Dr. Amy Holmes and Mike's story

Dr. Amy Holmes is a giant figure in the minds of the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) parents, particularly if they've been dieting and dosing and chelating and herbaling their kids for a few years. Dr. Holmes became really prominent when she published her baby haircut study with Boyd "Mad Child Disease" Haley and Mark "Hidden Horde" Blaxill. That study should go down in history as one of the most blatant attempts to lie about the data found in a study. The study was offered as evidence by the petitioners in the Autism Omnibus hearing and thoroughly shredded by the respondents' expert witness, Dr. Brent. Read about it in the day 10 testimony, pages 2351 to 2354.

But besides writing being the principal investigator in the practically fraudulent baby hair study, she has actively promoted her ideas on the mercury-parents' favorite Yahoo! Groups and such. Here is Dr. Amy Holmes in her own words from some of those boards (some of which are compiled and found here) She wrote about her autistic son:

Finally diagnosed as autistic at 26 months. We began an intensive ABA program (Lovaas) at 28 months. We took him to see Dr. Stephanie Cave at 29 months. She ran a number of tests, including hair analysis for heavy metals. He was very high in lead, aluminum, and antimony. Mercury was only slightly elevated. She gave him DMSA 100 three times a day for 5 days, followed by 100 mg twice a day for 2 weeks (the old treatment).

By 1 month after this first chelation course, he had improved noticeably - behavior was better, no longer as "zoned out" as before, was no longer pale, looked healthier. ...

After this, we pursued other areas like getting rid of yeast and pathogenic bacteria, gluten and casein-free diet, getting rid of multiple food allergies, and did not return to the heavy metal issue until he was 4 years old. By this time, I had taken over his case. I repeated a hair analysis for heavy metals when he was 4. Mercury had dropped (of course - it had gone back into its favorite storage areas), but aluminum and antimony were still very, very high, and the lead was back up to elevated range.

I started him on a kinder, gentler course using DMSA 200 mg TID for 3 days,
off for 11 days while repleting minerals. I repeated this 2 week cycle for a total of 4 cycles, then got a toxic urine screen on the last cycle. To my surprise, tons of mercury were coming out. That is when I started investigating mercury-autism connection in Mike's case. After a few weeks, I was convinced that mercury was responsible for a lot of his problems, so we continued with the same 2 week cycles of DMSA for several more months, repeated the urine toxic metal screen with almost the same findings.

From April of 1999 to the present, I have been doing these 2 week cycles, 4 to 6 at a time, then allowing him a month off now and then to fully recover from the chelation. We got a urine toxic metal screen last month [April 2000] which showed mercury at 2.7 ("normal" range 0 - 3). This is the first time he has ever been in the "normal" range for mercury (provocative urine). One year ago, Mike was essentially non-verbal and preferred to engage in meaningless self-stimulatory behaviors.

Today [May 2000], he speaks in sentences, addresses people by name to get their attention, and no longer "stims" non-stop. His receptive language is excellent, expressive is still 2 years behind his peers (but is catching up fast). His pronunciation, which had been so bad as to make any words completely unintelligible, is now improving to the point that we can understand almost everything he says. And as far as my son goes, I have no neurologic or behavioral evidence left in him to suggest that mercury is still a significant problem for him - he is talking, answering questions, carrying on conversations. His strabismus is gone. His bilateral Babinski sign are now gone. He no longer walks on his toes. I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that I used DMSA every 8 hours, 3 days "on" and 11 days "off" and he is not the same horribly impaired child that he was even a year ago.

I intend to continue chelation until no more mercury comes out on provocative urine toxic metal screen.

Hope this helps,


Dr. Amy Holmes

Dr. Stephanie Cave, Dr. Holmes' son's doctor, is known for having been urged onward in her quest to cure the vaccine-autism thing by a priest. As explained by mercury mom Susan Fund:

Her priest came to her one day and said to her "I know what causes autism". She asked him what caused it and he told her it was the vaccines. He told her that God had told him this and that she would become very involved in this issue. Dr Cave then asked her priest what was in the vaccines that caused autism. He replied that he did not know but she would figure it out. She then began to study what was in the vaccines.

Dr. Cave is also known for discouraging people from vaccinating their kids. Dr. Holmes also took her son to a snake oil seller in Mexico for FGF (Fibroblast growth factor) injections, or drops. or something....

When we finally met with Dr. Aguilar to go over Mike's results, there was both good and bad news. Pretty bad brain damage with resulting immaturity in other areas. But, he thought that Mike was a good candidate for FGF. And at that time, he gave us a time-line of what he thought would happen:

1. We would see nothing for the first 4 to 6 months.
2. Then big gains in receptive language (6 to 12 months)
3. Then big gains in expressive language (12 months+)
4. The last thing to improve would be his pronunciation (it was horrible!).

So we started FGF on 4/19/99. I had also started getting mercury out of Mike at about the same time, so it is really hard to tell which treatment is doing what. But, I have to admit that the time-line of improvements has been exactly on Dr. Aguilar's schedule!

About 5 months into treatment, his receptive language started getting a lot better. He has been getting FGF every 10 days since 4/99 (1 year, 4 1/2 months), and he now speaks in complete sentences, carries on simple conversations, can answer questions, goes to a normal school, and has little friends he plays with. I have no idea which treatment is doing what - mercury chelation or FGF. I have a feeling it is both, but I really don't care because my son is back.

He was re-evaluated by the same examiner who saw him in 4/99. His DQ is now 80.

Here's Barbara Brewitt in 2004 describing the wonders of FGF. Dr. Brewitt got into a bunch of trouble later:

"The comment was made once that we don't care what the government says because we're homeopathic," he said Brewitt told him and other employees. "We can make this stuff in a bathtub if we want to."

...

The Department of Health ordered Brewitt to immediately "stop her unlicensed practice of manufacturing drugs," saying that they do not have the necessary federal approval.

Adler, who says he was hired to help establish a small manufacturing facility in Woodinville, says many of the medicines were mixed by Brewitt herself in her own kitchen as she chanted over a crystal bowl.

"She told all of us the magic is in the chanting and the crystal bowl," said Adler. "And that's what caused everything to work was the energy from the crystal bowl."

Back to Dr. Holmes; she nicely described how one can scam parents into thinking their kid is heavy metal toxic:

We have just started testing kids in the beginning of treatment with urine toxic elements (Doctor's Data). We cannot get a 24-hour urine on most, so we get an 8-hour urine, and have to base our decisions on mcg/g creatinine instead of mcg/24-hours. We do a challenge test with DMSA, low-dose for 2 days, collect the urine on day 2. So far, almost all the tests fall into the same ranges - mercury is coming out in large amounts along with other metals.

No kidding, especially when they are comparing a provoked urine sample with non-provoked reference ranges. Pondering this bogus information (more details here and here) from provoked urine metals tests Dr. Holmes and Bernie Rimland agreed that the situation was serious:

Bernie Rimland. (ARI director) The conversation (of course) eventually turned to mercury. He asked me if I thought all autistic children with no identifiable syndromes were all mercury- poisoned. I told him that I thought they were, at least based on my testing of about 200 autistic children so far. There was a long silence on the other end, and then he said that he had reviewed a lot of the data himself, and had come to exactly the same conclusion.

It appears that there is no difference in children "born" autistic and those who were developing normally and then had a regression. The only real difference may be the timing of the poisoning and maybe some individual susceptibility.

But what's Dr. Amy Holmes up to these days? She stopped seeing autistic kids in her practice a while ago. So is she still promoting her biomed ideas at DAN! conferences? It doesn't look like she is, though her website refers people to some DAN! doctors that she seemed to think were OK.

Michelle Dawson found a recent article about Dr. Holmes and her son. Dawson pointed out (here) some discrepancies in this article between the way Dr. Holmes has described her son Mike, in the past compared to now. Dawson also notes that maybe Dr. Amy has abandoned the Defeat Autism Now! ship entirely. The article is about how Dr. Holmes was moving from Louisiana to Texas to be closer to Soma Mukohpadhyay and her work, apparently. The article describes a letter that Dr. Holmes' son, Mike, had written recently by touching one letter at a time on a flexible laminated sheet with the alphabet on it in big letters. The letter was a good-bye and thank-you message read to the church that they had attended in Louisiana.

“We are moving because there is a lady named Soma who can teach me how to ‘talk’ to other people using a letterboard,” he begins his letter.

“I will never be able to talk like you do, but I can spell out words using a letterboard,” he writes.

Actually, Mike was using the letterboard to write the note to the church — pointing to each letter while his mother wrote them down.

So, how is it that he can't speak now but after all the biomedical interventions about 7 years ago he could? Did all the "biomed" his mom was using on him lose its magical power? Apparently, so.

Here's a video of a mom using Soma Mukopadhyay's "rapid prompting" . Autistic people and others have been using letter boards and keyboards without the need for rapid prompting for quite a while. There isn't any research that shows that rapid prompting is the key to getting kids to us a letter board, but maybe some kids respond to it well. Portia Iversen's son Dov was first exposed to a letter board by Soma M. There's more information on Dov's use of the letter board, here and here on a website belonging to strange mom, Portia Iversen (of CAN and Autism Speaks). Ms. Iversen seems to have ripped off some of Soma's ideas and left Soma in the dust, according to Soma's version of events. To Autism Diva it seems too intrusive, not to mention exhausting and maybe too heavy on the saccharine, high pitched, "GOOD! BOY!" rewards of behaviorism But Dr. Holmes must think it's helping her son now. Interestingly, Dr. Holmes had credited chelation and vitamins and prayers and what all to moving him from an IQ of less than 70 to 80, but now after all these years:

Educational authorities originally listed Mike’s IQ at “less than 70.” Recent testing put it at 150, Holmes said.

“His vocabulary and spelling are much more adult than you would think a 12-year-old would have,” she said.

Mike has been in special education classes for seven years essentially doing first-grade work, Holmes said.

“Now we find out that he has very adult ideas,” she said.

She is home schooling him to get him to grade level. Once he has caught up, Mike will attend regular classes, using the board with the help of an aide.

Writing to the church, Mike describes how the disease has impacted him socially:

“I have never had a real friend, because I cannot talk with them even though I understand everything they say to me.

“But, there are others just like me in Austin. They talk using letterboards too. I have already made 3 friends in Austin who are just like me. I can talk to them. I like them. One of them is a girl.”

His mother said Mike, Mitch and Madison became “instant friends” when they first met in Austin.

“It was like they were long-lost friends,” she said.

Thinking of a brighter future did not stop Mike from remembering what had happened in Baton Rouge.

...

So what magical biomedical intervention moved Mike's IQ from 80 (borderline mentally retarded) to 150, very superior, or genius even? Nothing, apparently. It looks like his mom and teachers just had been ignoring Mike's intelligence and most likely ignoring many attempts on his part to communicate with them. If you had an IQ of 150 and people were treating you knew far less than you do wouldn't you be trying to get a message through to them? Wouldn't you be trying to say stuff like, "I realize you want me to point to blue, but can't point to blue." or "I don't want to point to blue any more. I want to discuss the Bernoulli Equation." Fortunately, though now the adults in Mike's life have discovered that he much more than a tragic list of deficits and that he never was just a heavy-metal medical mystery to be cured with arcane potions. They are listening to him and his ideas.

Maybe Mike would like to meet Drew and DJ. Maybe they would enjoy each other's company and could all be like long-lost friends. Fortunately for Drew and DJ, they weren't put through years of chelation and other invasive biomed to get to the same place Mike seems to be at.



Autism Diva
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