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Possible Cure For Autism
Henry V .009 writes "Scientists in New Jersey are claiming that children with autism are unable to metabolize key fatty acids that fight brain-damaging inflammations. They have already developed urine/blood tests to identify at-risk children. A preventive cure to autism may be as simple as a 'therapeutic cocktail' of fatty acids. Human trials could start later this year."
it won't cure autism. It sounds like the treatment would prevent the brain from being damaged, not that it would reverse any existing damage, for everyone with The Geek Syndrome.
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
There are going to be people vocally declaring that we have no right to "cure" (or prevent, as the case may be) autism, and that it's not a disease. At the same time, others will insist that we should do everything in our power to mitigate the effects of autism, which can be quite formidable...I myself know a family friend a year younger than me who has pretty severe autism, he lives in a group home, but he plays the piano like a concert pianist (and has since he was 12) as well as being completely bilingual. He is quite intelligent but really can't function independently in society. I'm going to reserve judgement on this until the trials are completed and the results are in, but I can promise that there is going to be a HUGE amount of controversy over this.
And what about those of us who have been finally diagnosed through traditional means, but sadly a decade or two too late for therapy to actually make a difference in our lives, due to our being told over and over again through the years that we were just your "Internet whiners".
Don't be too quick with the label. As a society, we've started to overdiagnose many conditions, and that hampers proper medical care. But it is just as bad, if not worse, to underdiagnose those who are suffering.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Please stop spreading this lie. You are killing people by convincing them to avoid vaccination. It is more likely a result of trans-fats in food. Or a new neurological virus caused by sexual promiscuity (cerebral herpes maybe). How do I know these things? Well, both have increased at the same time as rates of autism. And, both can get a rise out of people by making them feel abused by others or powers at be.
And that, is the Modern Scientific Method.
If Autism is caused by mercury why has a gene recently been found that correlates highly? Why does a vaccine "transform" one child (anecdotally) but not affect anyone else in the class?
How many other growth trends have been occurring while the rates of autism have been growing? Global warming? The strength of the Japanese economy? The price of oil?
Leave the "A mother's story: We must fight against the growth of the Japanese economy for my special little autistic Suzy" stories to geocities please, and leave medicine to the pharmacologists (who recently discovered a key genetic link).
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
i agreed with you until you ragged on dyslexia.. because that one ACTUALLY IS A DISORDER and is older than the "fad" of making everything a disorder - and it actually involves the brain having a problem with spatial implacement of visual and auditory stimuli. My brother has it, and he's smarter than most people by far. His spelling is great, and he reads 2 living languages, and 3 dead languages - he just reads and writes slower.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Wishful thinking, really.
People want to believe that Aspies are fakers, because Aspies generally inspire dislike, which makes people want an excuse for disliking them.
The issue is, if people are really faking, and they *can* be likable, what is it they need an excuse for? Saying that someone is faking Asperger's to have an excuse is a bit like saying someone is faking Tourette's to have an excuse for shouting obscenities in public. If they *didn't* have Tourette's, why would they be shouting them in the first place?
(Because it's a lot more pleasant to fit in than to not fit in, but have an excuse, even if the excuse is accepted.)
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Who said anything about a free pass? Regarding someone as neurologically disordered is hardly a free pass. Hell, the social stigma attached is often far worse than that for being an asshole.
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They'll have no more excuse to be rude fucking assholes!
Just like you.
Autism is a serious neurodevelopmental disorder, not "smart people acting weird". Just because Hollywood somehow made it glamorous to be autistic, doesn't mean it's remotely accurate.
While I don't agree with the asshat who responded to your original post, I will tell you this. My son displayed the signs of autism far before his two year shots (typically the ones autism is blamed on). Your assessment that it has to be "caused" rather than genetic is flawed.
It took me quite a while to come to grips with the fact that my son has this condition. I've also done a lot of thinking on why so many kids today are being diagnosed with it as opposed to twenty years ago and the answer came from my Mother of all people. She saw nothing wrong with my son. "He's just a little behind" she said. "Your brother didn't start speaking until he was almost three" she said.
Explaining away the condition as some medical conspiracy is ignorance at its finest. Perhaps in the future you should study a little more and get a little more experience with topics you feel you need to comment so strongly on before you make such absurd statements (and no, the internet, while fun, is not the best place to learn if you're looking for facts).
While I appreciate the fact that you took five minutes out of your day to give the matter some thought and you decided that in your limited experience you've never heard of or seen anything that would lead you to believe autism was anything more than mercury poisoning, I'll have to side with the researchers and the doctors and the therapists I've spoken with who have actual years of experience dealing with children afflicted by this condition.
Just because you'd never heard of it in such numbers before doesn't mean they weren't there. They were simply explained away, ignored, or treated quietly while the rest of society went about its business. Not understanding a disease is not the same as it not existing.
There are healthy people with Savant-level mathematical skills. But no one really cares. But in someone with no real personality, someone who doesn't have conversations, someone who doesn't do any of the normal things that we're all used to, the extraordinary skills are the only things left to notice.
It's like walking into an empty white room that has a pornographic magazine sitting on the floor. The magazine will probably be the only thing you notice. But if you walk into a normal teenage boy's bedroom, there could be dozens of pornographics magazines lying around and you'll probably never notice them because your attention is being taken up by a few slices of moldy pizza, mounds of dirty clothes, the poster of Caprica-6 on the wall, the Slayer CD playing at 95 dB, and the precarious tower of empty soda cans that contains enough aluminum to jumpstart a small nation's airplane industry.
Quick, patent the fix now or else the little shitheads will get cured without coughing up some $10,000/vial.
Let me say clearly and up-front: Full-blown autism is a terrible thing - and a cure for it is most certainly worth striving for.
The problem is that there is no bright line between "Autism" and "Aspergers" (and no bright line between "Aspergers" and normality at the other end of the scale). We have a range of brain types ranging along a continuum from normal to completely autistic - and we've chosen to confuse matters still further by giving the people in the middle of that range another name for their position along the line.
But this is where the moral dilemma strikes. Those of us (and I'm one of them) with Aspergers frequently benefit from it. Notably, Asperger "victims" who are programmers are able to focus their minds on a tiny problem for insane amounts of time - to be happy to amass vast amounts of ultra-detailed knowledge on ridiculously small topics. This is "A Good Thing" for some of us to be able to do.
I for one would strongly resist being "cured". I like being this way. There are undoubtedly downsides - I'm terrible at reading sarcasm and 'undercurrents' and body language and other societal cues...I know that I suck at this and I try my hardest to make allowances for my possible lack of knowledge. I tell people I work with "don't hint - tell!" - and my wife has come to understand that - yes - I'm even worse than most guys at picking up on subtle hints. I walk on tiptoes too - a classic Asperger symptom which people think is odd. But the benefits (I'm happy and I earn a pile of cash for doing what I do) by far outweigh the downsides. I just wish someone had told me about this when I was 10 years old instead of waiting for me to figure it out in my late forties! Jeez - I have so many memories of teenage problems which just make me cringe when I look back on them and realise how things I did must have looked to other people!
So - at what point in the fuzzy region between 'Severe Aspergers' and 'Mild Autism' do we start the magic treatment?
We could greatly damage society by making the cut too close to the 'normality' side - we gain great benefits from Nerds. Yet we would unnecessarily ruin the lives of too many severe autism sufferers if we went too far the other way and refused to treat people with more severe symptoms.
Where do you make the cut? It's a tough call.
www.sjbaker.org
Thank you, Dahamma. Whenever Hollywood glamorizes a disease, it is almost the worst thing for sufferers of that disease for three reasons.
1. If you tell people that you have , they go "Like that kid in ! Yeah? So why aren't you twitchy/shaky/screaming obscenities in public?"
2. It gets overdiagnosed, and you become "just another aspergers/autistic kid".
3. Help dries up. So many shockingly crap parents that want a disease to blame for their incompetence as a caregiver go out and book appointments with the specialists so you can't get in for 6 months; they buy all the pills to comatose their kids, increasing the demand so up goes the price; and all the people who once gave a crap about helping people with aspergers/autism get so disillusioned with the amount of badly raised perfectly normal kids that walk through their doors, that they unknowingly turn away the people they wanted to help.
It's ADD all over again...
Nothing properly called a "fad" lasts for 12 years, which is the shortest required duration for even one of these landmark dates in the history of Asperger's to fall within the "fad of making everything a disorder". Perhaps you are referring to something more long term than what most people would think of as a fad; if that is the case, my apologies for misunderstanding. If not, then Asperger's Syndrome clearly predates the "fad" you refer to as well.
[1] Wikipedia's page on Asperger Syndrome, History section.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Now let's have your definition. Preferably one not involving any references to magic, deities, astrological convergences, or other imaginary phenomena.
. . .such as the tendancy to walk on tip-toe instead of with feet flat on the floor. . .
Have you considered the possibility that you might just be a ninja?
You can study that with scientific rigor - and whilst it won't ever be a 'natural' thing - you'll be able to fake it pretty well.
No, you can't and no you won't. The irony is that you think this because you are an Aspie. You do not percieve your failure. Stuff you don't even know is happening gives you away quite quickly. It is really the social skills of the other person that makes your interactions appear to be more normal. They are working very hard at fitting you in.
Make sure that people who are close to you know that you don't do well at picking up subtle cues from speech. It's no use someone dropping subtle hints that they want you to do something - you'll never notice them.
Q.E.D.
Conversely I cannot really study you with any scientific rigor, except from the outside as I would a shark. I can define your behavior, but cannot "get in your head." I can sympathize, but I cannot empathize, because I can empathize. I can empathize with a cat, or dog, or hamster, because although their social structures may be a bit different from the human, they have them.
I will always be outside of your world; and you will always be outside of mine.
And that's the way it is.
KFG
Autism is a serious neurodevelopmental disorder, not "smart people acting weird". Just because Hollywood somehow made it glamorous to be autistic, doesn't mean it's remotely accurate.
Most autistic people aren't also savants. Hollywood has glamorized savantism to a degree, but hasn't really glamorized regular old autism.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Knowing a few people with ASD doesn't make you an expert to say who has and who doesn't have ASD. Whether a "real" Aspie know whether they fit in or not is not a diagnosis whether he/she is an Aspie.
While I agree with you in large part (a great many people self-diagnose Asperger's especially withing our community), it's worth pointing out that you overstate, I think, the issues. While many people with the Syndrome are severe and exhibit behavior similar to that which you describe, there are those who are not as severe and very much know what we are missing. Autism is a spectrum disorder, which means two things, really: 1. It covers a wide spectrum of symptoms rather than a tight clinically clear grouping and 2) those who have it fall on a spectrum of severity. One can have /slight/ autism just as likely as one can have severe autism. Indeed, severity is highly correlative with order of birth. The first child might display some symptoms, but each successive child is increasingly likely to display increasingly severe symptoms. You friends is likely fairly severe (though not as severe, it sounds, as some I've met), but that can't be used to dimiss legitimate edge cases where the autistic child will have lifelong trouble, but not so severe as to need much help...just enough to be generally unlikable.
This is not to say you are wrong, as I think you are right. Just making suring others don't misunderstand your point and take it to mean that what you've described is the only form Asperger's takes.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
I'm only 27, but I've had a lot of the same fight. I've only known about my AS for about three years. When I did know for sure, I showed some of the literature to my mother. She immediately breathed a deep breath, her eyes kind of glazed over, and she said quite a number of things I won't repeat here. The gist was that, even as a schoolteacher trained in dealing with kids like me, she had never recognized it from my behavior and didn't suspect what some of the stranger symptoms meant (fear of physical contact, tiptoeing, echolalia, etc.) -- she just thought I was a sullen, introspective child.
I think more people could learn to deal with us. But for people with AS, the tendency is to take the burden on ourselves. We analyze social interaction as a rule-based system and learn enough, intuitively, to get by. But it's like the "Digital Divide" effect seen in CGI characters crafted to look human... The more closely we can approximate neurotypical reactions and behaviors, the 'creepier' we seem to get, because the subtle differences stand out in contrast. And some people, upon really realizing how different things are below the surface, react quite strongly, to wit: your post above.
People won't pity you, and they won't make concessions, because the very act of participating in society hides your differences. If they saw you in a mental institution, or a hospital, they might have some heartfelt reaction of pity or a desire to help. But if they talk to you on the street, you're a wierdo who won't look them in the eye, and sometimes silently repeats what he just said -- a crazy person dressed up to look like an intelligent, handsome, healthy, well-composed young man, and it scares them.
But for people to concede your difference and willingly interact with you, you must provide some overwhelmingly positive basis for that difference. If it is assumed that you are different because you are an artist, or a musician, or a genius, you can get a foot in the door. Many with AS, though, don't have an outstandingly positive trait, and they suffer greatly because their differences are never sanctioned, only condemned and punished. And no matter how hard they try, many will never be able to emulate neurotypical responses 100% -- they'll give off a "bad vibe" that nobody can qualify, all the worse as they try harder.
You, sir, are a jerk. You can empathize with an animal because you concede that they will behave differently. By making no concessions for differing behavior from other human beings, you will find yourself unable to interact with a tremendous number of people. In fact, I will go so far as to say that, while the barriers erected against individuals with AS may be insurmountable, it is you who has the greater social disorder by far.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I have learned much in the fifteen years of my son's life, and the thing I have learned most is that people who claim to have "the cure for autism" are lying. Not always in an evil fashion, and not necessarily knowingly, but they are saying something that is not true.
Man, I'm always late for these things...
My wife is an SLP in a school for autistic children and sees the snake oil marketed to parents as a treatment for autism (of course, marketing themselves in the strictly legal sense, avoiding the magic words that'll land them in hot water). Kelation, vitamins, massage, gluen free diets, raw food diets, etc etc all make the rounds without any real results. Hell, one of her parents are both neurosurgeons who send their daughter for kelation and have a tutor come to their home to pump her head with knowledge to show off that their kid isn't a complete retard.
Parents want their kids to be normal. Many perceive a clinician's attempt at injecting reality into the situation as an overworked teacher giving up on their kid. They'll pay any amount of money to the next charlatan to come down the pike offering nebulous claims. It's sad, I hope that there is a special level of hell for people who prey on the desperate in this fashion.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?