
The Problematic Obsession with ‘Curing’ Autism - domdip
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/09/problematic-obsession-with-curing-autism.html
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cbd1984
OK, what is autism?

Is it rocking in one spot because you're stressed and overstimulated right
now, or is it rocking in one spot because you're stressed and overstimulated
by most things and will therefore never learn to communicate?

Is it stimming by hand-flapping or is it stimming to the point you need a
helmet to prevent traumatic brain injury?

Trick question, of course; they're all autism. My point is that unless we can
nail down what exactly we want to cure, we'll continue to talk past each
other, apparently ignoring the fact one side is talking about Temple Grandin
and the other side is talking about people who are so disabled they drive
their parents to such quackery as facilitated communication.

[http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-
blog/783-this-...](http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-
blog/783-this-cruel-farce-has-to-stop.html)

[http://www.skepdic.com/facilcom.html](http://www.skepdic.com/facilcom.html)

[http://www.apa.org/research/action/facilitated.aspx](http://www.apa.org/research/action/facilitated.aspx)

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thinkcomp
This is the kind of topic that unfortunately often devolves into a flame war
because each side simply doesn't understand the other. But there's something
important that neither Silberman nor the mass media has caught onto yet: that
the collection of discrete diseases referred to as "autism" has a nexus, and
it's in the cerebellum.

There are a large number of recent (2013-2015 range) medical journal articles
in respected publications such as Cell that confirm this. Autism is largely
about the cerebellum: what happens when cerebellar cells aren't present at all
(severe disability, as in Dandy-Walker Variant, aka "autism"), and what
happens when they're present but not wired up properly (unusual personalities,
aka the condition formerly known as "Asperger Syndrome"). It's not really that
simple of course but those are both real conditions that we don't bother
distinguishing right now.

This is what should be in the newspaper: that autism is really a collection of
things that should be called Cerebellar Dysmorphic Disorder. Everything else
is clearer when people aren't just arguing about abstract terms with no
morphological basis. (Wonder why some people with autism are able to have
intense debates while others can't talk at all? If you have an arbitrarily-
shaped Dandy-Walker cyst that has displaced 30% your cerebellum, it's unlikely
anyone else will have the exact same symptoms, but you might not be able to do
a lot of things.)

The upshot is that anyone with severe deficits and an autism diagnosis should
get an MRI of their brain to image the cerebellum.

This is a topic I take really seriously. E-mail me at greenspan at
post.harvard.edu with any questions. I'm not a doctor but these views have
been run by many MDs and MD/PhDs and I'm happy to point people to journal
research if helpful.

~~~
Asbostos
No disrespect, but you're using weak arguments together with strong assertions
that ends up sounding suspicious.

Medical research has plenty of mistakes, bad science and fraud. It doesn't
matter if it's published in Cell, there's a good chance that what you
described is going to be considered wrong someday, if anything just because
it's so recent (2013-2015).

Don't forget The Lancet was also a respected publication in 1998. The prestige
of a journal doesn't imply the research published in it is more correct.

