As a mother, I didn't want to believe that the same business practices applied in medicine, because that would have meant accepting the possibility that my child was perceived first and foremost as a target market. A new mother is particularly vulnerable, and most of us harbor a trust bordering on reverence for the medical community, believing its members to be omniscient and above reproach.

When I held my baby in my arms for the first time and understood the magnitude of my responsibility, my faith in medicine translated into an implicit contract with my doctor: My job is to love him; your job is to keep him well.

And my baby was well, at least until 1998, when, at 2 years old, he was diagnosed with autism. When I read statistics from the Department of Education that said autism in school-age children had increased 556 percent in five years, skyrocketing past any other disability, I was shocked and horrified. But I trusted what my doctors told me: that the increase was due to better diagnostic skills, not to any real increase in autism.

It took two years for that trust to erode, chipped away by increasing evidence that business motives had mandated my child's health. I learned that congressional investigations were underway into key members of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control who vote on U.S. immunization policy despite a web of conflicts of interest: panel members who owned stock in vaccine makers, received research grants from those companies or even owned vaccine patents themselves.

I found out that vaccines given to my child had unsafe amounts of mercury, contained in the preservative thimerosal: a fact that led to the introduction this year of new "thimerosal-free" vaccines. I learned that last year a rotavirus vaccine was rushed to market too soon, without enough research, and had to be suspended by federal health officials because children were experiencing life-threatening bowel obstructions.

But it was during a conference this June that I crossed over to the other side, from conventional mom to vaccine-reform advocate, and began sounding more and more like Mulder in "The X-Files," saying to anyone who would listen, "The truth is out there."

At an autism conference in Irvine, Calif., I heard the first theory that made sense to me intuitively, not just about autism but about other children who were sick, children I could see around me every day, children of my friends, the "typical" children who shared my son's classroom. Respected doctors and researchers presented evidence that the rise in autism over the past decade was related to immune system impairment, part of a spectrum of other childhood illnesses on the rise such as allergies, asthma, ADHD, learning disabilities and seizure disorders.

What was causing the immune system to turn against itself? The research was pointing to bombardment by multiple vaccines that overwhelmed the immature immune systems of infants and toddlers.

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