by Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mercola:
Story at-a-glance
- Autism needs to be approached as a system; systems biology looks at everything in biology as a web where everything is connected. When you tug at one part of the web, the rest of the web changes
- Dr. Martha Herbert believes autism develops in response to environmental factors that irritate and excite the brain, such as toxic exposures, allergens and electromagnetic fields
- Autism can be predicted by looking at the level of brain irritability in the child. Mercury, EMF, glyphosate, vaccine adjuvants and processed foods are all contributing factors
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- The neural network disturbance found in the brain of autistic children has been shown to be proportional to the amount of mitochondrial dysfunction they have; in other words, autism is an outgrowth of mitochondrial stress and dysfunction
- De novo (new) gene mutations can result when sperm is exposed to wireless radiation. Men desiring healthy children should avoid carrying their cellphone in their pants pocket
Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published May 28, 2023.
This interview was recorded in November 2018 at the annual Academy for Comprehensive and Integrative Medicine (ACIM) convention in Orlando, Florida, but it was only last year that it ran on the site. At the time there was concern that the topic was too controversial, but now that six years have passed and COVID changed the controversial landscape, we thought it would be good to release the video on this important topic.
I had the opportunity to interview two experts on autism and dirty electricity, Peter Sullivan and Dr. Martha Herbert, who cowrote “The Autism Revolution: Whole-Body Strategies for Making Life All It Can Be.”1 Here, we discuss some of the toxic factors that contribute to the development of autism, especially the role of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) and dirty electricity.
Sullivan’s Journey
Sullivan has struggled with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and still does to some degree, which was his primary motivation for learning more about it. He’s become a fount of knowledge as a result. As a software engineer in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, he was passionate about personal technology.
“I studied in Stanford. I did all kinds of human-computer interactions. I worked at multiple companies: as a troubleshooter in Silicon Valley, an engineer and a software designer at the very end. I worked at Netflix and some other companies people would know of,” he says.
In the early 2000s, problems began to take root. Fatigue and food allergies cropped up, and his children were struggling with developmental delays. He eventually realized he had toxic levels of mercury in his system.
“I eventually just took time off from work, in about 2005. I just said it’s ridiculous, with all these things going on, to have two people in the family working. I was focusing on my kids’ health and my health and really had some time and energy to really go deep and find out what was really out there.
I had a great doctor, Dr. Raj Patel … an integrative medical doctor who would talk about Candida overgrowth, mercury and all that stuff. He got us on track. Eventually, the kids slowly got better, but even after detoxing, I did not. I kept getting worse.
I got down to 131 pounds. I became electrically sensitive. My brain kept telling me, ‘All the stuff is safe and well-tested. I love technology.’ But my body was reacting like there was something really wrong. I was catching myself just throwing a cellphone away — feeling cellphones and then transformers when I plugged them in.”
He eventually learned about dirty electricity, and once he started addressing his exposure, he regained 10 pounds in a couple of months, along with his health. Today, he’s passionate about sharing information about the dangers of EMFs and dirty electricity, and how to address electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
“We’re just trying to share the information, make the field credible, because it’s very credible, and make sure people don’t have to suffer,” he says.
He even created an EMF-free tent that he brings with him to different seminars and conferences that people can sit in, as many of these events are held in places where you’re exposed to very high amounts of EMF. He’s also funded some of Herbert’s research.
Herbert’s Story
I first met Herbert at a Cure Autism Now event (now Autism Speaks) in 2009. Herbert’s two children struggled with symptoms of autism when they were young. Today, they’re both grown and have fully recovered. Her initial focus was on mercury toxicity, looking at ways of doing noninvasive screening for toxic metals.
A lifelong environmentalist, Herbert went to medical school after getting a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She studied pediatric neurology, and fell into working with autism after inheriting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from the first MRI study performed on autistic children in 1989.
“I was one of the first people — but not the only one — to identify white matter abnormalities in autism through brain imaging, not through gray tissue,” Herbert says. “That really violated the paradigm that behavior comes from the cortex. I was already kind of a whole-body person. I was seeing patients.
[Few of them] had these rare neurogenetic diseases that you’re trained for in pediatric neurology. But everybody was coming in with diarrhea and eczema, and they couldn’t sleep. It was almost like primary care in neuropsychiatry. That’s where I sort of edged my way into the whole-body approach.
I had an epiphany in 1999 … that all the stuff I was seeing in my patients really could connect with the environment … I started putting together and figuring out that this was really a systems [biology] approach to these conditions.”
