SBS: Insight: Understanding Autism

Well tonight the SBS Insight program “Understanding Autism” was on tonight, and Donna and myself were on talking about how we live with Donna’s autism.

One question I didn’t get to ask was going to be this:

Why, if we hear that people with autism react so very differently to different treatments with one helping one child and then for another child it has no effect (or makes things worse), do we continue to assume that there is just one thing called autism ?

Some children improve on gluten free diets, some don’t. Some improve on cassein free diets, some don’t. Some respond well to ABA, some become phobic because of it. Some are intolerant to salycliates, some have no problem with them. Etc, etc, etc..

To me, as a physicist, it makes sense when you change different variables on the same thing and it reacts differently then it usually is not the same thing!

So, to me, it makes good sense that there are multiple underlying issues (multiple autisms) that are causing symptoms that look similar.

A final plug – Donna mentioned the website we built almost a year ago now for people on the spectrum to advertise their employment skills to the world – it is called auties.org – go visit and hire someone with autism!