Talk:RyansWorld: Cure for Autism

Insult
This article is an insult, Autism is not a disease so you can not cure it. Delete it now or I will.


 * I removed all references of calling autism a disease. Are you happy now? Nanobots will cure autism even if it's considered a medical condition. 209.205.36.27 03:30, December 23, 2009 (UTC)

Sound
You make Autism sound like a disease, it could be the next stage in human evolution.


 * Autism is a disability according to the government of Ontario. You make yourself sound like an idiot for saying differently. 209.205.36.110 16:58, December 23, 2009 (UTC)
 * Then the Ontario government is wrong.
 * The Ontario Government is not wrong, Homesun is a fool for not wanting to get his autism cured. 209.205.36.3 03:05, January 2, 2010 (UTC)

Idiotic
Autism is not a disease/disability that can be cured. And considering how out-of-their-mind most "normal" people appear to be, I wouldn't want this so-called cure anyway. The above poster is correct, autism is an evolutionary occurrence. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong.
 * Thanks, down with Ryansworld

You got to be kidding me
how can there be a cure autism? it's not even a disease it's a mental condition and yet most morons treat mental conditions as diseases under some delusion that it's contagious the irony is it's not contagious it's often hereditaryCrypto457 05:56, March 12, 2010 (UTC)

An autistic scientists view of autism
Perhaps my view of what "autism" is might be affected by my being autistic. To me, autism is an aspect of the human condition which affects how a person communicates with other people (and also how a person communicates with self).

In his book, "The Liar in Your Life" (Twelve, 2009), University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman states on page 258 that, "All of us are liars." And yet, on page 73, he states that "Parents of children with autism often report that their children are simply incapable of lying." Also, on page 73, "Consider the irony of the situation. Honesty in children with autism is viewed as a manifestation of their disorder. Subsequently, autistic children who were originally unfailingly honest but have begun to show signs of lying effectively are considered to be showing improvement in their condition." {Please note that the above quotations comply with my understanding of copyright fair use.}

It is my experience that the usual transition from infancy to childhood (sometimes called the infant-child discontinuity in some psychology papers) is about learning the social expectation of learning the techniques of effective lying. To me, so-called psychological defenses are mental processes (or mechanisms) which distort reality in the service of the ego (the ego in the Freudian sense) in order for a person to function in socially-deemed appropriate ways.

Mental processes which distort reality? I find no valid distinction between distorting reality and lying about reality, and perhaps this is because I am autistic? No wonder some children treated me in ways that led me to reject suicide on the third day of kindergarten. I suppose they wanted to help me become "normal" like them.

What may separate me, as an autistic person, from people who are not autistic is my not being able to learn effective lying in the sense found in Feldman's book. Alas, for me (if for no one else), I experience my being autistic as I am as the optimal way for me to be in terms of my having a truly decent life. I have no way to fear being caught (and punished?) for lying.

Oops, I make mistakes, sorry. The title was meant to be, "An autistic scientist's view of autism"

Bioengineer 15:06, March 27, 2010 (UTC)

Biological Pattern Recognition Methodologies and the Autism Spectrum
It occurs to me that I may usefully add to what I previously wrote and saved here for others to wonder about.

As a graduate student in bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (now the University of Illinois at Chicago) in the early 1970s, my advser, Dr. Earl E. Gose, was one of the pioneers in an engineering-based approach to the possible improvment of accuracy in medical diagnosis. While I understand traditional diagnosis to be primarily based on "frequentist statistical methods" such as are used in the contemporary Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR" (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), Dr. Gose also used Bayesian statistical methods because, so I understand, frequentist methods can be profoundly biased against prior learning.

In the late 1980s, as I was doing the fieldwork for my thesis and dissertation, talking extensively with psychologists and psychiatrists, one well-trained psychiatrist remarked to me, "You are as good at diagnosis as I am, but you have a different system." I replied, "The difference is, my system works." In "my system," I use both frequentist and Bayesian statistical methods, and I use Bayesian methods to decide when to use frequentist and when to use Bayesian methods.

Given that not all the diagnostic criteria in the DSM are purely dichotomous, and using the methods of my adviser and of my subsequent work, I find that the DSM system (including both Autistic Disorder and Asperger's Disorder) allows for the possibility of at least billions of unique biological conditions which qualify as one or another form of autism. Many of these may well be of "genetic defects" which will eventually be "correctible" through using "nanobots" to correct genome mutations which are inherently damaging to the individual who has them. Others may perchance be of the cutting edge of advancing human genetic evolution.

Consider a person born blind. The pathways from light external to the person's body to the visual centers within the person's brain did nor form in such a way as to allow the person to not be visually blind in the usual sense of visual blindness. Some of such folks might truly and gratefully welcome nanobots which would generate or repair the missing or defective aspects of the visual pathways; thereby providing a formerly blind person with vision similar to that which sighted people commonly have.

That "autism" is one word does not mean, to me, that this one word has only one meaning for only one biological condition. The genuine fact that I find that I do not "suffer from autism" or "suffer from being autistic" in no way suggests to me that someone else who qualifies for an autism spectrum diagnosis as well as or even better than I do is not suffering from autism or from being autistic.

Based on my grasp of accurate medical diagnosis methodologies, I find that the word "autism" is a word for a very diverse collection of biological phenomena which happen (by happenstance?) to share a particular rather small set of clinical signs as understood by a particular set of clinical diagnosticians.

When I was seven, my parents thought it might be time for me to learn to ride a bicycle, since I had mastered riding a tricycle rather well. Across the street from us was a vacant block where there had been a public school which had been torn down because of having become obsolete. The ground was rough, with chunks of concrete here and there. At first, I noticed "potholes" and "rocks" because I knew that riding into them could be dangerous. Alas, not understanding better, by looking where the danger was, there is where I went. It took me a while to understand that, to avoid the potholes and rocks, I needed to look at the safe ground between rocks and potholes while not ignoring them.

The difficulty I have with a purely medical model of human biology is simply that every departure from some statistical average gets deemed as a disease regardless of whether the departure effectively is an advantage for the person or is a disadvantage. I find that defining every difference from some measure of central tendency to necessarily be a sign of disease sometimes results in people being harmed. Applying the medical model to the whole of human biology is, to me, like learning to ride a bicycle on rough ground with broken chunks of concrete scattered about and looking intensely only at the "potholes" and "rocks." If all one looks for is disease, that, surely, is all one will find?

Perhaps some folks who read what I write may notice that I avoid what seems to me to be a form of the childish game of "king of the mountain," in which one person attempts to build himself or herself up by putting others down. Such methods may work properly for some, or even many people, yet I can find no way whereby I can improve my sense of self by attempting to diminish another person's sense of self.

Were "autism" a single condition, it would be possible to determine whether autism is a disease/disorder or a beneficial aspect of the evolution of the human species. Alas, I find the directly observable diversity of folks who qualify for being assigned to some place on the autism spectrum to be such as to rule out my deciding, other than by what an individual "on the spectrum" tells me, whether a particular autistic person or person with autism has a biological advantage or a biological defecit because of autism.

Bioengineer 18:33, March 27, 2010 (UTC)

There is nothing wrong with this page.
This article on autism is NOT offensive. The article is perfectly fine. I'm Autistic, and I see Autism as a gift- not a hindrance. However even if there was a cure for autism, I wouldn't accept it, but I would rather accept my identity and be happy for who I am. CNashhinton 15:44, August 8, 2011 (UTC)

So enlightened by this
Your article is very informative. I was so relieved to see this article here, knowing that there are some people who would like for a cure to be found. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one can speak for all autistics and families living with it on a daily basis. I would loved to have a conversation with my child and understand what and how he's feels. Keep me posted! ( mom)

aspergers cure
Is the cure also going to be used for aspergers101.172.188.148 14:01, December 13, 2011 (UTC)

Urban Myth
The Theory that Childhood Vaccines cause Autism is an Urban Myth, made up by a PseudoDoctor in the USA, and propagated by tabloid Newspapers