According to a recent article in Time magazine, it now appears that former Playboy model and self-proclaimed autism guru Jenny McCarthy now faces the reality that her 7-year-old son — whose autism she claims to have “cured” — likely had a completely different illness with symptoms that are similar to autism in some respects.
Indeed, the article suggests that McCarthy’s son instead suffers from Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, “a rare childhood neurological disorder that can also result in speech impairment and possible long-term neurological damage.” Therefore, McCarthy’s son was never “cured” because he never had autism to begin with. Read the full article here.
Using her son’s illness as a springboard to revitalize her showbiz career, McCarthy has appeared on numerous television and radio talks-shows such as Oprah, as an activist, and has pointed to common vaccines such as the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot as the cause of her son’s autism. Even though McCarthy has had no medical/scientific education or training whatsoever, she has been embraced as a hero by the mainstream public and has even managed to write three best-selling books in which she recounts her experiences and describes the methods she used to “cure” her son’s autism.
McCarthy’s claims have repeatedly been challenged throughout the medical and scientific communities as completely false and she has been called nothing more than a menace to public health. Now it appears that the scientists and doctors were right, and Jenny was wrong, all along. Unfortunately, thanks to the stupidity of Jenny and the media who supported her, parents have been refusing to vaccinate their children and old, deadly diseases like measles and meningitis have been returning as a result. See the evidence from the CDC here and pay close attention to the Editorial Note in that article.
On a related note, the medical journal that published the original study linking autism with vaccines has recently retracted its report and the doctors are now being investigated for medical fraud. Click here to read more, just in case you missed the earlier post.
Maybe Jenny will give back all that money to the poor folks who believed in her and bought her books…yeah sure !!! On the other hand, there’s no doubt that Jenny’s a good mommy, or that she has a great publicist, but everyone should know that she’s simply not a doctor or a medical scientist. This makes one wonder why people trusted her medical opinion with the health of their children to begin with. It’s amazing how some people worship celebrities.
So, what are the lessons that we can take away from all of this? No matter how desperate we become, no matter how much we want to place blame on others, we must not lose our common-sense in the process by disregarding the experts and blindly-following the advice of someone with no credentials in the quest to help our children overcome their disorders.
