Hygiene hypothesis: difference in autoimmune diseases in Russia, Finland (2012)

Having an (informed) opinion about something I have wrestled with a long time somehow makes me automagically wrong or bad or something? Why is that?

My point is that if "harmful chemical use" is down (even if only a little) over the last 50-70 years, then it seems unlikely said chemicals are the cause of an epidemic that appeared only a few decades ago and has been growing ever since. If they were the cause, you would expect the epidemic to start even earlier, and you certainly wouldn't expect the epidemic to grow as the chemical decreases.

A great many chemicals do not simply get rapidly dumped by the body once you stop being exposed. For some things, once you are exposed, you are toxic for the rest of your life unless something is done about it and doctors do not know a good way to fix it. So reducing exposure will not magically fix anything. Some things accumulate in the tissues over time. And some of those chemicals are out there in the general environment and people are still being exposed to them, even though they are no longer being used.

It is also well established fact that exposing a pregnant woman to certain things has a much bigger impact on the developing fetus than it would on an adult. That is hardly wild, random speculation on my part.

A more dramatic example: imagine blaming the recent increase in autism diagnoses on alcohol. It's not entirely impossible, but it is suspicious. Alcohol has been around for millennium; if it is the cause, why is this only happening now?

Yeah, that’s really funny since both my sons are autistic. I participated for a time on a list where one of the things being done to help autistic kids was chelation – ie removal of metals from the body. According to a PHD chemist (and published author) who was an active participant on the list, about 75% of autistic kids benefit from chelation. Metals are one of those known toxic chemicals that, for thousands of years, most ordinary people had relatively little exposure to but which are simply everywhere now. They are, logically, possibly very much a part of the problem here.

Once metals get into the tissues, the body does not automatically dump them. They tend to stay there for life, having toxic impacts on the immune function and brain function unless you carefully follow some very specific protocols to try to effectively remove them. Most medical doctors don’t know much about metals removal. It’s the alternative med community, where a PHD chemist did the math to work out the half-life of various chelators and also work out which chelators work for which metals, which has reasonably reliable answers on this topic. Of course, saying that is something that opens one up to automatic dismissal by a lot of folks who think the answers they know from peer reviewed journals (or whatever) are the only ones with any validity.

I'm not saying this is proof of anything, but it calls your theory into question and I was curious if you had an explanation rather than simply saying "What you say doesn't agree with what I think so you must be wrong"

If you were genuinely curious as to what I think, you could have indicated that much, much earlier instead of positioning yourself as merely shooting me down.