Minor Thoughts from me to you

The Capital Times published an article on the shortage of child day care in Dane County. It's not until the 11th paragraph that they finally reveal that the state government is to blame.

The primary reason it's so hard to find care for infants is because of a state mandated caregiver-child ratio that requires one provider for every four babies or toddlers under age 2. Ratios increase according to the age of the child. For example, the ratio is 1 caregiver for every 13 children for 4- and 5-year-olds. So, the staffing costs for infants can be more than triple what they are for older children.

Most child care centers don't offer infant care, in part because of financial reasons. "Not to sound cold, but they don't make money on infants because the ratio is so small," says Jody Bartnick, the executive director of Community Coordinated Child Care, a children's advocacy organization commonly referred to as 4-C. Stricter regulations add costs, she said. Infant rooms require their own sink, their own refrigerator and other equipment.

And when those costs are passed on to consumers, they are significant for most household budgets.

4-C numbers show that the average weekly cost of infant care in Dane County as of March 2008 was $245 in a family child care center and $275 at a group center. For preschool care, the number drops to about $220 at both types of centers. At those rates, child care can cost between $11,000 and $14,000 a year -- compared with about $7,300 for in-state tuition at UW-Madison.

In the name of making day care safer, they've actually made day care nearly impossible to get. And, when you can get it, it's astronomically expensive. For an area that prides itself on its progressivism, this sounds pretty regressive to me.

Of course, they'll redeem themselves by attempting to raise my taxes so they can turn around and subsidize child care for someone else. The obvious solution -- deregulate the market -- would never occur to them.

You're doing a heckuva job, Jimmy Doyle.

Scene Stealer - The Web Is Pouncing on Hollywood's Ratings - NYTimes.com

The standard Hollywood ratings -- G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 -- must now compete with all manner of Internet-based ratings alternatives, some of which are gaining new traction through social networking tools.

SceneSmoking.org, which monitors tobacco use in movies, issues pink, light gray, dark gray or black lungs to films, depending on how smoking is depicted. Kids-in-Mind.com ranks movies on a scale of 1 to 10 in categories like "sex and nudity" and "violence and gore."

Movieguide.org issues ratings from a Christian perspective. A "+4," or "exemplary," means "no questionable elements whatsoever." A "-4," or "abhorrent," means "intentional blasphemy, evil, gross immorality."

The article goes on to talk about how people want to "fix" the MPAA ratings, according to various pet standards.

Why?

It seems like something great is happening. People that are passionate about different things -- and have different standards of acceptability -- are creating and disseminating their own ratings. Parents, or discriminating movie goers, who care about particular standards can use the ratings from a group that shares those same standards. There's absolutely, positively no way that Hollywood -- or the FTC -- can create a single rating system that represents all of those different standards.

There's a simple reason for that. One group of parents believes that nudity and coarse language is a natural and normal part of life. They believe that sex and nudity should be celebrated while their children should be protected from exposure to violence and aggression. There are other parents who would be horrified at the thought of their children seeing some bare skin but are perfectly okay with their children seeing movies that depict massive amounts of violence. Now, design me a PG-13 or R rating that makes both groups of parents happy.

I celebrate the diversity in ratings. I may even use one standard to evaluate which movies my children will be allowed to see and a completely different standard to evaluate which movies I'll see. Vive la difference!

You want an easy way to make me angry? Threaten my kids. You want an easy way to make me really angry? Assume that every parent is a bad parent and then threaten my kids because you can't be bothered to figure out which type of parent I am. This story from "Great" Britain makes me furious.

A couple forced to give up three children for adoption despite a judge ruling they may have been wrongly accused of abuse yesterday vowed to take their legal fight to Europe.

Mark and Nicky Webster said they will never give up the battle to win back their daughter and two sons after the Appeal Court ruled this week that it was 'too late' for the family to be reunited.

The couple's nightmare started in October 2003 when Mrs Webster took their second son to hospital with a swollen leg. He was found to have a number of small fractures which doctors said could be caused only by physical abuse. The following year they were permanently removed and put up for adoption after a one-day court hearing.

Medical experts later concluded that the injuries were not caused by violent twisting and shaking, but were symptoms of rare case of scurvy. Mr Webster, 35, and his 27-year-old wife fled to Ireland in 2006 to stop their fourth child, Brandon, being taken into care at birth.

The Appeal Court ruled on Wednesday that even though the Websters 'may well' have been victims of a miscarriage of justice the adoption order on their eldest three children could not be revoked because the youngsters are now settled with their adoptive parents.

The couple have not seen the children, now aged nine, seven and five, since they were put up for adoption four years ago.

You want a model of unjust government? It's right there. Right there in one story. Screw up the investigation, take the kids, then refuse to let the parents have their kids.

I'm not honestly not sure how I would react in their situation. Let's just say: "not well". Stories like these are why I hate the very idea of Child Protective Services and other similar government agencies. There is no justification for this behavior.

My heart -- and prayers -- go out to Mr. and Mrs. Webster.

This story just breaks my heart. A 7-year old girl who was so neglected that she became a "feral child" -- completely unable to relate to other people, process emotions, or relate to the world.

"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces -- dog, cat and human excrement -- smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked -- except for a swollen diaper.

"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

The authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.

The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts -- some fictional, some true -- of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."

The importance of nurturing has been shown again and again. In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow put groups of infant rhesus monkeys in a room with two artificial mothers. One, made of wire, dispensed food. The other, of terrycloth, extended cradled arms. Though they were starving, the baby monkeys all climbed into the warm cloth arms.

"Primates need comfort even more than they need food," Armstrong said.

Thankfully she was found by a great set of adoptive parents who are doing everything they can to love her and help her. As I read the story I wanted so hard to find a villain. Somebody that I could hate for doing this to a child. But it's hard to really blame the mother.

A judge ordered Michelle [Danielle's mother] to have a psychological evaluation. That's among the documents, too.

Danielle's IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating "severe mental retardation." Michelle's is 77, "borderline range of intellectual ability."

"She tended to blame her difficulties on circumstances while rationalizing her own actions," wrote psychologist Richard Enrico Spana. She "is more concerned with herself than most other adults, and this could lead her to neglect paying adequate attention to people around her."

If there's any villain here, I think it's humanity. We rebelled against God and decided that we wanted to do everything ourselves. We wanted to know both good and evil. We wanted to make our own decisions about right and wrong. We wanted to rule the universe and we wanted God to get out of our way. This is the end result. This is what our sin looks like. Is it fun yet?

It used to be that a person had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now? The government snoops on you through your children. Woe be to the person that does anything the government finds questionable.

I found this out after my 13-year-old daughter's annual checkup. Her pediatrician grilled her about alcohol and drug abuse.

Not my daughter's boozing. Mine.

"The doctor wanted to know how much you and mom drink, and if I think it's too much," my daughter told us afterward, rolling her eyes in that exasperated 13-year-old way. "She asked if you two did drugs, or if there are drugs in the house."

I turned to my wife. "You took her to the doctor. Why didn't you say something?"

She couldn't, she told me, because she knew nothing about it. All these questions were asked in private, without my wife's knowledge or consent.

"The doctor wanted to know how we get along," my daughter continued. Then she paused. "And if, well, Daddy, if you made me feel uncomfortable."

Great. I send my daughter to the pediatrician to find out if she's fit to play lacrosse, and the doctor spends her time trying to find out if her mom and I are drunk, drug-addicted sex criminals.

That's just disturbing, on so many levels. I absolutely hate the idea that the government would automatically consider me to be a danger to my children and would snoop behind my back looking for any evidence to convict me and take them away from me.

It gets worse.

We're not alone, either. Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad's "bad" behavior.

The paranoia over parents is so strong that the AAP encourages doctors to ignore "legal barriers and deference to parental involvement" and shake the children down for all the inside information they can get.

And that information doesn't stay with the doctor, either.

Debbie is a mom from Uxbridge who was in the examination room when the pediatrician asked her 5-year-old, "Does Daddy own a gun?"

When the little girl said yes, the doctor began grilling her and her mom about the number and type of guns, how they are stored, etc.

If the incident had ended there, it would have merely been annoying.

But when a friend in law enforcement let Debbie know that her doctor had filed a report with the police about her family's (entirely legal) gun ownership, she got mad.

Ya think? These doctors are state officials are turning lawful actions into near crimes. What gives them the authority to do that?

And people wonder why I have such a strong dislike for doctors. Maybe it's because so many of them think that it's their God-given right to be interfering, know-it-all, tin-pot dictators in charge of making sure society is healthy and pure.

Hardly.

This story (Ban Sought on Cold Medicine for Very Young - New York Times) made my pharmacist wife shake her head.

It seems more than a little overkill to ban an entire class of medicines just because a few doctors start jumping up and down and yelling "There's no proof that it works! No proof!"

And look at the number of children supposedly killed by these medicines in a 37 year period: 123. That's about 3.3 children per year. Far, far more than that are killed via accidents every year (such as parents backing over kiddies with the SUV) than by baby dimetap. Some perspective might be in order here.

Various teaching methods intrigue me. What makes a good teacher or a bad teacher? What makes a kid learn or sleep through class? How can we best prepare the next generation to face an increasingly complex world?

I tend to largely agree with Alex Tabarrok: Heroes are not Replicable.

You know the plot. Young, idealistic teacher goes to inner-city high school. Said idealistic teacher is shocked by students who don't know the basics and who are too preoccupied with the burdens of violence, poverty and indifference to want to learn. But the hero perseveres and at great personal sacrifice wins over the students using innovative teaching methods and heart. The kids go on to win the state spelling/chess/mathematics championship. c.f. Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds etc.

We are supposed to be uplifted by these stories but they depress me. If it takes a hero to save an inner city school then there is no hope. Heroes are not replicable.

He talks about an instruction method called "Direct Instruction" (overview from the Washington Times or a slightly more technical overview) that was tested in a research study from 1967 through 1995. The study cost $1 billion and involved more than 20,000 students. It was judged to be a huge success, more so than any other method studied. The other methods are popular ones in use today, including the Learning Center Model, Open Education Model, and Self Esteem model. DI trounced all of them.

There's a catch though. DI involved giving teachers a script and having them follow it. Apparently, teachers don't take kindly to the suggestion that they'd do better following a script than they would following their own initiative. So, nothing much has come of DI yet.

What I found more interesting, however, was the comment section at Marginal Revolution. I saw three broad themes: 1) you should fire all of the econ profs at GMU and teach economics this way, 2) how boring: rote instruction from a script, 3) I did a scripted training class at work and it was worthless.

I find #1 and #3 interesting, because the entire method is about teaching young children. Why anyone would think that that automatically applies to teaching adults is beyond me. I'm intrigued by the idea of DI, but I'd need a lot of convincing to use it as a method for college or corporate instruction.

I find #2 interesting because the more technical overview specifically states:

In poorly designed phonics programs, young children are expected to sit through hours of dull repetition. This is unfortunate, since it is possible to turn drill into a highly engaging, exciting group activity through the use of Direct Instruction.

It appears that most of the commentors didn't really read through the material -- either that or they reject the entire idea without even seeing what the scripts look like. Neither option speaks well of their intelligence.

Given how utterly failed most of America's big-city public schools are, I think a switch to DI could hardly make things worse. Isn't it worth a shot?

UPDATE: In fact, the reaction in the Marginal Revolution comments section reminds me of this post from Scott Adams and The Dilbert Blog. Might these commentors be suffering from cognitive dissonance?

I've discussed before how toy companies are using "safety" as an excuse to pile more and more regulations on top of their competitors. Mattel has been blaming China for a recent spate of recalls and using the accusations as leverage to push for more safety regulations.

Turns out, China wasn't to blame.

Mattel Inc. made a public apology to China for damage to the country's reputation stemming from a spate of toy recalls. It was an extraordinary attempt to placate Mattel's most important supplier, but it is likely to shift the spotlight to the company's own responsibility in the crisis.

In its apology, the world's largest toy maker said its own "design flaw" was responsible for the biggest recall by far, involving around 18 million playsets studded with potentially dangerous magnets.

Oops. I'm guessing that regulation wouldn't have done much to catch Mattel's design flaws. Maybe we don't actually need regulation after all.

Toy manufacturers want to regulate toys coming into the United States, looking for dangerous materials like lead paint. But what's the real cause of dangerous toys?

Design flaws, not Chinese manufacturing problems, are the cause of the vast majority of American toy recalls over the last two decades, according to a new study by two Canadian professors.

The study, which looked at toy-recall data going back to 1988, showed that some 76 percent of the recalls in that period involved design flaws that could result in hazards like choking or swallowing small parts, while 10 percent were caused by manufacturing flaws, like excessive levels of lead paint.

The study, written by Hari Bapuji, a professor at the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba and Paul W. Beamish, from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, suggests that while China's manufacturing troubles were a serious problem, toy companies needed to take more responsibility for the growing number of recalls.

"I'm not saying there is no problem with Chinese manufacturing," Professor Bapuji said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I'm just saying there is a bigger problem with designs."

Sounds like regulation wouldn't help nearly as much as the big companies want you to think it would. But it would still hurt their competitors plenty.

Needless to say, I'm still opposed to the idea.

Mattel, Hasbro, and Lego have figured out how to use the government to hurt their competitors. They'll ask for more government regulation.

Acknowledging a growing crisis of public confidence caused by a series of recent recalls, the nation's largest toy makers have taken the unusual step of asking the federal government to impose mandatory safety-testing standards for all toys sold in the United States.

The toy manufacturers, of course, claim that they're only doing this in the interests of public safety and in reassuring the public before the Christmas shopping season. Of course, they're might be another reason.

Instead, companies would be required to hire independent laboratories to check a certain portion of their toys, whether made in the United States or overseas. Leading toy companies already do such testing, but industry officials acknowledge that it has not been enough.

... Small companies that currently do little or no testing would be required to pay for testing as well.

So, the large companies already do testing. Recent events have proven that testing isn't always enough to catch dangerous toys. No matter. They'll use the cover of recent events to force their smaller competitors to pay for testing as well. This won't necessarily do anything to improve the safety of toys, but it will do a lot to raise the manufacturing costs (and retail prices) of toys from their competitors.

How clever.

You know, if Mattel, Hasbro, and Lego believe in stronger testing, they could start doing it all by themselves, without the force of the federal government behind them. They could then run an intensive ad campaign talking about their new testing system and what they're doing to make their toys safe for children. This would accomplish their stated goals, they wouldn't have to wait for the government to act, and they could probably increase sales as well.

But it wouldn't hurt their smaller competitors like government regulation would. So, they won't do it. Government regulation -- it's just another way to say "legal mugging".

A Toast to Mom and Dad -- The family that wines together, shines together.

Observant Jews, for example, traditionally serve children small glasses of wine during Friday night Sabbath ceremonies. Other cultures also begin socializing children into drinking at an early age--including Mediterranean societies such as Italy, Greece and Turkey (and non-Mediterranean societies such as China).

As for the second, two international surveys--one conducted by the World Health Organization--revealed that these Mediterranean countries and Israel had the lowest binge drinking rates among European adolescents.

Several studies have shown that the younger kids are when they start to drink, the more likely they are to develop severe drinking problems. But the kind of drinking these studies mean--drinking in the woods to get bombed or at unattended homes--is particularly high risk.

Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2004 found that adolescents whose parents permitted them to attend unchaperoned parties where drinking occurred had twice the average binge-drinking rate. But the study also had another, more arresting conclusion: Children whose parents introduced drinking to the children at home were one-third as likely to binge.

Babies not as innocent as they pretend | Science | Earth | Telegraph

Dr Reddy said: "Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing is wrong. You can tell, as they will then pause while they wait to hear if their mother is responding, before crying again.

I'm pretty sure I've already caught Esther doing this. She's only 19 weeks, but she's smart. Devious too, apparently. Now I have proof that it wasn't just my imagination.

I'll have to keep an eye on this one...

Psycologist Robert Epstein doesn't like adolescence.

Psychologist Robert Epstein argues in a provocative book, "The Case Against Adolescence," that teens are far more competent than we assume, and most of their problems stem from restrictions placed on them.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years"”except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.

Imagine what it would feel like--or think back to what it felt like--when your body and mind are telling you you're an adult while the adults around you keep insisting you're a child. This infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed, with their distress carrying over into their families and contributing to our high divorce rate. It's hard to keep a marriage together when there is constant conflict with teens.

We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other "children." In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence. But we not only created this stage of life: We declared it inevitable. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall said it was programmed by evolution. He was wrong.

He has me convinced. My own experiences reflect this. My parents homeschooled me. By my early teen years, I was ready to get out of the house and start doing more. A mutual friend taught me about relational databases, then offered me a job working for his web startup company. I remember being totally astonished that I had to get permission from City Hall (literally), in order to work at age 15. (Actually, I couldn't work at age 15. I had to wait until I was officially 15½.)

Even at such a young age that policy angered me -- I wanted to work, I wanted to do more, and my parents were supportive of that. The state, however, assumed that I was incompetent and that my parents were exploitative. Thankfully, the waiver was easy to obtain. But it shouldn't even be necessary any longer. Factories no longer thrive on grunt labor. American factories require workers with lots of skill and expertise. Our economy is fundamentally different than it was in 1900. Repealing the overly restrictive child-labor laws would not lead to an increase in child labor -- except in those situations where young adults are hungry for a chance to work.

Ironically, because minors have only limited property rights, they don't have complete control over what they have bought. Think how bizarre that is. If you, as an adult, spend money and bring home a toy, it's your toy and no one can take it away from you. But with a 14-year-old, it's not really his or her toy. Young people can't own things, can't sign contracts, and they can't do anything meaningful without parental permission"”permission that can be withdrawn at any time. They can't marry, can't have sex, can't legally drink. The list goes on. They are restricted and infantilized to an extraordinary extent.

I was also frustrated, as a teenager, by the banking restrictions. I learned to manage my money at a young age. I'm fairly certain that my parents opened my first account when I was 13. Again, I was surprised to find that I wasn't allowed to have my own bank account (my parents were co-signers on the account) or credit card until age 18. I was reasonably mature, I was capable of handling my finances, and I didn't understand why the State insisted on treating me as a child.

If my daughter matures as quickly as my wife and I did, I intend to do everything I possibly can to help her skirt these ridiculous laws and regulations. I'll help her open a bank account, I'll help her get work permits, I'll probably even put her on my credit account -- there's no sense in treating her like a child if she acts like an adult.

From What special-ed cut means:

Several speech and language clinicians predicted some of the projected savings won't materialize.

Testing of children diagnosed with only speech and language disabilities will intensify, they said, in search of additional diagnoses -- such as learning disabilities, or emotional behavioral disabilities -- that would cement the need for a special education teacher's involvement.

"I have no doubt that additional labels will appear if you look hard enough," said Johnson [a speech and language clinician], who acknowledged that the current system made it more expedient to simply call upon the special education teacher without going through the process of amending a student's individual education plan.

If you subject children to enough tests and examinations, I'm sure you can manage to find something wrong with every one of them. That allows you to easily justify spending millions of dollars on special education teachers, thus preserving valuable teacher jobs and leaving no teacher behind.

It's no surprise that the head of the local teachers' union said the move appears to shortchange vulnerable students and subject the pared-down special education staff to burnout. It will also result in immense hardship for the 45 teachers and assistants that may have to find other work. But never, ever mention that. Keep all of the focus on the children and you may yet preserve your jobs.

According to radical environmentalists, putting diapers on your baby is a great way to ruin the earth before your grandchildren arrive. Here they are, in their own words:

"There is a way to have a baby and NOT use diapers."

"When David was born, I started to think about the kind of world I was making for him to grow up in. The thought of garbage spewing and sprawling landfills filled me with horror. And right along with this horror were those little mother's helpers, disposable diapers...rotting, but never really going away in all their plastic glory. ... [M]any of us have not, until recent years, given credit to the mothering skills of more Earth-centered, i.e. 'primitive" cultures." -- Natec

"In my mind, diapers became the symbol of the Evil Empire of Western Parenting in which babies must suffer to accommodate the needs of their parents' broken-continuum culture: a controlled, sterile, odorless, wall-to-wall carpeted fortress in which to live with the illusion of dominion over nature. ... How I longed for a simple, dirt-floored, baby-friendly hut like that of a Yequana family." -- Scott Noelle

"Observation and close bonding interaction help the parent to understand the baby's signals, body language and timing rhythms. Some common signals that indicate a need to pee in a young infant are: squirming, 'fussing,' tensing the face, frowning or having a look of 'inner concentration'. When the baby has to go, the parent holds him or her in a comfortable position over an appropriate toilet place and makes a cueing sound (perhaps a gentle "sss"). [Parents out shopping] may rely on using public bathrooms, or bring along a container such as a tight -lidded bucket. This gentle and ancient practice is the most common way of caring for a baby's hygiene needs in the non-Western world." -- Ingrid Bauer

Diaper-less babies -- because diapers are more dangerous than the plagues, diseases, and sicknesses endemic in pre-diaper societies. Hygiene is, apparently, overrated and the earth is underrated.

It's starting to look like the best method may be to let them play in the dirt, stick all sorts of things in their mouths, and, generally, be exposed to everything.

From the linked article:

Here's the new wisdom: Early exposure to pets, peanuts and intestinal worms might actually be good for you, because they program the developing immune system to know the difference between real threats, such as germs, and Aunt Millie's cat.

"When you're born, Day Zero, your immune system is like a new computer. It's not programmed. You have to add software," says Joel Weinstock of Tufts New England Medical Center. "Between the ages of zero and 12, you're learning to read, you're learning to write, and your immune system is learning to react to things. Part of that is learning to limit reactivity."

Although trying to link allergies to autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's might seem like a stretch, scientists say both types of ailments result from an immune system run amok. In allergies, the immune system goes on alert when ragweed or some other allergy-causing protein wafts through the air, settles on the skin or tickles the tongue. In autoimmune diseases, the immune system can no longer distinguish between the self and foreign proteins. Mistaking the self for those proteins, the immune system attacks the bowel in Crohn's disease or insulin-producing cells in Type 1 diabetes.

Weinstock, Elliott and other researchers believe that a low-grade infection with intestinal worms "” pig whipworms because they can't reproduce in people "” can restore the immune system's natural balance. A small-scale study in which 29 people with Crohn's disease drank whipworm eggs in Gatorade found that 23 responded to treatment and 21 of the 23 experienced complete remission.