The Johnson Center for Child Health and Development — formerly Thoughtful House Center for Children, or simply Thoughtful House — is an Austin, Texas-based organization promoting anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and medically unsupported cures for autism. It was founded in 2005 by a group including discredited researcher Andrew Wakefield. It has offered dangerous alternative treatments including chelation therapy and gluten-free/casein-free diets. After the departure of Wakefield, the Center’s founding executive director who previously headed its research, it continues under the direction of Laura Hewitson. The Center was named for benefactor Betty Wold Johnson.
History
The Johnson Center's predecessor organization, Thoughtful House, was established in 2004, by a group including Troy and Charlie Ball, Kelly Barnhill, Bryan Jepson, Jane Johnson, Andrew Wakefield, and others. Charlie Ball, former Dell executive, and his wife, Troy, donated money to the group as a tribute to their autistic son. Wakefield resigned from the Thoughtful House in February 2010 after his now-retracted research on the MMR vaccine was ruled dishonest by the UKGeneral Medical Council and an "elaborate fraud" by the BMJ.
Controversies
, the disgraced former doctor who helped found the Thoughtful House in 2005, resigned from the organization in February 2010 after The Lancet retracted fraudulent research that Wakefield had published prior to helping found the Thoughtful House, which used doctored data to claim a link between autism the MMR vaccine, and he was sanctioned by the UK General Medical Council. Bryan Jepson, another founding collaborator, was fined $1,000 in 2005 for allowing information to appear on a website that suggested he was entitled to practice medicine in Texas before he received a Texas Medical License. In his book, Changing the Course of Autism, Jepson advocates for chelation therapy, a dangerous non-evidence-based treatment for autism based on a discredited hypothesis that mercury poisoning leads to autism. One of Thoughtful House’s former collaborating physicians, Arthur Krigsman, was fined $5,000 in 2005 by the Texas Medical board for failing to report a Florida Medical Board action that cited him for failure to document continuing medical education hours. According to the memoir of Jennifer Noonan, a blogger who advocates non-evidence-based dietary treatment of autism and who is the mother of a former Johnson Center patient, the Center also believes the discredited hypothesis that autism is caused by gluten and casein.
