Sunday, October 8, 2006

Dear Friends and Colleagues -                                              

AUTISM IN THE NEWS
NAA - Can Autism be cured?  BET ON IT!
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa in Atlantic City, NJ the National Autism Association proudly presents the largest charity poker tournament directed to funding autism research and family care.

Tournament Sign Up includes $100 + $20 Buy-In, Donation to NAA, Player's Lounge Admission and Cocktail Reception, Silent Auction and Special Gifts. For full details click here or visit http://www.nationalautismassociation.org/pokertournament.php.

Autism For Dummies
Bringing unusual clarity to some of the most confusing issues surrounding autism and its treatment, Stephen Shore and Linda Rastelli team up to bring you Understanding Autism for Dummies as part of the critically acclaimed "for Dummies" series. This popular and accessible book will help you find answers to questions from "what is sensory overload" to choosing the best biomedical, behavioral/education, and sensory approaches to help the person on the autism spectrum you care for.  Additional topics include practical advice on coping with daily challenges in education, family life and transitioning to adulthood as well as promoting success for all people on the autism spectrum by using their strengths.

Find out more about this long-awaited contribution to the autism community at Stephen Shore's website www.autismasperger.net.  

The Age of Autism: Rattled regulators
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor
WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- A shakeup at the CDC and the shaky performance of the FDA raise some serious questions relevant to the debate over the huge rise in reported cases of autism. For full story, click here.

Both federal agencies are key to assuring Americans -- and particularly those whose children receive an ever-increasing load of vaccines -- that there is no relationship whatsoever between the shots and autism.

But both agencies have come under fire this month in ways that make you wonder how much confidence to have in their overall performance.

First, the Food and Drug Administration. The agency responsible for the safety and efficacy of prescription drugs got walloped by the prestigious, independent Institute of Medicine, whose "often damning" conclusions portrayed an agency "rife with internal squabbles and hobbled by underfinancing, poor management and outdated regulations," according to a lead story in The New York Times.

Pediatric massage and Chinese medicine for children with Autism - Willowbrook, IL 
Saturday, October 21, 1 – 5pm: Exam, consultation and diagnosis of treatment with Chinese medicine. Traditional Chinese herbs and antioxidant supplement available if necessary. Appointments are necessary. 
Sunday, October, 22, 9am – 5pm: Brief introduction of Chinese medicine for autism, and hands-on workshop on how to give daily pediatric massage focusing on acupressure points for children with autism.

For more information, please visit Dr. Jiang’s website at www.qiacupuncture.com or email qi@....

AUTISM ONE 2007 CONFERENCE
Autism One 2007 will be held Wednesday, May 23 - Sunday, May 27 at the Westin O’Hare Hotel in Chicago.

EXCITING NEWS! 
Autism One Radio announces AUTISM ONE MEDIA.

Do you have a video you would like to share?
• An IEP meeting or OT session that could help other parents?
• A politician addressing autism?
• Footage of your child?
• Video of a rally?
• Daily life?

We will air videos and create a library related to life with autism to present all the varied aspects of courage and commitment, obstacles and challenges, progress and growth our community faces every day.

Get your camcorders going and videos laid out. Details on sending your videos to us will be included in the next newsletter.                                

AUTISM ONE RADIO - Coming Attractions:
Join us at Autism One Radio this month for updates on the Combating Autism Act including: The Real World of Autism with Host Chantal Sicile-Kira on Tuesday, October 10 at 1:30 ET. Topic:  Why Walk Now for CAN. Guest: Peter Bell, President and CEO of Cure Autism Now.  Peter Bell discusses what we can do to help the Combating Autism Act move along, how Walk Now helps current research projects including those at UCSD and UC Irvine, how CAN research helps families with children of all ages, a bit about his own teenager with autism, and the upcoming walks of Walk Now, which include Autism Research Booths where you can meet local researchers. For more information about Walk Now, including Orange County (October 14) and San Diego (November 4) visit www.walknow.org.

Holistic Dentistry and Your Health: This month, Dr. Lina Garcia begins a 4-part series with Jim Marlow, Senior Nutritionist at the Optimal Wellness Center, speaking about the importance of dentistry, nutrition, and your health.  Join Dr. Garcia and Jim Marlowe on October 10 and October 24.

The Candy Store hosts Robert and Sandy Waters, composers of the internationally acclaimed song Faith, Love and Hope, were honored by Cook County (Illinois) Board President Bobbie L. Steele at a September 7 board meeting, where Bobbie L. Steele and Commissioners passed a resolution which seeks to heighten awareness of autism.  Introduced by Cook County Commissioner Elizabeth Ann Doody Gorman, the resolution honored special children and their families. Join the Waters on Autism One Radio two Mondays each month for upcoming guests such as Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., Paul McCartney’s guitarist Brian Ray, Dr. Dan Gottlieb, and actor Joe Mantegna.
Support Autism One Radio! Learn how. Click here.

THE ZEN OF AUTISM
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig wrote “What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important.”

“What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua–that’s the only name I can think of for it–like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have been silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. ‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and ‘best’ was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening needs called for.”

I would like to follow Pirsig’s lead and begin a Chautauqua–an Autism Chautauqua–to talk about some things that may provide insights but do not fit neatly within the standard autism channels of discourse.    

With all the community’s efforts moving silt downstream there’s an element of Hobson’s choice (“no choice” masquerading as “free”) at play. The amount of time dealing with the immediate leaves little time to cut channels to other pools of thought.

Caught up in caring for our children we look for answers. But constrained by the non-stop need to do more, the need to know more–the lack of free choice to other channels grows deeper.     
Other pools of thought are needed. Other pools of thought often provide answers beyond the confines of the problem that gave rise to them. Freed from the tethered worries of the present can serve purposes not always apparent in the first few steps of a journey.

Science is of central importance to our community. Science is also one of the defining worldviews of Western culture, where Western culture is “the set of literary, scientific, musical and philosophical principles which set it apart from other great civilizations.” I would like, therefore, to begin by offering a very brief overview of science and continue next time with a more in-depth examination of science and its relation to art.

Science Begins
Understanding the world has been the central task of science, specifically the search for “natural laws.” The authority of science lies in its explanatory and predictive powers.
Thales, (624 BC- 546 BC) the father of modern science (the word science comes from the Latin word scientia for knowledge) attempted to find natural explanations of the world, without reference to the supernatural. Thales removal of theology and revelation from scientific investigation recognized the world of phenomena as separate and distinct from anthropomorphic gods and heroes and began moving “scientific” inquiry from the murky mists of legend and myth to something more recognizable today.

It would be wrong, however, to assume a continuous separation of theology and science dating back to Thales. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages – the thousand years or more between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance – virtually all learning and disciplined intellectual activity was pursued within religious institutions.  

The way scientists were to proceed was first systematically described by Francis Bacon (1561-1626). His works established and popularized inductive methodology for scientific inquiry. Bacon proposed replacing deductive syllogism with inductive reasoning, which proceeds from fact to axiom to law. 

Bacon’s major contribution was to begin the examination of the scientific process itself. Reformation of learning and the establishment of an intellectual community dedicated to the discovery of scientific knowledge were Bacon’s lifelong pursuits.

Early in his career Bacon judged that, owing mainly to an undue reverence for the past the intellectual life of Europe had reached a kind of impasse. He believed there was a way beyond this stagnation if persons of learning, armed with new methods and insights, would simply open their eyes and minds to the world around them.

Bacon believed that in order for a genuine advancement of learning to occur, the prestige of science had to be elevated, while that of history and literature needed to be reduced. Bacon effectively accomplished this by marginalizing history and relegating poesy (the domain of everything that is imaginable or conceivable) to a mere illustrative vehicle.

For all of Bacon’s genius and genuine insights his evangelical believe in science and the scientific method he promoted blinded him to its shortcomings and limitations. In many ways, his was a scientific model of absolutism.

Bacon defined and popularized the scientific process as proceeding from fact to axiom to law and the noble quest of science the discovery of natural laws, where natural laws were considered absolute truths.     

The word “law,” however, is misleading at best. A law of nature is not prescriptive but descriptive. “As such it is a statement of what–give certain initial conditions, such as there is a body of water and it is heated–occurs.”

The belief that scientists discovered scientific laws originated in antiquity. The laws of nature were thought to be commands of the gods. The mistaken belief of natural laws given by the gods was discarded and instead was replaced and accepted by its incorrect empirical equivalent–men became godlike in their search for and discovery of inviolate, absolute natural laws.            

Today, it is known, although not necessarily well accepted, that scientific laws are not absolute to be kept, obeyed or broken, but explanatory statements of a general character which purport to be factual, and must therefore be modified or abandoned if found to be inaccurate.

New Paradigms
It would take more than a hundred years before Bacon’s model was seriously challenged. It would take the work of the Scottish philosopher and skeptic David Hume (1711 - 1776) to question some of the basic ideas proposed by Bacon as truth. In doing so, Hume would call into question all of science and raise questions which to this day remain unanswered.        

Next time we will look at the works of Kant, Popper, Kuhn, and others as they struggled to answer the questions raised by Hume to secure the foundations of science. And over the coming months, we will touch upon history, economics, politics, religion, literature, medicine, culture and computer science as prisms to reflect and refract the tapestry of autism.  

My Best,
Ed Arranga
714.680.0792
http://AutismOne.org
earranga@...