I think if I had read all this stuff about mercury etc before or during my pregnancy, i would have gone stark staring mad.
The upshot is - most of it is unavoidable! Whether rightly or wrongly, i spent most of my pregnancy worrying about all the things that can go wrong (too much knowledge - how on earth do mdwives cope?. I refused all prenatal tests on the grounds that the risk from the test was higher than my risk of the conditions that were testable.
I suppose one of the points Im trying to get across is - if we get too uptight about some of these things, we spend too much time worrying - even that is supposed to harm the developing foetus.
One of the hardest things when working with some families with SN kids is trying to convince the parents, and mother especially, that its NOT THEIR FAULT. How can I do that if even having a filling in their mouth or a lightbulb in their house could be causing damage?
its like the alcohol in pregnancy thing - apparently we dont know how much can cause damage - but all the kids Ive met with FAS have had heavily alcoholic mothers. And we dont blame them either!
I dont know. I think this stuff is interesting, but it comes back to a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If it eventually brings about a cure or way of preventing a condition, then great. If it sends ordinary families on lifetime searches for the answer to all their problems, using up their money and their lives in the process, then I prefer not to know.
It was bad enough when I used to watch families tearing themselves apart in order to take their kids to the Peto Institute, mother and child in one country, frequently partner and sibs left here for months at a time. The therapist who introduced Peto to this country actually said that she did not intend the knowledge to be used that way, ie breaking up families - she wanted professionals here to know about it so we could use the techniques. But it was never good enough - even though I told parents that I had trained in conductive ed here, because I hadnt done it in Hungary, or wasnt a real Hungarian conductor, to them it wouldnt work.
Talk about going off on a tangent.
I am also concerned about the Hyperbaric O2 bit. Apparently it cures everything - its also unproven, and has a lot of side effects, particularly to the developing eye. I knew a couple of people who tried it and saw no real difference.