Messages posted by: loozianaman

I can tell you it was very difficult being undiagnosed and having no clue what was going thru a woman's mind. Everyone jokes about women being on a different planet, but it must be worse for us. Even after I married at 29, I was clueless how she really felt. My lack of Theory of Mind caused me to be blissfully unaware of how unhappy she was and how unattentive I was to her feelings.
I haven't read his article, but I have often wondered how different dating and relationships would have been if I had known about autism as a teenager. Would it have crippled my already sagging confidence, or given me the knowledge to better train myself for such a daunting task of finding a mate?

I am new to this forum. I thought this might be a good place to express some questions I had after attending the Northwest Louisiana Autism forum.
I heard a talk given by a group out of Austin Texas that has ABA and some experimental dietary and other approaches at "recovery". This is a term I am very uncomfortable with in the situations they described.
They described research results of various therapies and showed videos of various children before and after.
1. How can it be research if their is no scientific method, and no 'check' without treatment for comparison?
2. Since withholding treatment doesn't seem like an option they will consider, how can we ever know if these same children would have recovered without any intervention?
As a person carrying the broad autism phenotype, I am concerned how much of this type of speculation is leading current research and how we can make it more accurate.
For example, my sister and I both have children that also display the Broad autism phentotype. She also has a child with Kanner's. Before we discovered the existence of autism, and it's existence in our family (confirmed when her son was diagnosed and we figured out the HFA that had been missed in others)our children were all latetalking without an explanation. My oldest daughter did not talk until 4, not until 4 1/2 where I could understand her. She then rapidly improved once communication was established and her frustration levels decreased.
My middle child starting talking at age 3. Both of them did not have ABA or any other ASD therapies, rather they started totally when they were ready and able to communicate. Granted, we had traditional speech therapy, but none of the expensive therapies they are telling parents are a necessity.
This followed the patterns exactly of several of the children in the videos they claim they "recovered' with $100,000 worth of ABA, dietary, and other therapies. These children were very mild on the spectrum (like mine and my sister's), and I theorize would have recovered at about that age without the therapies. The difference is, I am not publishing my theories or sending out videos convincing people to spend tons of hard-earned money to "recover" these kids.
Does anyone in the research community share my concerns? Many of these 'recoveries" are not really recoveries since in year's past children were just known as latetalkers with quirky behaviors and now are being diagnosed as HFA, PDD-NOS, or similar diagnoses. I fear these cases will skew the data of the more sever cases that we should be focusing on.