Final Thoughts for 2019
2019 is on its final hours. Here’s your chance to make a difference for 2019. One last blast of positive action which will change lives. Please write your senator and representative to shut down cattle prod punishments of autistic patients. It will take 10 minutes to write a short email. Every voice absolutely matters.
The one and only place in the ENTIRE UNITED STATES which is still using taser-like electrical shocks for punishment is located in Canton, Massachusetts. The FDA had vowed to ban this practice by the end of 2019, but when FDA Chief Scott Gottlieb resigned in March 2019, suddenly all momentum on that was lost. I can’t find a single mention of the progress on this issue since March.
It’s been wholly forgotten.
In the meantime, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Massachusetts continues to use electrical shocks to punish its patients.
Note we are not talking about “electroshock therapy”. This is not a person being laid down on a table and carefully, medically exposed to electricity to ‘normalize’ their brain waves.
What we are talking about are the patients being strapped into backpacks against their wills. That patient wears the backpack all day long. If the patient says or does something the doctor doesn’t like, the doctor pushes a button. The patient is zapped for TWO FULL SECONDS with painful electricity to get them to stop. This goes on all day long.
No other location in the entire US does this. The Canton location is the only place which feels the need to repeatedly zap their patients. Every other facility in the US has found other techniques which work far better than painfully zapping their patients.
And if this “really worked”, the patients would have long since been weaned off the backpacks, as the training did its job. But the patients are still wearing the backpacks. Clearly this isn’t creating changes in behavior long term.
Please, please, please, write your senator and representative. Have them pressure the FDA to fulfill their promise to shut down the use of these backpacks. Here’s how to do this.
It will take ten minutes tops. Ten minutes to save autistic patients from daily painful experiences.
Pink rose image sourced from Pixabay / user silviarita