Solidarity HealthShare’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. John Oertle joins The BS Show to discuss autism awareness and the changing medical landscape in recent years. Read the transcript or listen below.
Bob Sansevere (00:00):
We are joined by Dr. John Oertle, the co-founder and chief medical officer for Solidarity HealthShare at solidarityhealthshare.org. Doctor, I want to talk to you something that’s been in the news lately, and actually it was just had its own month. April was National Autism Acceptance Month, and you did a story about this for solidarityhealthshare.org and exploring the causes and personalized interventions. And let me ask you a question about it, because we’ve all heard that the number has gone approximately one in 36 8 year olds in the US are diagnosed with the condition and there’s what, 12.2 million people found that autism prevalence, it’s risen over time by the number’s gone up by 175%. Is it a combination of things and is one of the things that they have broadened what is considered autism, that maybe there were things that were not considered being autistic and now it is, or are there other things like RFK Junior is saying that it’s from vaccinations? What do you think is the cause for the rise and what I brought up potentially one of the causes, they’re just widening. What is autism?
Dr. John Oertle (01:14):
Yeah, Bob. No, these are great questions and you’re asking the right questions. So again, we certainly, one of the things that we’ve seen is that over the last 15 years we’ve seen this exponential rate increase in autism. And so we’ve seen it again from the 2011 to 2022 data that I wrote about was again, an increase in 175%. And so this is where when you actually look at some of these actual data and how it’s actually extrapolated, one of the things that people like to say is that, yeah, it could be this very fact that you’re saying that it may just be more opening up the diagnostics to be able to diagnose autism spectrum. And so we’ve seen that, but you actually, in the design of looking at these, you actually remove those outliers. And so this is really where again, you do see that it is not just from overall diagnosis criteria that you’re able to see that there’s actually an increased rise in these conditions happening. And so throwing that out that again, it’s just an increase in diagnoses from opening up diagnostic criteria. There is concerns about what we’re seeing in our youth here in America because of these autism spectrum disorders that we’ve seen, like we’ve never seen them before here in 2025 that they weren’t in such prevalence back even 20 years ago.
Bob Sansevere (02:37):
Now, you had listed a list of potential contributions to autism, and I’m going to bring up, we’ll talk about number one, which is air pollution, but I want to bring up first pesticides when I grew up as a child, and that’s decades upon decades ago, they used to come by, I lived in New Jersey with the truck that would spray and pesticides out and run behind it. It was a cloud. It was fun to run behind if there was not an apparent moms were out there too. And dads, if that exposure wasn’t going to cause it decades ago, why would it be doing it now we have a much better handle on pesticides and they’re dangers than we did decades ago.
Dr. John Oertle (03:18):
It is a really good point, but this is what you’re starting to see in the data is that it’s overall accumulation. And so there is one, pesticides have shifted and changed as well. So the pesticides that were used back then are not the same pesticides that are currently being used today. So there has been a fundamental shift. Obviously I don’t support going through chlorinated pesticide clouds as far as this goes with what you were running through and describing.
Bob Sansevere (03:44):
I was a kid, Doctor!
Dr. John Oertle (03:44):
– Other issues as well, but again, we’re using other pesticides this day and age. So again, and then you were seeing total overall exposure. And so I go through again, some of this actual data that’s really clear as far as these correlative root causative markers like pesticides, like heavy metal exposure. We see this in the autism spectrum is that again, we see an increased heavy metals and the exposure to heavy metals contributing or at least some level of correlation. We also see things like when I talk about obviously air pollution, these air pollution, the pollutants are definitely correlated as well, especially with moms that are exposed in utero when they’re actually pregnant. We also see that there’s a concept of the gut brain access. So this is where the gut microbiome and we’re seeing more and more discovery and evaluation and research into the gut microbiome as far as how does the little microbes that are not yourself but are helping you.
(04:49):
These are your probiotic and your good healthy bacteria. How are these playing a role in the ability to be able to actually heal the gut and heal and protect against autism? And then the last one is these aspects of, and I think this is a big one, these impaired methylation or detoxification pathways. So what’s interesting is that when we methylate so many times people have inborn errors of metabolism and unable to methylate and methylation is a critical factor of our bodies that helps the body to detox and process through chemicals and it’s in every cell of the system. Well, one of the ways that we get methylation is through healthy foods like green leafy vegetables has a specific type of folic acid called Methyltetrahydrofolic. This is what helps the body to methylate. These are in our green leafies and so we don’t have those currently in our fortified processed foods. And so this is also, I think, a big deal as far as when you’re looking at foods and where we’re at with our food supply, we’re not getting that methylation support that’s helping to be able to clear maybe those pesticides or clearing those heavy metals and helping support the cellular framework of the actual system.
Bob Sansevere (06:03):
How many levels of autism are there? I mean, because a parent, they’re watching their kid and they’re saying there’s something that maybe my child is autistic, maybe my child, there’s many, many, maybe my child is how do they find out what doctor would they go to be diagnosed for this and how many levels are there?
Dr. John Oertle (06:23):
Yeah, so you’re going to be able to go see there’s autism specialists, but again, even going to see a neurologist or a pediatric neurologist is usually again, a good place to be able to go, to be able to be fully evaluated. And there’s scores that are able to actually look at this. So again, essentially one of the tests that they do is a full checklist evaluation. It’s called the A TEC or the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist. And this is where you’re looking at checklists and evaluating what are the symptoms of the actual spectrum to be able to get a gauge on how severe or how benign the actual autism spectrum disorder may be.
Bob Sansevere (07:03):
Now, I’m not familiar with it, but is there an improvement, someone who’s autistic, is there an improvement or can it actually, I mean, can it be, I dunno if reverse would be the right word, but if someone’s autistic, is that their lot in life that it’s not going to change or are things being done that it can change?
Dr. John Oertle (07:23):
Yeah, so many times when you are diagnosed, that is as the current model of thinking goes, is that once you are diagnosed, that again, that your score very little can improve that actual score. However, one of the things that I found to be really exciting was back in 2024 in talking about this as far as not just looking at it from a diagnosis of autism and then helping to do things to manage those symptoms and try to live in society to be able to manage those symptoms came across some research. And this is where I wanted, I published in just last month to be able to talk about there are things when you look at removal of these various root causes that have been correlated to autism, and then you are able to introduce these factors like methylation support that we were just recently talking about that when you do this to these actual patients, there was a June, 2024 study that came out in the Journal of Personalized Medicine that actually detailed these really severe kids, two twins with autism.
(08:29):
And when they gave these actual supportive mechanisms and they were actually diagnosed with some of these actual root causes and correlative factors and where they were able to do personalized dietary changes and helping with the gut microbiome and they were able to be given methylation support in reducing those actual environmental toxin exposures, they actually improved quite significantly. And it’s very exciting to be able to look at this, that the actual improvement was significant. You had one of the kids that actually dropped that autism treatment evaluation checklist showing how severe it is going from a score of 76, meaning it’s really severe to an actual score of 32. The other twin went from a score of 43 down to four. So again, we’re seeing this is that it’s pretty exciting to see this kind of novel research happening and kind of this understanding of the disease process because it really does shift paradigms as far as what could be possible if we actually start to be able to do more research and evaluating different options for parents struggling with children with these diseases.
Bob Sansevere (09:38):
Well, doctors always greatly appreciate it. If you’d like more information, solidarityhealthshare.org, you can go there and you will actually, it’s Solidarity HealthShare.org and National Autism Acceptance Month. If you look for that, you can find it. Or just Dr. Oertle, O-E-R-T-L-E. He’s written a number of articles. Check those out and check out Solidarity HealthShare if you’d like. A great alternative to traditional healthcare. Dr. Oertle, thank you again. He is of course the co-founder and the chief medical officer for Solidarity. Take a quick break. The BS Show’ll be right back.
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