Actress and model Jenny McCarthy smiled as her 13-year-old son cracked a golden hammer against a giant candy cane, chopping it into pieces as a crowd of more than a hundred cheered earlier this month at the All Chocolate Kitchen in west suburban Geneva.
Throngs of joyful kids grabbed and gobbled up chunks of the sweet holiday treat as Christmas music played in the background. Some in the audience were also enjoying free samples of hot chocolate and peppermint gelato.
I found the holiday display a little strange, namely because longtime anti-vaccine crusader McCarthy, from nearby St. Charles, has repeatedly claimed that she"s been able to help alleviate her son"s autism symptoms with a range of unproven treatments including a restrictive diet often citing sugar, in particular, as a major culprit.
"Doctors have to acknowledge and help research the therapies that lead to recovery from autism, recovery brought on by therapies long ignored by the (American Academy of Pediatrics) and others," she said in her 2008 book, "Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds." "Dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free diets have succeeded far too many times for any doctor to claim that they"re not "evidence-based.""
Regarding her son"s meals, she wrote: "He does not eat any wheat, milk, sugar, soy, eggs, yeast and most fruits, and his diet is fully rotated."
So it seemed odd that she would have him make an appearance at a sweet shop, where he was declared an "honorary chef" and appeared to be tasting a piece of candy cane as his mother looked on. (The All Chocolate Kitchen was famed for crafting a world record-breaking 51-foot-long candy cane three years ago; the one McCarthy"s son was invited to break was a 10-foot-long replica commemorating the original.)
I called and emailed McCarthy"s publicist to ask about this seeming irony but didn"t receive a response. McCarthy would not take questions from the media at the Dec. 5 event.
This contradiction over a candy cane might have been humorous, except it"s the crux of a larger problem: celebrities like McCarthy using their influence to propagate medical myths and pseudoscience at the expense of public health and safety.
There is no data that show restrictive diets lead to recovery from autism, said Dr. Lainie Friedman Ross, a pediatrician and associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago.
"Restrictive diets, if they are very restrictive, can lead to nutritional deficiencies," she said.
More troubling, though, is McCarthy"s related history of falsely linking autism with immunizations and calling for alternative vaccine schedules or limits on the number of shots children are given at a time. While most of us automatically dismiss her medical advice as quackery, The New York Times best-selling author and former co-host on the daytime talk show "The View" has quite a following, particularly among parents.
"When celebrities and the media give voice to those who claim that vaccines caused autism, they can cause harm," Ross said. "Many who see and hear these reports do not have the scientific background to be able to evaluate the veracity of a claim."
McCarthy has in media reports quibbled with her "anti-vaxxer" title, sometimes arguing that she supports delays or alternatives to the recommended immunization schedule. But these deviations are also potentially harmful and unnecessarily put kids at risk.
"Vaccinating according to the schedule is important because that is how the research on safety and efficacy were done," Ross said. " What we all need to know about this is that the research was done in one way, and so we cannot be certain that the vaccines are as safe or as effective if done on an alternative schedule."
The physician added that vaccines are in some ways a victim of their own success: Most of us have never seen a child die or suffer from a vaccine-prevented illness.
But we"ve had a few recent wake-up calls from the measles outbreak that began in Disneyland last winter, where many victims weren"t immunized against the disease, to our own measles outbreak at a Palatine day care in February, which led the day care chain to require staff working with babies younger than 15 months to be vaccinated.
Ross encouraged those with medical questions to turn to a trusted physician or credible Web sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"If you want acting advice, ask an actress," Ross said. "If you want medical advice, ask a health care professional."
And if you haven"t already done so, it"s not too late to get that flu shot.
Reward yourself afterward with a candy cane.
eleventis@tribpub.com
Twitter @angie_leventis
Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-jenny-mccarthy-candy-cane-anti-vaxxer-met-20151214-story.html
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