To My Niece: Desiree Jennings Was Malingering

And I write the title of this post without qualifying it with a phrase like "in my opinion."

The dramatic "Inside Edition" video can be found here; but any neurologist worth his or her salt would recognize that the young woman's filmed condition is factitious. I fully suspect that the Hopkins neurologists who reportedly made the diagnosis of "dystonia" believe that it represents a profound case of malingering also.

Jennings claims that her movement disorder appeared 10 days after getting a seasonal flu shot in August—so the obvious secondary gains would appear to be attention and financial compensation.

Other bloggers, like Orac and neurologist Steve Novella, have commented extensively on this case.

For the record, Jennings appears to have recovered with questionable treatments from the questionable Rashid Buttar, a controversial osteopath in North Carolina. God knows, she couldn't have kept it going forever.

11/24/09 update

Two Losers Find Each Other Thanks to a Third Loser

Jenny McCarthy's Generation Rescue evidently recommended Buttar to Desiree Jennings, the Washington Redskins cheerleader ambassador (whatever the hell that is). According to this recent Fox News affiliate report (which, once again, demonstrates that local news reporting simply sucks), Buttar diagnosed Jennings with something he calls "acute viral postimmunization encephalopathy" and "secondary mercury toxicity"—both of which he attributes to the flu shot.

But if Jenning's vaccination delivered any mercury,* she would have received no more than 25 micrograms of ethylmercury in the form of the preservative thimerosal.

And all injected seasonal flu vaccines contain inactivated (ie, split) virus, which is incapable of causing infection.

* And if the vaccine was in the form of a single-use syringe, it did not have ethylmercury-containing thimerosal.