we should completely ignore anything Jenny McCarthy says about vaccines and autism just because she's a playboy bunny and an idiot. But I
am saying that we should probably ignore her because she knows absolutely nothing about vaccines, and her ideas about autism differ drastically from the accepted norm. Today I went to her
website, and what I saw there actually managed to surprise me. The doctor who works in tandem with her, Dr. Jerry Kartzinel, had something very
interesting to say about autism in the preface to her book:
I'm sure the family members of autistic children who saw that and were any kind of sane were appalled, and we should be, too. Dr. Kartzinel is a board-certified doctor and a fellow in the American Academy of Pediatrics. I think it's pretty safe to say we should all, always be wary of the information we get, and not just assume that if it's from a source with an MD after his title, it's true.
Although I agree with you that McCarthy is an idiot, I do agree with this quote. I think of this quote more figuratively than literally in that if I had a child with autism, I would always wonder what their personality would have been had he/she not been autistic. I think that Dr. Kartzinel is just trying to portray that autism takes away the personality of a child. The child is no longer "normal" (NOT in any way disrespectful to autistic children), and autism affects not only the children but their parents. If I were a parent of an autistic child, I would be wary. It is sortove the same way as when a child develops cancer--their parents are affected by the cancer as well as the child. I think you are taking Dr. Kartzinel's quote too literally.
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