The theory is apparently that autism can be caused by oxygen deprivation (at birth) and that this will (somehow) reverse that oxygen deprivation damage. It's dangerous. I wish the FDA would step in and make some sort of regulations on how these things are sold so that they would only wind up in actual hospitals or licensed medical clinics. This is where the free market bumps up against safety.
Autism seems to be a special magnet for woo because:
1)nobody is entirely sure what causes it, even saying "genetic" still leaves room for speculation since there can be an enviromental trigger for genetic things
2)the established medical community has no actual interventions other than meds for the comorbid problems such as anxiety or depression
So people just more or less make stuff up on the fly based on half-understood science and 3rd generation rumours of a paper that somebody once published.
I don't think these treatments are necessary. The only interventions that I think really make a difference in somebody's life are educational and possibly pharmaceutical for comorbids. Parents do spend a staggering amount of money. I think that when a treatment gives no results, parents give it up and move on to the next (and there are many) and figure that they just haven't found the right one yet. When a treatment actually does (seem) to give results, the parents get delirious with joy and tell everyone they know and write about it on the internet, thus spreading the concept for that particular treatment.
Sometimes the kid will seem calmer/more verbal/less anxious/less depressed/more connected to others simply through development and that will get falsely attributed to the treatment. If you do some sort of woo treatment for 3 years and in that time your kid starts learning to talk, it's easy to attribute the new speech skills to the woo treatment. Sometimes the woo treatment for autism happens to actually be a real treatment for another problem that your kid actually has (that isn't autism, but that they have at the same time). If your kid has digestive problems alongside the autism, then some of his difficult times may actually get easier if you put him on the GF/CF diet. It didn't do a thing to affect the autism. But it did help the comorbid condition of digestive problems and taking those away made him "better". Not less autistic. But to a parent, any kind of "better" is going to almost feel like less autistic even if it isn't because problems caused by the comorbid will be falsely attributed to the autism and when they go away, the autism will seem lessened.
Sometimes the kid is exactly the same regardless of woo treatments. Sometimes the parent then moves on to the next woo. Sometimes the parent falls into a pit of self loathing despair about how they just didn't try hard enough. They didn't adhere strictly enough to the GF/CF diet. Not enough time in the hyperbaric chamber. The chelation was done wrong and they should have gone to somebody else who is more skilled. Etc. Etc. Etc. Once a parent goes down the woo path, turning back is very hard.
Why do parents go so nuts about this anyway? After all, nobody goes nuts like this when their child has Downs Syndrome or is deaf. They follow the medical and educational protocols that are non-woo and raise their child in a reasonably normal fashion, with no extraordinary lengths gone to, except the ordinary interventions of learning sign language or being in special ed. I think it's because autistic children seem so very much like NT children except in some odd and indefinable way and parents get the idea in their head that if they just "took away the autism", they would discover a perfectly ordinary child underneath, somebody very much like they remember being as children. Autistic parents don't do this since autistic parents don't have this "ordinary inside/weird outside" delusion about their children. Autistic parents seem immune not only to woo but for the need for it in the first place.
Actually a lot of NT parents don't do this either. But there is a subset of NT parents who do. I think that this subset is parents who 1)aren't hardcore scientifically educated enough to mentally fight woo and 2)believe that autism isn't truly part of their kids but is instead something removable with great effort, like a welded-on hat. It's a different way of seeing the world and I don't know where exactly it comes from.
11 Apr 2011, 3:29 am
