I always have a weakness for the gossip blogs, but I have been paying especially close attention for the past couple of days. I have a terrible cold and don't have the mental muscle for reading the latest issue of APSR. I also have been morbidly fascinated with the John Travolta story.
His poor kid was obviously very impaired either by a seizure-related disorder or by autism. Most likely, he had autism. But the Travoltas refused to accept the autism label, because Scientology doesn't accept that it is a legitimate disorder. (I've heard buzz that he wasn't getting any therapy and that they just let the kid play video games all day.)
Right now, people are wondering whether or not Jett could have been saved if he had been given appropriate treatment. I don't feel like heaping any more pain on the Travoltas. I would like the mainstream press really nail that Scientology crap.
UPDATE: More on court decisions regarding religious freedom and parental obligations to care for a child.
Apt. 11d 
A friend has a son with Kawasaki disease, and her whole family has been scared by the whole thing, as if what happened to Jett Travolta could now happen to the kiddo. “The doctors didn’t tell us about this possibility!” my friend’s mother squealed to me the other day.
Admittedly, one should educate oneself in order not to be scared by whatever nonsense is going down in the media, but science-deniers and other crackpots should think about the effects of their wack-ass claims on the general public.
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“I don’t feel like heaping any more pain on the Travoltas. I would like the mainstream press really nail that Scientology crap.”
I don’t there’s any way of critiquing Scientology’s possible role in this without “heaping pain on the Travoltas.”
Speaking of Scientology, have you ever noticed how rapidly Scientologists appear on comment threads whenever the group is mentioned? The group isn’t large enough for it to be just chance. With any luck, there should be a friendly Scientologist popping into this thread any minute now.
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I find it a bit disingenuous to deny the diagnosis and meds yet not acknowledge the extreme financial privilege involved in substituting 24 hour nannies for their son. Most parents of children with autism or other disabilities are struggling just to navigate the health/education system let alone have the choice of round the clock care.
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I’ve read that he was autistic, but that seems to be gossip from family and friends.
Serious and frequent seizures, over an extended period of time, if left untreated, will lead to brain damage, which could lead to behavior bystanders might attribute to autism. In my opinion, if he did have a seizure disorder, to leave it untreated was unconscionable child abuse.
And who knows how many other people have been led into the arms of Scientology by the Travoltas’ example?
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Autism and a seizure disorder aren’t mutually inclusive. About 2-3% of neurotypical children have a seizure disorder, while nearly 30% of children with autism have a seizure disorder.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1783481
Many of the anti-seizure medications have very significant side effects. Even non $cion parents have chosen to discontinue (or take a break from) the meds when side effects are too difficult to manage.
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Autism and a seizure disorder aren’t mutually exclusive, true. However, there are far more neurotypical children than autistic children with epilepsy. If the incidence of epilepsy is roughly 1 in 100, and the incidence of autism is 1 in 150, and 30% of children with autism have a seizure disorder, in a population of 10,000, you would expect to find roughly 67 autistic people, and 100 epileptics. If 30% of the autistic people have epilepsy, that comes to 20 autistic epileptics. Thus, the ratio would be 80 non-autistic epileptics to 20 autistic epileptics, a ratio of 4 to 1.
The boy’s parents haven’t claimed that he was autistic. No doctor who treated the boy has come forward to describe him as autistic, only “gossip magazines and blogs,” according to the Associated Press.
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Kawasaki disease is a vasculitis – a disease causing inflammation of the arteries/veins. It can cause ischemia (lack of blood flow) in whatever tissues the affected vessels were supplying. It is unusual for Kawasaki’s to affect cerebral vasculature (or it might have been termed another form of vasculitis) but it could have happened. Brain damage could have occurred at an early age.
Kawasaki’s most significant effects are usually in the heart, it can cause coronary artery aneurysms and heart attacks. This could also have caused brain damage at an early age, from hypoxia (though more unlikely).
Kawasaki’s also causes extended, severe fever at onset. This could, I suppose, cause brain damage – particularly if denied drug treatment.
So Kawasaki’s could have damaged the poor kid’s brain. Or, he could have just ALSO had a seizure disorder, or mental retardation from other causes, or autism unrelated to anything else.
I don’t know, was the kid’s behavior stereotypical of autism, was the age and rate of onset of symptoms consistent with autism? If not, the speculations of autism might all be incorrect, and the poor guy just had other disorders in addition to childhood Kawasaki’s.
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I think that, if Travolta and Preston had not been scientologists, their decision to stay silent about their son’s confirmed disabilities (Anne Archer for example described Jett as “severely mentally disabled” in People’s cover story) might not have attracted the level of gossip it has. Preston’s insistence, in particular, that “he had/has Kawasaki’s disease” was an adequate explanation for her son’s disabilities drove me crazy. But then, we’ve got Jenny McCarthy swearing that detox cures autism. I try to ignore Hollywood parenting precisely because I can’t actually demand that actors explain their private decisions, and because those decisions so often seem insane.
Sometimes it is very hard to ignore, though.
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Hindsight is 20/20. I don’t know what the diagnosis was for this young man. What is evident is that his parents loved him and gave him the best care they knew how. I think we should leave them alone. Their grief has to be overwhelming enough without everybody and their brother second guessing them. My heart goes out to them.
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people its not kawasaki its kowasaki there is a differense kowasaki is a heart problem
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