im willing to take the cure IF and ONLY IF

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- i dont lose my logical way of thinking
(meaning i still want to be able to solve problems logically)

- i dont lose my sense of social justice
(meaning when i see people suffering on tv, i want to be sad, i want to feel what they feel)

- i dont lose my 'niceness'
(meaning if i see someone fall on the street, i wont laugh at them and make fun)

- i dont lose my worldly care
(meaning i still care about the state of the world instead of just me and my immediate family)

- i dont lose my curiosity
(meaning i still want to learn about everything there is to learn. i want to know the mystery of life, universe and everything)

I just plain wouldn't take it, it would entirely change who I am.

I'm willing to test out some "cures" if scientists compensate me financially for my service as a human guinea pig. Seriously though, what exactly is in these ominous concoctions? Are they FDA approved? Will I become one with the universe and gain the ability to smell time itself, with the slight risk of suffering premature baldness and infertility? Sign me up.

That is just it, no one wants to lose what makes them them. If I could just have something that would 'cure' my social problems, I might be willing to take it. I am even reluctant to take my Zoloft every day. I don't want something that will alter my mind in such a way that I am no longer myself.

i would never take it.


why would i want to take a pill or whatever that makes me want to talk to random strangers and act like a dolt?

I would never take the cure. I'd take a cure for cancer, diabetes, or Aids, though. I would never want to be cured of my AS.

I don't think a cure would change any of the things you mentioned. There are plenty of NTs with the above qualities. A cure would only remove the negative symptoms.

I would like less symptoms (I'm practically screaming inside from the sensory issues today). If there was a "cure" for that, I would take it.

How do you know a cure will only remove the negative symptoms, if their is no such thing as a cure yet, and theres not scientific data that proves there is a 100percent cure? I'm not trying to be mean or anything, im just wondering why you think it will only cure the negative symptoms, when actually nobody knows for sure?

I like how i think, i like my childlike personality, and the way the littlest things amuse me, or how i can always find the good anywhere i go, or can see the most beautiful things that most nts seem to always miss. Everybody around me, even agreed how boring i would be without autism.

Most of the things aspies here worry about losing if they're cured are qualities that some NTs have also so I think they're part of one's personality and not part of autism. Therefore, curing autism shouldn't directly affect them (unless the person chooses to change as a result of being able to do more once they're cured).

I read stuff like "when i see people suffering on tv, i want to be sad" it makes me laugh because I think the majority of NTs are sad when they see people suffering.

"i dont lose my 'niceness'" - it's as if he thinks all NTs are mean. Most NTs I know are nice once you get to know them

"i dont lose my worldly care" - millions of NTs donate to thousands of charities, people take in foster kids, fight for justice, help the needy, etc.

You mentioned, "i like my childlike personality, and the way the littlest things amuse me, or how i can always find the good anywhere i go" - there are NTs who are just like that

Also, from the stories and videos I watched of autistics who have recovered, they seem much happier than before. You will always have free will and be able to choose how to live your life although you may want to change once you have more options available.

Yes I know this, but you don't know for sure, that a cure will take a way all of the negative traits. Autism is a way the brain is wired, completely changing the way a brain is wired will have affects that will eliminate the good qualitys as well. I have met NTS who are childlike, you are right, but what if we cure that NT, and make the NT more NT, you don't think it will change the persons positive qualities rather then there negative qualities? As for the videos, there videos, anybody can make a video, I don't always believe it until I see it. I work with autistic kids alll the time, seen kids after and before biomeds, not every one of them is happier, some are even more miserable. What I'm getting is, that nothing is 100 percent, so when it is, then its a different story.

This is silly.
I'd rather be NT, my day at school is almost unbearable.

It's hard to know anything for sure. It will be easier to determine once the cure is available. The whole different brain wiring thing may be true but it hasn't been proven. Some of the "cures" people have used are anti-virals (to fight viruses), anti-fungals (to kill fungus), and pentoxifylline (to improve circulation). I don't think any of the positive qualities in autistics are due to viruses, fungal infections, or poor circulation. Therefore, if these are the "cures", I think it will only improve negative symptoms.

Yea I see what you mean. I can see them finding a cure in the way future for babies, but for adults, don't you agree its going to be 100 times harder?

Yea. It may even be impossible for adults to be fully cured.

Yes, it's not known yet what a cure would do, if one were even possible.

A lot of things in the brain are connected to each other in ways that people don't always realize. My psychiatrist is a good example of this. He has severe ADD. Before he retired, he took Ritalin in order to function at work. On the weekends, he would not take Ritalin, because he wanted to be himself. He felt that he lost something important about himself when he became more functional, so he found a compromise. (And I've seen him when he's forgotten his meds -- has trouble getting through a complete sentence, and completely disorganized and losing his place all the time.)

Similar things have been reported by some with Tourette's syndrome. Some of them, despite having severe and unpleasant symptoms, will refuse medications or take only the minimum possible dose, because some element of Tourettic thinking is important to them, and because the medications that treat the tics can erase personalities pretty well as well.

I once took a seizure medication that has personality change as a side effect. The moment my neurologist heard of this, he told me to stop it immediately no matter what good it was doing otherwise. Personality change is a known phrase used for side-effects of certain medications, and is generally considered unacceptable except in extreme cases of specific things, for as short duration as possible. It is considered a severe and life-altering side-effect.

In the brain, if you yank on one thing, you're often yanking on ten more things as well. And sometimes keeping parts of those ten more things are more important than fixing the one thing that's going wrong.

So it's not at all unprecedented that this could happen.

It's also not unprecedented that an autistic person could lose certain skills when being made non-autistic. This could be true even if the person's skills were ones that superficially a non-autistic person could also have.

Because, let's just say that two people are really good at running. (Running will substitute for the skill that an autistic and a non-autistic person have in common. I'm trying to pick an obvious physical analogy because it's easier to visualize than something abstract about cognition.)

Annie is good at running because she has long legs. She has mediocre endurance and willpower.

Bob is shorter than Annie. Bob runs well because he has excellent endurance, and the ability to force his legs to keep performing at his top speeds because of a high level of willpower and a disregard of the pain involved

Both Bob and Annie have equal capacities for running, they run at the same speed, and if you put them in a race, they would tie. They just come at them from totally different reasons.

Now, Bob ends up needing treatment for a medical condition. The medical condition is something that has a lot of negative effects on Bob's life. One of the things the medical condition happens to cause in Bob, is a tendency to not notice his body so much. This is because of the severe pain the medical condition causes, and when that pain reaches his brain, his brain's defense mechanism against experiencing constant pain is to dissociate from his body and not feel it so much (this is something I have experienced myself, and that is actually taught to pain patients whose bodies haven't come up with the solution on their own).

Bob has a chance to cure that medical condition.

He can't run as fast anymore. But Annie can still run as fast, even though she still pays more attention to pain than even the post-treatment Bob does.

There are also examples that could be more neutral, as in not caused by a reaction to severe pain in an obviously bad medical condition.

It could be that to do the same task, requires two totally different areas of the brain in two different people. A cure could mess with one of those areas of the brain in a way that make one of the people unable to do the task. (But the other person was never using that part for that task, so wouldn't be affected if anything happened to that part.)

And those are just in things like "math" and stuff, rather than in the areas that autistic people have consistent strengths that non-autistic people have only more rarely. I'm just trying to give an example of why two people who have the same strength superficially, could be getting there two totally different ways, so they don't actually have the same underlying strength, they just have the same outcome through different routes. And in the autistic person if you mess with the route you could mess with the outcome.

As usual I think it should be total personal choice what people want to do to their bodies. People should be able to choose things for themselves that I would regard as harm. But I think it's important to explore both the positive and the negative of what a cure could be, before making a decision either way on something that is likely to be profoundly life-altering. Many of the fears people have both about sociological aspects and the internal aspects, are borne out by what happens with other conditions (such as children being forced to take Ritalin in order to attend regular school, and my psychiatrist who found Ritalin messed with his ADD brain too much for him to want to be on it all the time).