Bernie Rimland, rest in peace

While I was home visiting my mom, she gave me a clipping she'd saved for me -- saved and managed to transport with her to the hospital and from there to her nursing home.

The clipping was a news item saying that Bernie Rimland has died.

I loved Bernie.

We were on different tracks, but it didn't matter. Though we saw eye to eye on behaviorism (both pro), he was a vitamin and supplements guy while I was pharmaceuticals and the NIH -- the guys in white coats as I think Bernie used to call them.

Bernie scorned the men in white coats!

I only had to get to know him a bit to see his brilliance; Bernie was probably the first Bayesian genius I ever met. After knowing him for a time I adopted a rule of thumb that anything Bernie believed in, no matter how much disdain it elicited from his foes in mainstream medicine, stood an excellent chance of being true in some fashion. He was way smart and, like a lot of parents of autistic people, marched to the beat of a different drummer.

Bernie once told me that when his son Mark was a baby, he would scream at the sight of his mother wearing anything but one particular housedress printed in one particular pattern. So Mrs. Rimland wore that same dress day-in and day-out.

Bernie also told me he cured his daughter of cancer using megavitamin therapy.^* I don't put it past him. If anyone could cure his child of cancer using megavitamins, it was Bernie.

Bernie was a kind and good man. His son Mark grew up to become an artist, and Bernie printed up his paintings on notecards and sold them to raise money for his Autism Research Institute. These days you get Mark's notecards as a gift when you make a donation.

Bernie never cured autism, though it's entirely possible he helped some autistic children emerge.

But he probably saved lives back in the day when Bruno Bettelheim was telling mothers they had made their children the way they were. I once talked to a woman who had her children in that era. She was so grief-stricken over the certain knowledge that she had caused her child's autism that for years she never drove a car with her children inside. She was chronically suicidal, and if one day the impulse to drive her car into a tree or a wall overwhelmed her she didn't want her children to die, too.

Dr Rimland, who was 78, "will go down in history as the person who ended the 'dark ages' of autism and spearheaded the fight to bring hope and help to autistic children," said Dr Stephen M. Edelson, his successor at the Autism Research Institute founded by Dr Rimland.

Dr Rimland began researching autism after his son, Mark, was diagnosed with the disorder. The result was the landmark book, "Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behaviour."

After marshalling extensive evidence and argument that showed the disorder had a biological basis, Dr Rimland wrote: "To add a heavy burden of shame and guilt to the distress of people whose hopes, social life, finances, well-being and feelings of worth have been all but destroyed seems heartless and inconsiderate in the extreme."

In recent years, Dr Rimland helped to introduce medical treatments for autism that some parents say have significantly improved, or even cured, their child's condition.

Mainstream medical groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics reject such approaches and say there is no evidence they are effective.

Dr Rimland attributed the rise of autism diagnoses in the 1980s and 1990s to increasing use of vaccines - another idea embraced by some parents and a minority of researchers but rejected by public-health officials.

Dr Rimland was also one of the founders of the National Society for Autistic Children (NSAC), now known as the Autism Society of America (ASA).

He will be missed.


^{* I hope I remember the story right. Can't find it on Google, so take it with a grain of salt.}