Measles may have saved me.

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I just thought I would be a good idea to post this article after reading this article on the link below.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/90521.php

Here is my experience of measles.
My first two years of life was extraordinarily quiet and I didn’t even speak a word or even babble. The occasional little bit of crying, blowing raspberries, screaming or giggling, were the only sounds that came out of my mouth. I would not even respond to my name. Then by the time I turned 2 I came down with a bad case of measles with very high fever of greater than 40°C. I was very sick for a while, but using the old adage one man’s poison is another man’s cure, the measles seemed to mark a great change in my behaviour for the better as far acquiring language was concerned even though it made no difference to the tantrums and meltdowns. If anything they got worse. When I fully recovered I learned to be at first be receptive to language then learn to speak. I still have a learning disability with regards the language, but it is at least a marked improvement to learning no language at all. So before the measles I was much more quiet and aloof and yearning to wander off and treating everyone like furniture. After the measles I was more highly strung and vocal.

This made me laugh.

Anyway, I had a similar experience when at two years old I got caught in the chain of a tire swing and couldn't get out for several hours. My parents still tell me to this day that that was the loudest I ever cried as a small child. After that I started talking my head off XD

In high school, I had an english/drama teacher who was a temporary foster parent to a lot of kids with special needs. He once told my class one of his biggest success stories, with an autistic boy who wouldn't do anything but stare at his hand. I don't recall how orthodox this method of treatment was, but he and his wife would constantly jerk or gently shake him to physically break his concentration. This worked so well that he would eventually respond to verbal requests like "get _____ a glass of water", and supposedly shocked the hell out of some professionls who'd completely written the kid off.

Is that commonly effective? Constantly forcing some physical stimulus in order to force interaction with other people and their environment? It seems similar in principle to the first two stories of unintended success through trauma.