Susan Senator

It is no secret that I do not take sides in The Autism Debates. This is because I know and love so many people on both sides, and I am a Libran, so I see worthy points in both of their arguments.

Today I was thinking more about the side in favor of biomedical inteventions because I heard from a reader who was so enthusiastic about how the DAN! protocol “worked” for her son, in that it helped his functioning and communication levels. It dawned on me that I should blog what I was thinking: that there might be many conditions out there being called “autism” but that are possibly something else that just manifests as autism.

We are all aware that there are many more kids with allergies today than there used to be. Unlike autism, it is much easier to diagnose an allergy. No one can claim that the rise in allergies is about better diagnosing, because most of the time having an allergy is a clear-cut thing, where you get some adverse reaction that is pretty straightforward and unmistakable anaphylaxis or something like that.

Or so we think. What if there were something called “Allergy Spectrum Disorder,” where you have a much larger spectrum of allergic response, from sneezing at pollen all the way up to autistic-like symptoms from eating gluten? I think that this is the ASD that some parents are looking at, frankly, and not the ASD my son was born with. It is hard to ignore the scores of “success stories,” where you hear of a kid becoming so much more verbal within a few weeks of discontinuing gluten and casein. There must be some explanation for that.

I think there are three possible explanations: 1) The diet helped the child’s allergic symptoms; or 2) The child was improving on his own and had a burst of development that coincided with the use of the diet; or 3) The child has not improved much, really, but the parents are so happy and relieved to be taking action that they feel differently and see things differently, and see their child with new, positive eyes.

Any of the above are happy occurrences, when you think about it. The problem comes when one side wants to make a claim that would become a generalization for all kids. Once the biomedical side claims that all autism is is a form of environmental poisoning for all autistic kids, and that we all should act now to obliterate autism, that is when the the trouble starts. Once the autistic-rights side claims that there is no way to address autistic-like symptoms with biomedical interventions, and that we should stop trying to find a cure for autism because that is an insult to all autistics, that is when the trouble starts.

Parents must find the right balance between trying to improve/alter their child and trying to give him the skills to have his best shot at life. Society must find the right balance between trying to include and accept people with disabilities and differences, and trying to ameliorate the conditions that cause disorders (cure them). These are tall orders for a human race that is all too human and racist to begin with…

Maybe what we should be looking to understand is HSD: Human Spectrum Disorder.