The problem is that crying wolf too many times will discourage researchers from using parental anecdotes as a basis for treatment research. Already M-B12 has had an unsuccessful double-blind trial. Same with GFCF. Where’s Jim Adams’ chelation study? (BTW, it’s completely unscientific to not publish results of a trail you’ve carried out. If everybody only published the results they liked, we’d end up with more random noise in the literature than would be desirable.)

do you have credible evidence that biomed won’t harm your child? Can you show a study where megadoses of vitamins over years are safe? Same for chelators? How about HBOT?

Congratulations. That is the precise argument we’ve heard for nearly every faith based medical intervention so far.

Is that dead horse showing any signs of life yet, Sig?

About 10% of Kanner’s original patients went to college. It appears that 21% of the general population went to college in 1961. Odds ratio 0.5. Doesn’t sound like something a doctor should be making blanket predictions about.

A parent’s window of opportunity is limited. We don’t have 10 or 20 years to wait for the REAL science to come in. You don’t have any credible science that says bio-med or ABA doesn’t work. I am willing to try things that won’t harm my child.

GFCF will not harm my child. Dairy is a known allergen. It is one of the most common. CLO contains fatty acids that are known to improve brain functioning. Probiotics improve digestion. I believe that ABA fits the learning style of many ASD kids.

I won’t wait for science to prove what works and what doesn’t. For many parents, anecdotal data is enough because that is all we’ve got.

The regulars on this blog will claim my child or JM’s was never autistic or is high functioning or would have made the same progress without intervention. However, you have no proof of that. Not even anecdotal evidence.

So, it is a mischaracterization to say 7 months.

The DSM definition is a laundry list of behaviors. It’s subjective. S/he still has deficits, but not enough to trigger a DSM label.

One of the comments made by the neurologist was what he saw in those 7 months was the difference between going to college or not. You can decide what that means, but to a parent it means the world. According to my wife, he had tears welling up in his eyes when talking about the progress our child made. That speaks for itself.

If some children can be successfully treated medically (in a PKU-like fashion) that’s up to researchers to determine, not anecdotal meisters from the internet, with their grandiose proclamations to have discovered the cause and cure of autism. Despite what some might think, we don’t have a mysterious power to prevent people from finding “the truth.”

See this and this. The first one is about ASD as a whole. The second one is about autistic disorder and PDD-NOS.

What were their chances for losing the label?

Any additional information on this study would be appreciated.

I don’t pretend to speak for autistics. Like you, you will never see my on Oprah or the View. You won’t see my child’s videos on YouTube. I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. My views on autism are still changing. It may turn out that everything that I believe is garbage – you can take the cheap shot if it makes you feel good. However, my limited experience does match what many others, including Jenny McCarthy, have been saying.

In my opinion, ASD is not one disorder with various degrees of impairment. I think it is several disorders with various degrees of impairment and/or combinations. I will be honest, there is no doubt that my child was less severely affected than many kids on the spectrum. However, I do see some broader phenotype traits within my family and my wife’s family. Our child does fit the profile of kids on the spectrum. But s/he also fit the profile of the recovered kids that I read about – PDD-NOS diagnosis, no cognitive deficits and good imitation skills.

More importantly, I view your viewpoint to be dangerous. In my opinion, your viewpoint (if believed) could damage some children’s chances to lead an independent and productive life. You implicitly believe that all ASD’s are the same. It is simply a state of being and that society should change to accommodate the differences. I am not saying that society should not change. However, if we have the ability to improve a child’s chances to function in the “normal” world without accommodations, we should do so.

I believe that there are other children out there just like my child that can be helped with the right intervention. It appears to me that dairy causes significant issues with SOME children and they may benefit greatly from a simple change in diet. I believe that many ASD kids will benefit greatly from the step-by-step, one-on-one, positive reinforcement provided by ABA because most ASD kids have difficulty learning through inference. I also believe that many AS kids can be taught to minimize their non-verbal communication deficits no different than a poor golfer can improve their golf swing through practice. They will never be Tiger Woods, but lowering your score from 130 to 100 allows you to play with most people.

Your right to speak out on autism is no greater or less than any person who has been touched by it. You have a right to speak out on how it has affected your life, but that does not bestow upon you any greater right to criticize someone else’s experience that happens to differ from yours.

Jenny McCarthy’s son’s development will now be played out in the public eye. He will be scrutinized for the rest of his life. For his sake, I hope Jenny is right. I’m not sure that you share the same sentiments because it would damage your value system.