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Comment by jgalt212 | Hacker News Reader

The entire medical community is doing their impression of Shaggy, i.e. "it wasn't me!" But there are thousands of suffering parents and children and this lack of empathy really does nothing for no one. Another hand-wavy response I have heard is that given the new Autism Spectrum diagnosis, many more kids are now diagnosed with autism. That being said, none has even come up with a reasonably derived estimate saying that of the 5X increase in autism over the last 25 years, we can confidently say that nX of this is due to changing diagnosis standards. And if n is anything less than 5, the medical community has work to do in solving this problem and not passing the blame and accusing suffering parents of being crazy.

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> this lack of empathy

Like cutting funding for autism research [1] and kids with autism on Medicaid [2]?

[1] https://www.disabilityscoop.com/2025/06/02/nih-autism-resear...

[2] https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/09/05/nebraska-lawmakers-h...

Literally everyone including everyone in "the medical community" would like to know the cause of autism.

So we do the tried and true solution of listening to the deranged quack?

I do not usually side with huge corporations, but in this case I hope Tylenol drags that quack into court and make him prove the report.

We all know he cannot prove anything, even if Tylenol loses, ensure they cost RFK jr lots of $ in defending himself.

Does RFK Jr have a track recording of winning his cases or losing them?

Whether he wins or loses is irrelevant. This administration has a track record of ignoring judgements they don't like and facing zero consequences.

His prior legal track record has no relevance to his current work?

No, because, as forgotoldacc points out, Trump is going to just keep doing whatever he wants regardless, and he wasn't appointed based on actual expertise or prior success: he was appointed because he validates the biases of Trump's base.

I’ll have an aspirin thank you. The main problem isn’t going to be solved.

I almost can't even blame him he is so off the deep end. I still do of course, he should have the self-awareness to have never accepted and it is his massive ego that keeps him doing crazy, dangerous things. But whenever this mentally ill person does things that make the news, I never hear anybody blame the people who put him in that position, and leave him there despite the clearly harmful things he does every day. So shame and blame on everybody involved.

Do they?

Or is it, perhaps, possible that, if there is indeed a real increase in the rate of autism, it's because of something that has nothing to do with our modern pharmaceuticals?

Could it perhaps be related to the increases in various kinds of air pollution? Water pollution? Pesticides or herbicides in our foods? Or even the dramatic increase in EM signals being broadcast everywhere?

Until there are reputable studies that can actually show something resembling a causal link, getting angry at the medical community, pharmaceutical manufacturers, or vaccine makes for saying they are not responsible is pointless and counterproductive. So far as everyone knows, it really wasn't them.

And while there may be some small subset of people "accusing suffering parents of being crazy", by and large that's also not something that's happening.

There’s a marked increase in mental illnesses diagnosed. My parents were heavily depressed and anxious, but in their day it was taboo to seek help and admit such a diagnosis. We are so much more sophisticated today.

> There’s a marked increase in mental illnesses diagnosed.

There was a marked increase in left-handedness once the 'stigma' of it was removed.

This sinister finding must be further investigated.

And righted?

Certainly no stone left unturned.

Or change of living conditions. Running around outside all the time vs sitting in front of a display.

There is far less environmental contamination now than there was in 1970.

And modern agriculture practices result in lower amounts of less toxic substances in the food supply.

This doesn't really average. There's less lead, but more micro plastics for example. There less cadmium, but more pesticides. Etc.

microplastic contamination, for one, is much higher now than the 1970s. who knows what else we arent measuring for carefully

“Could it perhaps be related to the increases in various kinds of air pollution? Water pollution? Pesticides or herbicides in our foods?”

The West is on a decreasing trend of all those kind of pollution since the 70s.

“Or even the dramatic increase in EM signals being broadcast everywhere?”.

It’s funny people are entertaining the hypothesis that EM radiation causes autism in the same conversation where they are trying to assure you that a drug that’s increasingly taken by pregnant women and that is proven to pass the placenta, is 100% harmless and can’t have anything to do with increased levels of autism.

To be clear, I don't think that's a likely factor. I mention it merely because it is one of the dozens of factors that have changed over the past few decades that have nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry.

>Until there are reputable studies that can actually show something resembling a causal link,

Wrong approach. You prove that something is safe first (and there are ways to do it, one has to creative though) and then have people use it. One does not introduce something in the population and then trying to prove a causal link through stats. There are too many variable and it becomes easy to pass the buck by massaging numbers.

So now that we're all terrified that one of our various pharmaceuticals might, hypothetically cause an increased chance of autism, we have to take them all off the market and do extensive testing of absolutely everything? All the painkillers, blood pressure medicines, immunosuppressants for transplant patients, antipsychotics and antiseizure meds—everything?

Surely you understand that that makes no sense at all? All of these medicines have already been tested and shown to be safe, based on the science and understanding of the time. That's why they're on the market in the first place.

For better or for worse, the burden of proof is now on those who want to show that they are dangerous.

We are not talking about medicines, we are talking about some that is frequently ingested/exposed to people. Things like plastics, additives, pesticides, EM signal. These are novel chemicals/radiation and are potentially slow toxins and showing a causal link from population studies is near impossible.

....nnno?

We are primarily talking about Tylenol. Paracetamol. Acetaminophen.

Perhaps you need to be reminded of the whole sentence you quoted from my post, rather than just the first subclause?

> Until there are reputable studies that can actually show something resembling a causal link, getting angry at the medical community, pharmaceutical manufacturers, or vaccine makes for saying they are not responsible is pointless and counterproductive.

The post I was replying to originally was specifically saying that the medical community needed to be accepting blame for causing autism.

This is bullshit. We do not know what causes autism. We certainly do not have any compelling evidence that anything the medical community is doing is causing autism.

We don't even know that autism is something that's caused. When sampling an integer, there's some probability you'll get a prime; perhaps when making a human, there's just some inherent probability you'll get an autistic person. (Afaik, we don't even know enough to put a likelihood on this class of theories.)

>Perhaps you need to be reminded of the whole sentence you quoted from my post, rather than just the first subclause?

My mistake, I did not quote your original comment correctly.:

I meant to quote:

>Could it perhaps be related to the increases in various kinds of air pollution? Water pollution? Pesticides or herbicides in our foods? Or even the dramatic increase in EM signals being broadcast everywhere?

>This is bullshit. We do not know what causes autism. We certainly do not have any compelling evidence that anything the medical community is doing is causing autism.

I would not put it past them. Harmful until proven otherwise is the approach I would take with most drugs/vaccines in the market out there, today. There is no third party testing for any drug/vaccine today - so pharma is free to manipulate the stats, and they have done it in the past.

> You prove that something is safe first (and there are ways to do it, one has to creative though) and then have people use it

Acetaminophen is better studied than like 99% of foods and supplements.

> accusing suffering parents of being crazy

What? Who is supposedly calling parents of autistic children "crazy"?

>lack of empathy

True. Infact I'd go so far as to say the medical community causes many of the health problem.

Speaking about empathy most people don't have it, not just the medical community. Even the victims will be victimizers at some point, it's very twisted situation.

( Btw, you have a very obvious pseudonym...)

No one supporting this quack's actions and opinions has any right to claim that the people devoting their lives to understanding, managing and healing illnesses, are the ones lacking empathy and not the ones doing their best to make healthcare less accessible, discrediting and shutting down any research that doesn't support their biases and irresponsibly spreading misinformation.

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