Some may even believe they are the real reason.

On the other hand, intelligent kids with milder impairments could be taught better communication skills and/or to behave more normally. Practice may not make perfect, but it can make you respectable.

I will add that my “recovered” son does prefer to stay at home and do his own thing. He is a classic introvert, but he does much better when he is forced to go out.

Also, am I to understand that a child without imitation skills does not differ from a child with imitation skills, with respect to symptom severity?

I’m calling bullshit on this one.

“On regressive autism, they quote papers saying the expected outcomes for regressed children is about the same to worse.

Kids on biomed do worse?”

No, kids who regress do worse on the whole. Don’t think it matters if they’re on biomed or not, at least, that’s not the point as far as i can see. I wonder if they do worse anyway.

CAM at 40% is a pretty easy target to reach if you include vitamin supplement usage. CAM practioners always do so that folks think that everybody’s using chiropracters and accupuncturists. They aren’t. It’s a nice piece of misdirection.

As for the CAM question – the definition of “CAM” is much like the definition of “art”: very subjective. Depending on how you define “CAM” (e.g. Is “prayer” CAM? Is relaxation/meditation “CAM”?), you can get usage rates from 2% to 65% in the general population. I suspect another issue is the willingness of parents to admit that they’ve used “CAM” (i.e. “biomedical” therapies) if they haven’t “worked” (i.e. their use coincided with a period of spontaneous improvement).

“Biomedical” therapies are a serious “hot-button” issue among the parents of autistic children in my area – more than sex or even politics. Many parents won’t mention whether they have used “biomed” (or have not used “biomed” or have stopped using “biomed”) until they are sure that the person they are talking to is of the same opinion (either using “biomed” or not using it). It may be impossible to tease out that information, especially in a review article.

The other issue with “biomed” usage is that – at least in my community – a large number of parents of autistic children have tried one or more “biomed” therapies but only a small fraction are still using them or – for matter – ever used them for an extended period.

The usual response from the “biomed” enthusiasts is to claim “victory” any time a child who ever received any “biomed” therapy gets better – even if the parents of that child deny that the “biomed” therapy “worked”. Strangely enough, the same groups that readily claim that two doses of chelation or six weeks of GFCF diet “cured” (excuse me, “recovered”) an autistic child three or four years after the therapy are also claiming that it can take up to three years (or is it four, now?) for chelation to “work” and also claim that going off the GFCF diet – even by so much as a crumb – leads to “catastrophic regression”. There seems to be a contradiction somewhere.

We may never know the true usage of “CAM” or “biomed” in autism, but I think that the finding that children can “recover” from autism without “intensive biomedical intervention” is something that parents need to know.

Prometheus

It’s interesting to note that my gluten sensitivity has little to do with what the speculated link to autism is, and thus it wasn’t really a CAM in my son’s case though it might get counted as such. I “bloat” (2 slices of bread and I’ll pick up close to 10 pounds within a few days) and have much poorer digestive absorption (I have to take %40 more of a very dose sensitive medication, Strattera). I tested negative on a blood test for celiac but that test has a lot of false negatives. I figured I wouldn’t bother with the endoscope biopsy, which is the gold standard for accuracy, because a celiac diagnosis doesn’t make any real difference to me. I’m still going to actively avoid gluten.

Likewise when I first gave the melatonin to my son I didn’t know anything about these other claims of helping with autism symptoms. I hadn’t even known about it till I did a Google of “autism melatonin” yesterday. It was just for the sleep difficulty thing, which is well documented and understood.

I certainly wouldn’t expect Ontario to act outside any standard/conventional medical care. Medical services (and thinking) in Ontario is very conservative and slow to change so I would expect different practices in other provinces and especially the US.

Many of the systems in place are from the dinosaur age…

How is that even possible, considering that CAM is used by 40% of autistic children?

Is the number really that high? Maybe it’s just different in my part of Ontario, but I haven’t run into nearly that level of CAM use among the parents that we’ve known in the past 11 years. Maybe melatonin if you count that, but I’ve known very few parents in real life who even go as far as the GF/CF diet. I’d be interested to know if we really are that far off of the average up here, or if possibly it’s just something that parents don’t talk about much here. I’ve certainly known a few people who have “tried everything”, but they seem to be few and far between in my experience.