
What causes autism? Environmental risks are hard to identify - curtis
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/11/what_causes_autism_environmental_risks_are_hard_to_identify.single.html
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mhkool
I see so much misinformation about diseases that it makes me sad since the
public is so misinformed. Go to the website of Dr Perlmutter to get a list of
scientific articles about treatment of autism:
[http://www.drperlmutter.com/learn/studies/?study_tag=autism](http://www.drperlmutter.com/learn/studies/?study_tag=autism)
In short: it is not genetic and treatments without horrible drugs already
exist.

~~~
EliRivers
PepeGomez, the other commenter, has made it clear that you're spouting
nonsense. He's made it clear that it's a problem of not talking to children
enough.

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PepeGomez
That's not what I said. I said children not being to exposed to language, that
is, other people talking. It's a well known thing that if language isn't
acquired within a specific period, the window of opportunity closes and it's
no longer possible to (fully) learn it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Linguistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Linguistics)

~~~
mhkool
wikipedia only shows mainstream "common" knowledge. Dr Perlmutter refers to
published peer-reviewed scientific articles which say that diet and microbiome
are important factors and the articles show large improvements with diet
change and probiotics, much larger than with drugs. So think again, or read
the scientific articles.

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PepeGomez
Child abuse and neglect.

Children left alone for lengthy times and not being exposed to enough language
to learn it within the critical period = autism.

Being raised by parents who are autistic themselves (which guarrantees extreme
emotional neglect and abuse) = aspergers.

~~~
EliRivers
I think you'll find that the other commenter, mkhool, has made it clear that
you're spouting nonsense and it's a diet problem.

~~~
PepeGomez
Ask anybody who works with autistic children. You won't find an autistic child
whose parents aren't either mentally ill or autistic themselves.

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EdiX
Scott Alexander [1] allegedly works with autistic patients and has a different
impression. My impression is that autism is an epistemologically unsound
category, as if biologists had 'flying animal' as a category encompassing some
insects, some birds and bats, with flying squirrels and frogs classified "in
the flight spectrum".

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-
autism-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-
cures/)

~~~
PepeGomez
That's surely a possibility as well. But it's impossible to decide until
medical science improves. Be it autism, depression, obesity, nearsightedness,
and so on, medical research is wandering helplessly with different hypotheses
being in vogue at different times while having no way to conclusively prove or
disprove any of them.

The problem is that medical science is dominated by a particularly insidious
misinterpretation of frequentist statistics which makes most medical research
for most practical purposes worthles. It goes as follows: A study that looks
at one possible cause is, all things being the same, a hundred timess less
likely to produce a false positive than a study that looks at a hundred
different causes, so we should make studies as specific as possible to avoid
false positives.

The error in this reasoning is that while a study that looks at a hundred
possible causes is indeed a hundred times more likely to produce a false
positive, it also produces a hundred times more data, so the amount of noise
is the same. So in an ideal world, a hundred small studies are perfectly equal
to one big study, so it shouldn't be such a big deal after all.

But we don't live in an ideal world and studies that don't produce significant
results are often shelved, and studies that report results for one possible
cause in fact looked at many and report only the most significant result. This
makes it impossible to add up results from different studies to get a clearer
picture and you only have separate studies pointing at random directions and
leading nowhere, with no hope of getting more certain results untilt the way
science is done changes.

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zajd
> But we don't live in an ideal world

What a funny thing for someone to say after they just finished unironically
posting

> You won't find an autistic child whose parents aren't either mentally ill or
> autistic themselves.

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PepeGomez
You completely misunderstood the first sentence you quoted then.

