Category: autism

Journal of Personal Science: One Child’s Autism Eliminated by Removal of Glutamate From Her Diet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

by Katherine Reid

I am a mother of five children. I live in Fremont, California. In 2009, my youngest child, who was three, was diagnosed with autism. The diagnosis came from her social and communication impairment and highly repetitive behavior. She did not play with other children. She had no imaginary play. She made no eye contact with anyone. She had no spontaneous language. She did not understand questions. Her language was restricted to repeating what she heard (echolalia). In other words, she didn’t use language to communicate. She could stack blocks for hours. She would line up toys and have a meltdown if you moved a toy out of line. Everything had to be according to her rules or she was in chaos. She had highly repetitive routines that would escalate into unrest or panic. For example, she would go to wash her hands, turn the water on, turn the water off, turn the water on, and so on. Each time through the routine she would get more upset that she couldn’t stop. These loop-like routines might last hours, typically ending because of exhaustion from crying. She also had episodes of absence (blank stares) that lasted 15-30 seconds.

My husband and I tried a number of popular therapies. We tried Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) for 3 months. She got worse; her loop-like routines occurred more frequently. We tried speech therapy for 6 months. It increased her vocabulary, but did not improve her communication in other ways. The third therapy we tried was auditory integration training. We did the full series twice, which took a total of 3 months. There was no improvement. Then she started going to a special-needs school, where each student is given an individualized program. At this point, she was 3.5 years old.

Around the same time that she started the new school, we started changing her diet. I had been looking at nutritional deficiencies associated with autism. As a result, we added green veggie smoothies (for example, kale, cucumber, cilantro, nuts, seeds, fruits, it varied with the season) to her diet, supplemented with a multivitamin, magnesium, B complex, Vitamin D3, Omega 3′s (EPA and DHA) and probiotic blends (a mix of pills from different companies, such as New Chapter and MegaFoods). Within three days, she began to look people in the eye and began responding to her name. Before the autism diagnosis, we had taken her for a hearing test, because of her lack of response to her name.

This encouraged us to think that diet was important. We eliminated gluten and casein (dairy) from her diet. Many parents had seen improvement after they made this change. These changes were often not large enough to make the children no longer autistic, but they did improve. Our daughter’s response was similar. Her social and communication skills improved, but she was still about a year behind her peers. She still had long outbursts and meltdowns. We were sure it was the new diet, not the new school, that caused the improvement because several times she had eaten gluten or casein at school by accident (e.g., pizza) and her language and behavior regressed. This happened about ten times. Twenty-four hours after these exposures, she was considerably worse. She wouldn’t be able to articulate words and her language comprehension decreased. She also became much more emotional and picky (e.g., had to take a certain route home). The regression lasted about five days.

These improvements encouraged me to read more about diet and autism. I read a few clinical studies – there were hardly any. On blogs, I read about parents’ experiences. On one blog – I can’t remember which one — I read a comment from a parent that he found that his son benefited from removing gluten and casein, and, importantly, MSG made his son worse. What idiot feeds his child MSG? I thought. I was wrong.

I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry, with an emphasis in protein chemistry, from UC Santa Cruz. I have spent 20 years conducting research and development on proteins for therapeutics and molecular diagnostic applications. Proteins are made of amino acids, the most abundant of which is glutamic acid. When a protein breaks down, glutamic acid is released. I discovered that I had been feeding my daughter plenty of glutamate. I started researching connections between glutamate and autism and convinced myself it was plausible that too much glutamate caused behaviors associated with autism, as well as other brain disorders. Suddenly I understood why removal of gluten and casein might help. Both proteins have a high glutamate content (= a large fraction of their amino acids are glutamic acid). Common types of food processing break down these proteins. For example, fermentation, ultra-pasteurization, adding acid (such as lemon juice), and adding enzymes (e.g., when making cheese) all create free glutamate.

I started looking into food labels. Glutamate can be hidden in many ways, I learned. For example, “natural flavor” may be up to 60% glutamic acid. Perhaps my daughter had a predisposition to glutamate sensitivity; my research revealed that many of us do. There are glutamate receptors all over the body, including the brain. For example, glutamate receptors in the pancreas regulate insulin secretion. To reduce the amount of glutamate in her food, I tried to remove all processed proteins from her diet. This wasn’t simple. Apple juice may have “natural flavors”. Toothpaste may have glutamate. Our new diet mainly consisted of organic vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, meat, quinoa, and rice. We stayed away from any product with processed soy, corn, or wheat (because of the processed protein). Corn on the cob or edamame was fine because they aren’t processed.

This was a huge shift in the family diet and was met with protest. My husband was hesitant because the advice from a team of neurologists had been to try behavioral therapy again. (ABA is one type of behavioral therapy.) They thought a better therapist might help. That was their main advice. They told us they hadn’t seen gluten-and-casein-free diets produce improvement.

In May 2010, we made the big dietary changes. After we started the new diet, my daughter never again had a meltdown. She had had one the previous week. About a month later, at the end of the school year, we were contacted by the special-needs school. They said she had improved so much that she should go to a mainstream pre-school. At this point she was almost four. Her language and social skills quickly caught up with her peers. Of my five children, she is the most social and outgoing. Today, at 6 years old, she attends a public school kindergarten. At a September 2012 parent-teacher conference, her kindergarten teacher was shocked to find out that she had been previously diagnosed as autistic.

I decided to make it my mission to educate and raise awareness of the amount of free glutamate in our food and the health ailments associated with it. The name of my mission is Unblind My Mind. More information can be found at unblindmymind.org.

Katie spoke about this at the first Make Yourself Healthy Meetup.

Make Yourself Healthy Meetup Group: Report of First Meeting

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The first meeting of the Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group happened last night in Berkeley. It went great. About 15 people attended. We heard four fascinating talks — five, if you count mine. About 10 people wanted to talk so there was far more material than time (the meeting lasted about 2 hours).

Here are brief recaps of the talks.

Me. I explained why I started the group. I described how I came to believe that non-experts can discover important things about health that health experts, such as doctors, don’t know. These non-expert discoveries deserve more attention than they would get on a online forum (e.g., a MedHelp forum about acne). They can help people with other problems and can encourage people with other problems.

Katie Reid. After her youngest child was diagnosed with autism, she tried many things that didn’t work. She tried removing gluten from her daughter’s diet — a common treatment — and that made things somewhat better. The partial success encouraged her to look further at food. On someone’s blog, she came across the idea that MSG (monosodium glutamate) can cause autism symptoms. To her surprise, she learned that MSG is in many things, including toothpaste and juice, without explicit statement on the label. When she removed all MSG from her daughter’s diet, her daughter greatly improved and now, three years later, attends class with normal children. All of her autistic symptoms are gone. Katie herself felt much better when she stopped eating any MSG. She lost weight and a low-grade headache disappeared. She has a website and a video about this. Here is a video about this by someone else.

Anonymous. He is 29 years old and has struggled with depression, anxiety and lack of motivation. No long term progress in therapy. Yoga has helped. He found some benefits from meditation, but to get the benefits requires consistency and consistency requires hope, which I don’t always have. He started thinking critically about what he eats. Read Eat to Live by Furman and Disease-proof Your Child. Eating whole foods plant-based lowered his blood pressure to 90/60, His weight went from 170 to 155 and is now in low 160s. (It was 160 when he was 19.) He has food addiction and technology addictions, demons that he is battling. Other attendees suggested six things he might try, such as eating more animal fat.

Kylene Miller. She spoke about the value of anti-oxidants. She became a Type 1 diabetic at age 5 and has been sick a lot in her life. She met Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, who told her to eat a lot of anti-oxidants. She started eating large amounts of Vitamins E and C. Then she started trying get her antioxidants from food. She discovered healthy chocolate — cold-pressed so that the anti-oxidants aren’t destroyed — made by the Xocai company. It has a huge ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) score. She had gastric paresis. Four years of throwing up first thing in the morning. She had stopped taking lots of antioxidants. After she started taking them again, her gastric paresis disappeared. She is a distributor for the chocolate. She passed out samples of the chocolate.

Janet. When she was 19 (she is now 22) she suddenly felt very tired most of the time, even though she was sleeping 12 hours per night. She decided what tests she wanted, but her doctor would not order them. After her doctor gave her the blood-test-order form to bring to the testing center, she checked the boxes for the tests she wanted. Three supplements have been especially helpful, including isocort and progesterone (both OTC, over the counter). You can listen to her talk here (thanks to Jane Cho).

I had worried that too few people would have stories to tell, but one attendee lived one block away She had high blood pressure and had lowered it without medicine. I wanted to videotape the talks but during the second one the camera battery died — and, anyway, I was doing it wrong, someone told me. I asked whether the next meeting should be in one month or two months and everyone voted for one month. We need a venue that permits longer meetings.

 

 

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  • An Epidemic of Absence (book about allergies and autism)
  • Professor of medicine who studies medical error loses a leg due to medical error. “Despite calls to action by patient advocates and the adoption of safety programs, there is no sign that the numbers of errors, injuries and deaths [due to errors] have improved.” Nothing about consequences for the person who made the error that caused him to lose a leg.
  • Doubts about spending a huge amount of research money on a single project (brain mapping). Which has yet to produce even one useful result.
  • Cancer diagnosis innovation by somebody without a job (a 15-year-old)
  • Someone named Rob Rhinehart has greatly reduced the time and money he spends on food by drinking something he thinks contains all essential nutrients. Someone pointed out to him that he needs bacteria, which he doesn’t have. (No doubt several types of bacteria are best.) He doesn’t realize that Vitamin K has several forms. I suspect he’s getting too little omega-3. This reminds me of a man who greatly reduced how much he slept by sleeping 15 minutes every 3 hours. It didn’t work out well for him (his creativity vanished and he became bored and unhappy). In Rhinehart’s case, I can’t predict what will happen so it’s fascinating. When something goes wrong, however, I’ll be surprised if he can figure out what caused the problem.

Thanks to Amish Mukharji.

Value of Self-Experimentation With Chronic Conditions

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A reader with an autistic son sent me a link to a story in the New York Times Magazine by Susannah Meadows about a boy with arthritis who was cured by dietary changes, including omega-3 and probiotics. Conventional doctors and the boy’s father had resisted trying the dietary solution; Meadows is the boy’s mother. An expert in the boy’s problem, Dr. Lisa Imundo, director of pediatric rheumatology at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told Meadows that “she [Imundo] had treated thousands of kids with arthritis . . . and diet changes did not work.” It took only six weeks of the dietary change to discover it did work. Eventually the boy’s arthritis was completely gone. It may have been caused by antibiotics he’d been given for pneumonia. The antibiotics may have killed his gut flora making his intestines too permeable.

Had Meadows accepted what mainstream doctors told her, her son would have taken medicine for the rest of his life — medicine that wasn’t working well. Dr. Imundo wanted to double the dose.

The reader with an autistic son explained how it related to this blog:

It particularly supports the value of self-experimentation in these chronic conditions, especially when there is heterogeneity. The heterogeneity of autism was obvious to me from early on, although I’ve come to realize it’s not obvious to everyone else. Autisms of known genetic causes have different tracks (Fragile X is the best-studied). Broad studies of autism start with a huge disadvantage: they are studying different disorders of similar presentation, and what helps in one case may harm in another. After the steady drip drip of your talking about n=1 experiments, it dawned on me that this applied to our situation. You didn’t need to do a massive, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of acne medication any more than I needed to enroll a thousand families in a study of diet and autism. I could start with dinner.

The reader found dietary n=1 experimentation with her son to be very helpful.

Update. After I wrote this, Michelle Francl, a chemist who writes for for Slate’s Medical Examiner column, complained about the “alternative medicine” in Meadow’s piece. Francl fails to mention that dietary changes completely cured the problem, thus avoiding the need for dangerous drugs that weren’t working. Francl says that Meadows has “an irrational fear of chemicals”.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts10 Comments
  • “Light” Ph.D. — a less expensive research degree
  • Umami Burger expands
  • A diuretic reduces autism symptoms. Does water balance influence brain function in people without autism?
  • This Amazon reviewer is almost always disappointed and his one-star reviews are fun to read. I suggest that ratings (book ratings, product ratings, etc.) compare the rating to other ratings given by the rater. A 5-star rating is more impressive if a rater’s average rating is 2 than if it is 5. I suggest percentiles. For example, rating = 5 (90%ile) is more impressive than rating = 5 (50%ile). I’d also like to know the average percentile across raters.
  • Lack of variation in heart rate predicts infection in neonates. The writer (Mike Loukides) is too surprised (“astonishing connection”). Many studies have found associations between too-little variation in heart rate and serious health problems.

Thanks to Adam Clemens and Patrick Vlaskovits.

Gene Linked to Autism?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

An article in the New York Times describes research that supposedly linked a rare gene mutation to autism:

Dr. Matthew W. State, a professor of genetics and child psychiatry at Yale, led a team that looked for de novo mutations [= mutations that are not in the parents] in 200 people who had been given an autism diagnosis, as well as in parents and siblings who showed no signs of the disorder. The team found that two unrelated children with autism in the study had de novo mutations in the same gene — and nothing similar in those without a diagnosis.

“That is like throwing a dart at a dart board with 21,000 spots and hitting the same one twice,” Dr. State said. “The chances that this gene is related to autism risk is something like 99.9999 percent.”

It is like throwing 200 darts at a dart board with 21,000 spots (the number of genes) and hitting the same one twice. (Each person has about 1 de novo mutation.) What are the odds of that? If all spots are equally likely to be hit, then the probability is about 0.6. More likely than not. (Dr. State seems to think it is extremely unlikely.) This is a variation on the birthday paradox. If there are 23 people in a room, it is 50/50 that two of them will share a birthday.

When Dr. State says, “The chances that this gene is related to autism risk is something like 99.9999 percent,” he is making an elementary mistake. He has taken a very low p value (maybe 0.000001) from a statistical test to indicate the likelihood that the null hypothesis (no association with autism) is true. P values indicate strength of evidence, not probability of truth.

One way to look at the evidence is that there is a group of 200 people (with an autism diagnosis) among whom two have a certain mutation and another group of about 600 people (their parents and siblings) none of whom have that mutation. If two instances of the mutation were randomly distributed among 800 people what are the odds that both instances would be in any pre-defined group of 200 of the 800 people (defined, say, by the letters in their first name)? The chance of this happening is 1/16. Not strong evidence of an association between the mutation and the actual pre-defined group (autism diagnosis).

Another study published at the same time found an link between autism and a mutation in the same gene identified by Dr. State’s group but again the association was weak. It may be a more subtle example of the birthday paradox: If twenty groups of genetics researchers are looking for a gene linked to autism, what are the odds that two of them will happen upon the same gene by chance?

If the gene with the de novo mutations is actually linked to autism, then we will have insight into the cause of 1% of the 200 autism cases Dr. Smart’s group studied. When genetics researchers try so hard and come up with so little, it increases my belief that the main causes of autism are environmental.

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Thanks to Dave Lull and Aaron Blaisdell.

PFCs, Ultrasound, and Autism

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Robert Delaney is a geologist who does environmental cleanup in Michigan. While cleaning up an abandoned military base, he found remarkably high contamination by a chemical called PFOS. He had been wondering what causes autism. He came across a rodent study that found that the combination of PFOS and ultrasound was much more damaging to the nervous system than either alone. (See also this study.) He remembered that study when he read my posts about ultrasound and autism. He wrote to me:

You will know the chemical PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfunate) from spray-on fabric treatments that protect clothes from stains and water. IÂ want to tell you about the possible connection between PFCs (perfluoroalkyl chemicals, especially long chain PFCs) and autism. Â I learned that mice and rats contaminated with PFOS, a PFC, when exposed to ultrasound convulsed and died. Â I was reminded of that finding when I read your blog about Caroline Rodger’s idea that prenatal ultrasound causes autism. Â I have thought that PFCs were causing autism for some time. I wondered if lower levels of PFOS would cause some type of brain injury, short of convulsions and death, when the mice were exposed to ultrasound.

I work on cleaning up military sites and attend a lot of related conferences and meetings.  I am working on a focus group with the Association of State and Territorial Waste Managers Organization that is looking at emerging contaminants (contaminants that are not regulated or so recently regulated they are still a problem). Because of that, I was recently made aware of the PFCs because the military had identified these contaminants in firefighting foams.  I was doing a cleanup at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan.  I decided we should check for PFOS and PFOA at the site. There were high levels of both PFOS and PFOA even though it was 20 years since the based had been used. When we checked groundwater, we found it in every well at every depth.  In my 25 years in the environmental business I have never seen anything like it.

I started researching the chemicals as it was apparent that I would have to deal with them. Â I discovered that at least 98% of Americans have them in their blood. That isn’t surprising because they are in everyday products such as food wrappers and popcorn bags, shampoos, cleaning supplies, carpeting, furniture materials, clothing, and dental floss. They are used in firefighting foams, pesticides, automotive parts, computers, electronics, and lubricants. Â They have ended up in our food supply and drinking water.

I had been researching the occurrence of autism for other reasons.  It had occurred to me that whatever was causing the dramatic rise in autism around much of the world, it had to be ubiquitous in the environment, of recent origin, with increasing use, and found in at least the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia where the autism rates were exploding.

PFCs fit these characteristics. Â They are found around the world in mammals, birds, fish, shellfish, etc. Â In fact, the Canadian government reported that the blood levels of PFCs in polar bear above the Arctic Circle were higher than the levels of any pesticides they had ever measured.

Research in the Great Lakes Region is showing high levels of PFOS in the lakes. In some places in the Lakes the contamination exceeds preliminary drinking water standards. Because these are huge bodies of water, to have so much contamination is amazing. High concentrations have been found in mink, fish, gull eggs, eagles, etc. around the Great Lakes. Fish and drinking water in Minnesota have been impacted over large areas. Europe has now banned PFCs for most applications.

What got me wondering about autism and PFCs was that in lab animals and in test tube experiments with human brain cells they are developmental neurotoxins. Many chemicals are neurotoxins, such as chlorinated pesticides and other chlorinated compounds (such as PCBs), organic mercury, and lead. Â However, we in the western world have been aware of these facts and for the last thirty years have been reducing use and exposure to these chemicals. Â But while we have been reducing our exposure to mercury, lead, and so on, neurologic diseases have been on the rise. Â No one suspected PFCs were harmful to humans. Their use has continued to increase.

The half life of the chemicals in our body is around 5 years, so in 5 years, if you have not gotten any more exposure to PFCs, half of them would still be in your body.

There are a lot of reasons to think PFCs may cause autism. Here are a few. First, the company that invented PFCs (3M) is located in Minnesota. There is widespread PFC contamination in Minnesota. As I was preparing a talk last week, I googled…”autism state rates.”  The first site to pop up listed Minnesota as having the highest levels of autism of any state. New Jersey has unusually high PFO contamination of drinking water; they also have a very high level of autism. The military, which has used a great deal of fire-fighting foam, has double the rate of autism of the general U.S. population.

In laboratory experiments PFCs influence brain wiring. The impact of PFCs in some mammals is sex-dependent with males being more affected; autism is 4 times more common in boys than in girls. PFCs are associated with repressed immune systems in animals which has been associated with autism as well. Deranged behavior/ADHD behavior has been reported in PFOS-exposed mice. Â ADHD in children has been associated with prenatal exposure to PFCs.

Unfortunately, the EPA did not include PFCs in their list of chemicals that might be causing autism. My colleague and I have put together a web page if people want more information: https://www.autism-pfos.net/

Yes, why does Minnesota have such high autism rates? It is not an industrial state. It is not a rich state. Yet it is where PFCs were invented and manufactured in large amounts (e.g., ScotchGuard). I can’t think of a plausible alternative explanation. The lab results (ultrasound plus PFOS far more damaging than either alone) makes perfect sense: If there is a bad molecule in neural tissue, it is going to do a lot more damage if you start shaking it, which is what ultrasound does.

Unnoticed Conflicts of Interest

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Gary Taubes pointed to this PNAS paper about climate change and noted that one of the authors, Stephen Schneider, had a big non-financial conflict of interest: If it turns out the whole argument is wrong, he looks like a fool. The accompanying statement (“The authors declare no conflict of interest”) is, if taken to mean the authors have no conflict of interest, wildly inaccurate. Readers unaware of Schneider’s history wouldn’t know this.

I came across a similar example today. A reader of this blog wrote extensive criticisms (here and here) of the idea that prenatal ultrasound may cause autism. He believed Caroline Rodgers, my source for that idea, misrepresented the evidence. In particular, Rodgers pointed to a study that found ultrasound disturbed neuronal migration in mouse fetuses. She said it supported her idea. The reader disagreed, saying,

The bottom line for me is that Dr. Rakic (from the mouse study) clarified, “Our study in mice does not mean that use of ultrasound on human fetuses for appropriate diagnostic and medical purposes should be abandoned. Instead, our study warns against its non-medical use.” Yes. Okay. No more boutiquey, keepsake ultrasounds. Great. But for Rodgers to skew this data (along with the FDA’s and others’) into claiming that ultrasounds under the care of an Obstetrics professional (and for medical use) are causing autism is disingenuous at best, unethical propaganda for the Midwifery Way at worst.

The reader is a professor who teaches composition. Maybe an English professor. He or she takes Rakic seriously, where I completely ignore his statement because of a conflict of interest. If Rakic questions “appropriate” ultrasound, he will be attacked in many ways, making his life unpleasant. I have no idea whether this swayed Rakic, but he would be only human if it did.

Of course developing neurons are unable to distinguish appropriate and inappropriate ultrasound. Rakic’s statement is ridiculous as Rakic and all insiders (neuroscientists) know, I believe. All insiders know that there are dozens of examples where findings from mouse brains have turned out to be true for human brains, in spite of the many differences between them, and that there are thousands of grant proposals in which mouse brains are claimed to be a worthwhile model for human brains. All insiders know this, realize the pressure on Rakic to say what he said, and, like me, just ignore it. As far as I can tell, Rakic pays no price for misleading outsiders because the outsiders don’t know they are being misled. (Just as with political lobbying: the public doesn’t understand what’s happening.) The composition professor doesn’t know this, as far as I can tell.

Rodgers is not claiming that ultrasounds “are causing autism”. She is saying they might cause autism, that there are several reasons to think so, and therefore (a) the ultrasound-autism idea deserves further scrutiny and (b) ultrasounds should be avoided as much as possible until more is known.

Prenatal Ultrasound and Autism: Multiple Voices

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I previously blogged (also here) about Carolyn Rodgers’s idea that prenatal ultrasound may cause autism. It turns out that she isn’t the only person with this idea; researchers at the University of Louisville recently published the same idea.

I learned about the Louisville study from Anne Weiss, who said the connection has been plausible for a long time.

Ultrasound was introduced into obstetrics in the 1970′s and was generally restricted to high-risk pregnancies. By the 1980′s policy statements were issued by ACOG, the NIH and equivalent bodies in Europe and Canada stating that its use should remain limited to high-risk cases. Despite these recommendations, ultrasound technology became common in hospitals and doctors’ offices and routinely applied to low-risk populations. Within a short time the majority of pregnant woman were being exposed at prenatal visits, during multiple scans in hospitals, and during continuous monitoring during labour (which could mean 12 to 14 hours during childbirth alone). Skills and techniques used to monitor the fetus prior to the introduction of ultrasound (in utero and during the birth process) were slowly undermined by the technology and often underutilized. Iatrogenic effects from false positive readings, – unnecessary C- sections, inductions, instrumental deliveries etc. caused harm to moms and babies, especially in the early 1980′s.

Three important names in the 1980s were (1) Robin Mole, who presented a paper “Possible Hazards of Imaging and Doppler Ultrasound in Obstetrics” to the Royal Society of Medicine Forum on Maternity and the Newborn: Ultrasonagraphy in Obstetrics, April 1985. She was former director of the Medical Research Council Radiobiology Unit, England. Also the work of (2) M.E. Stratmeyer – Research in ultrasound. A public health view. Birth and Family Journal 1980 and (3) Doreen Liebeskind – still at Albert Enstein and a prof of radiology- presented at a symposium at Columbia in 1983.  She was concerned that ultrasound may be producing subtle changes in the fetal brain perhaps affecting behavioral mechanisms, possible changes in reflexes, IQ, attention span or some of the more subtle psychological, psychiatric or neurological phenomena. Referred to animal and lab studies that showed ultrasound may cause chromosomal damage, breakdown of DNA, etc. There are others who sounded the warning that this was not a benign technology but these voices were crowded out for varied reasons like threats of litigation, loss of the traditions skills of birthing etc.

There were also Japanese studies that raised concerns about ultrasound. Weiss continued:

Unfortunately the use of ultrasound in obstetrics has not declined, despite safety concerns and the lack of research to rule out serious neurological effects. It’s so entrenched in modern obstetrical practice.  Doctors use the machines to protect themselves from litigation – in the case of fetal abnormalities, undetected multiples, placenta previa, neurological or physical damage to the fetus during childbirth, stillbirth etc. It has almost become a form of entertainment – you can get photos and videos of baby’s ultrasound. It’s disturbing how benign it appears.

Within the context of the work I do, ultrasound is just one of many concerns I have with the over-management and medicalization of childbirth. My clients come to me to find ways to subvert this within the hospital setting or to prepare for a home birth with a midwife.  I also get referrals from doctors whose patients are dealing with difficult issues while pregnant.