What is a DAN doctor?

"Defeat Autism Now (DAN!) is a project of the Autism Research Institute, founded in the 1960s by Dr. Bernard Rimland. DAN doctors are trained in the "DAN! Protocol," an approach to autism treatment which starts with the idea that autism is a biomedical disorder. Specifically, DAN! doctors feel that autism is a disorder caused by a combination of lowered immune response, external toxins from vaccines and other sources, and problems caused by certain foods."

I'm very unhappy with chelation Dan - apart from the appalling financial cost lack of any there are no published peer reviews and studies and there IS a real medical cost

Some parents of autistic children have, in the absence of a medical cure for their child's condition, very understandably turned to (often extremely expensive) alternative medicine and put their children at greater risk by avoiding crucial vaccinations or even causing direct injury with chelation.

"Real chelation therapy which removes heavy metals from the body) is used medically, though rarely, because there is such a thing as real heavy metal contamination that is dangerous.
It usually happens occupationally to people who work with heavy elements and are involved in accidents.
Medical chelation takes years and is, at best, only partially successful; and carries plenty risk of its own. Kidney damage is among the most common side effects.

Chelation therapy in popular 'alternative' medicine, however, brings only the risk and no possible benefit to the recipient.

Brian Dunning, a computer scientist, has made a study of rationally examining pseudoscientific claims describing himself as a 'Skeptologist'

He writes -

"So how did we get to a point where wrongly informed parents are turning to chelation to treat their autistic children? It's not all that surprising.
Many of the indications of autism first become apparent in children at approximately the same age as vaccinations are given. It naturally follows that some people will thus draw an (invalid) causal relationship.
Because they happened about the same time, one must have caused the other.
This is the same logic flaw that leads Oprah guests to proclaim their cancer was cured by some alternative therapy. Of those lucky few individuals whose cancer spontaneously went into remission, many were probably taking some random alternative therapy at the time; and because the remission occurred about the same time as the therapy, they assumed a causal relationship, when in fact none exists"

No parent wants to see anything bad happen to their child. When it does, it's natural to seek some outside cause, someone or something to blame, something that can be attacked and fought back.
Popular media has spread the notion that mercury from vaccination causes autism, and this makes a perfect scapegoat.
Something to blame, something to fight, some way to protect the child.
An easy answer.
A clear answer.
A chance.
Something more tangible than the doctor's vague explanation of the complex causes of autism, and its tragic incurability. It's the perfect opiate for the tormented parent."

From Mercury, Autism, and Chelation: A Recipe for Risk *

Abubakar Tariq Nadama, a 5-year-old autistic child in Pennsylvania was treated by chelation therapy in 2005 which, his parents claim, resulted in his death
He was being treated with EDTA, which is approved by the FDA for use only after blood tests confirm acute heavy-metal poisoning.
The child's blood tests did not reveal any such poisoning.

A study in 2007 by Williams, Hersh, Allard, and Sears published in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders found no significant difference in the levels of mercury found in hair samples between autistic children and their non-autistic siblings. Siblings were used for this study to eliminate other environmental variables as factors.

* A further look at the relationship between the preservative thimerosal found in some vaccines, the substance ethyl mercury which is naturally expelled from the body and methylmercury which will cause physiological damage but which is NOT present in thimerosal
NB Denmark and Sweden eliminated thimerosal in the early 1990s without any observable reduction in the incidence of autism.

Dunning observes that

"It doesn't help that this misinformation is spread by celebrity activists like Robert Kennedy Jr., whose only medical experience comes from carefully making lines of cocaine with a razor blade.
Kennedy wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine in 2005 charging that the government knows that vaccines cause autism and is actively covering it up"