new favorite blog
May. 29th, 2009 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitouthttp://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/
Really, really, really awesomely wonderful stuff. Highlights so far:
(1) Early diagnosis incredibly unstable. Big surprise here. Every time a "disease" category becomes popular (usually because someone is selling something that people will pay for to treat the disease), diagnostic creep becomes rampant. Which of course "proves" that the treatment "works". After all, if you diagnose a whole bunch of people with diabetes that never used to be diagnosable, and then give them pills, and then demonstrate that they no longer have the thing you were measuring, and are not dead or dying, clearly you've done great good things! Right? Well, until you realize that untreated people with the diabetes metric are living longer than the treated people, but that can take a while to figure out, and you can hold it off longer by saying that NOT treating people is unethical so you aren't allowed to set up an RCT to check the results.
(2) As I _strongly_ suspected, there are people in the treatment community who view loss of some amazing ability in someone who is autistic or on the spectrum as a sign that they are being cured. Yup, that's right, you could do something most people couldn't, and most people were really impressed, now you can't and that means you're somehow ... better?
No surprises, other than that wow there is some sanity.
Really, really, really awesomely wonderful stuff. Highlights so far:
(1) Early diagnosis incredibly unstable. Big surprise here. Every time a "disease" category becomes popular (usually because someone is selling something that people will pay for to treat the disease), diagnostic creep becomes rampant. Which of course "proves" that the treatment "works". After all, if you diagnose a whole bunch of people with diabetes that never used to be diagnosable, and then give them pills, and then demonstrate that they no longer have the thing you were measuring, and are not dead or dying, clearly you've done great good things! Right? Well, until you realize that untreated people with the diabetes metric are living longer than the treated people, but that can take a while to figure out, and you can hold it off longer by saying that NOT treating people is unethical so you aren't allowed to set up an RCT to check the results.
(2) As I _strongly_ suspected, there are people in the treatment community who view loss of some amazing ability in someone who is autistic or on the spectrum as a sign that they are being cured. Yup, that's right, you could do something most people couldn't, and most people were really impressed, now you can't and that means you're somehow ... better?
No surprises, other than that wow there is some sanity.
Re: I like the way you interpreted it
Date: 2009-05-31 01:16 pm (UTC)Anyway, I take it you got the Townie? Very, very exciting!