NO MAP TO THIS COUNTRY

Nonfiction

Lonely struggle

NO MAP TO THIS COUNTRY:
One Family’s Journey through Autism
By Jennifer Noonan
316 pp. Da Capo

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M. D.

This is a book by a mother who had the misfortune of birthing two children with autism. She battled mightily to help her children, often alone. Where was her husband? She struggles against ignorant health professionals, be they MDs, dieticians, nurses, or social workers. Neurologists seem to occupy a special place in hell for her. 

Surprisingly, she is easy on Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who profited from the hoax about vaccines as a cause of autism and who was the direct cause of many unnecessary cases of measles (the most contagious disease in the world), mumps, and rubella. His papers were expunged from The Lancet and his medical license revoked. Ireland alone had 1500 cases of measles and two deaths because of his bogus studies.

Noonan found that a diet free of casein (dairy) and then of gluten helped her son Paul’s behavior, and she spent huge amounts of time processing quantities of ground chicken, butternut squash and zucchini. Eventually she surrounds herself with like-minded mothers, web sites, special education teachers and health professionals who guide her along more productive avenues. But she continues to struggle against insurance companies, mothers who ask her advice and then don’t take it, and against bullies in her son’s classroom.

At one point she decides to become a nurse practitioner so she can work in the field, but one semester short of her degree she just drops out. Besides she concludes, “I don’t like people that much.” Her writing is undisciplined, to say the least. A one-hundred and ninety-three-word paragraph about trials for treatment in autism could be summarized in eighteen words as the results of controlled trials will result in changes in the treatment of autism twenty years from now. There is a sleek 150-page book inside No Map to This Country screaming to get out.

The author acts as though we don’t know where autism comes from, although she mentions fertility drugs and C-sections as causes, but we do know. It isn’t vaccines.  Autism is hereditary, and also it comes from old mothers and especially from old fathers. It is more common in diabetics. We badly need a prenatal test for it.

There are many better places to get information to get about autism than this book.