WTF.

[emmacrew]

By a somewhat circuitous route, I came across "Beading to Beat Autism." It's a cool story: 10 year old girl's brother gets an experimental treatment, it seems to help, the hospital wants to do a study on 20 more kids but need more money, she makes cheap bracelets to sell for donations and raises $300K to fund the study. Now she's set her sights on

Comments

[bopeepsheep]

Word.

I have taken to waving this page (particularly the links at the end) at people who talk about cures and battles and so on. (One of them is my S-not-IL in Oregon, whose theories on and *ahem* "remedies" for autism are driving me mad via Facebook at the moment. In three weeks time we will be spending 4 days in France with our respective autistic sons and her/my partner's family - who know my son much better than they know hers, despite the genetic link. I fear there will be major clashes over the topic of autism and how to raise boys with Asperger's Syndrome...)

[greyaenigma]

I can imagine gene therapy and retroviruses for avoiding the test/abortions route, but jesus, we've already messed ourselves up pretty badly without understanding what we've done.

If they try cutting out the autistic spectrum out of the genome they may very quickly leave us with a humanity incapable of dealing with the problems they've created.

[emmacrew]

They're starting to find out a bunch of really interesting things about a certain section of genes regarding both ASD and intelligence (and specifically super-intelligence) that suggest some of the mutations may be adaptive, and trying to eliminate the maladaptive ones could have some pretty serious consequences, yeah.

[aylara]

I don't think autism is something that can necessarily be cured but I do think there's a lot that can be done to help autistic people, and some of it is medical. I mean, I admit the level of biomedical interventions I've done with my son are pretty small (I have only changed our diets, albeit drastically), but I've seen huge improvements in him due to those changes -- to the point where if he strays from the diet, it's pretty frickin' obvious, and not in a good way

[emmacrew]

Yeah, I think there are probably a lot of different things going on with people that we call "autism," and that some can be helped with things X, and others helped with things Y. There are probably also some folks who are basically set up so that they could be high-functioning, but there are other things wrong with them, and when those things go undetected or untreated, they end up mid- or low-functioning, and then treating the other thing returns them to the high-functioning state they can naturally have. And probably for some people the "other thing" is intrinsically related to their autism, and for others it isn't.

At any rate, all way too complicated to simply "eradicate." And boy howdy do I hear you about the freak show approach. I think it's awesome you've found something that helps C, though.

[domestinatrix]

Yeah, that sounds an awful lot like trying to beat the wind. You can work to develop better shelters to work with the existence of wind, but no amount of engineering is going to make the winde cease to be a fact of the world we live in.

[wosny]

I just want to say I agree... we can't win a war on diseases or drugs or handicaps, because the whole analogy is wrong.

Autism describes a spectrum of behaviours, in the same way deafness or blindness describe an affliction without giving the cause. We can hope to find better treatments, or to avoid things that might cause them...
That's all. :)