Interesting blog on autism and recovery

[sickofsocalledexperts]

Enclosed is Professor Richard Hastings' take on the recent articles and research study which found 34 kids who had "recovered " from autism.

He says it was a decent piece of research, but what you can't ever know is whether the initial diagnoses were correct, as all were carried out by different docs.

He also argues that "can autism be cured?" is the wrong question, and thinks a better question would be (my words) : "why aren't we helping our existing autism population better, especially as regards education and adult care?"

Here it is

profhastings.blogspot.co.uk/

Wow - what a great blog - this is the kind of common sense i have been looking for

I think it would be more commonsense to say

1. here is a subset of the population displaying very tilted unbalanced perception and pattern recognition. Early intervention is about trying to lessen the tilt.

1. If your pattern-recognition skills are tilted, you might be non-verbal in later life. Or you might be a maths whizz with weak social skills.

Looked at from this viewpoint, it's pretty silly to say that someone had autism but doesn't any more. You're just saying that they've compensated for their tilt, and perhaps even recruited elements of it as strengths. A tiny tiny bit more tilt and a diagnosis of profound autism might be appropriate. A tiny bit less - and no diagnosis - both from the same starting point.

I always found it helpful to think about overflowing baths, tilting boats, etc - all those watery metaphors, when thinking about how my child's brain worked :) Often, a boat can right itself , but sometimes it just can't. Same boat, same complex sea around it - and good parenting/early intervention is like good weather conditions!

Prof Hastings is a top bloke-both in the field and as a person.

Thank you for the link, very useful to read it.