What type of research is most important to you?

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I don't consider Aspergers/ASD a real diagnosis. It has about zero actual diagnostic value. It's the same type of diagnosis as fibromyalgia, chronic pain, etc. Yes, the people that have those diseases are certainly in pain, but the problem is, their pain can stem from all sorts of different things. Sometimes it's nutritional deficiencies, sometimes it's not, but diagnostically, fibromyalgia isn't a helpful diagnosis, as it doesn't narrow things down enough to actually treat what's causing it.

It's the same situation with Aspergers/ASD at the moment. For example, for me, I've got NVLD, nonverbal learning disorder. Basically, my verbal IQ is like 130+, or 98th or 99th percentile, but my performance IQ is about 80, or 10th percentile. For all intensive purposes, it "acts" like Aspergers, and I've been diagnosed Aspergers (in passing, as in pyschs told I had it, but no paperwork done) schizoid/blah blah, but the real problem is my neurology is messed up. What happens with NVLD is the right brain hemisphere is dysfunctional in some way, in a lot of ways it's similar to what happens after people get right brain strokes or damage from accidents. But, the neurological root isn't being looked at really, and it's a shame. It's hard to "fix" neurology, but it's easier to figure out how to solve the problems when you know what's going on. For example, I know someone on here with NVLD who's performance IQ went up after doing vision exercises, so while I'm not a neurologist, yeah... Either way, I'd love for someone to study NVLD more, the diagnostic rate is low, though, it's about 1/1000 diagnostic rate, whereas Aspergers is about 1/100 people. Partially because it's rarer, but then I think the other problem is people with NVLD are getting misdiagnosed Aspergers. In a lot of cases, schools will diagnose NVLD kids Aspergers just because the IEPs are similar.

But, going with that, there's people with Aspergers that are definitively not NVLD. I'm thinking more of the extreme visual thinker types, that's sorta the opposite of NVLD. I'm thinking lower functioning autism too, is a different disease than "Aspergers" too, in most cases. So yeah, looking into actual causes neurologically of what's going on, and understanding why, that's what I'd like. It took forever to get the NVLD diagnosis, but it's really the only thing that makes sense to me, because psychology is so subjective of a "science" that one person can say I have whatever, another can I say I have something else or don't have something, you need to figure out neurologically what's really the case.

Neither one, they are both terrible, but I'd prefer the first one, the second one is useless.

Ganondox, what would you prefer research focused on?

That's interesting, I guess we'll both have to just keep our eyes and ears open for some research about this.

People forget too easily about foot binding, too, now that it's been ended. Those who know about it also often have no idea of all that it involved and the full effect of it. Ugly, ugly practice, that.