Any evidence that autism isn't treatable?

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This is what I think of when I hear the word "cure", and this is what I fight night and day to prevent. I also think that we're a whole lot closer to that than a couple hundred years...

To reiterate what someone else has already said, the placebo effect does not indicate psychological problems or stupidity. It just means that most people really hope that Treatment X will work and as a result may not exercise the most objective judgment over their own condition. The same applies to parents who try out treatments for their kids. Human beings are inherently subjected to biases, and that's okay. The scientific process merely seeks to objectively quantify results and control all of the variables. To prove that I don't think the placebo effect is stupidity, I'll say that I often wonder about similar issues during the course of my own "treatment." I'm not saying that people should stop trying to find what helps them to function better, but I do think some skepticism and critical thinking in the process is called for.

<sigh>

OK.... let's look again, shall we?

[A 1] How, pray tell, do you expect to change those traits? What mechanism makes it easier to make eye to eye contact? Facial expression? Gestures? I don't see a drug or diet therapy anywhere that would be able to accomplish that. BEHAVIORAL therapy yes. Not eating Twinkies? No. If you're talking about behavioral treatment you'll have a hard time finding people here to DISAGREE with you. If you think eating an active culture bacteria makes it easier to look other people in the eye?? No, not buying it.

[A 2] Failure to develop peer relationships? Define peer. I do FINE developing relationships with other Aspies, alway HAVE done fine with that. Giving up eating cheese and bread will make that easier for me?? Uh huh... it's funny, but I haven't seen that in The Lancet, or the New England Journal of Medicine. And you know, here's the funny thing, if you COULD do that, and prove it, it would be there, because the team that does that is a shoe in for a Nobel.

[A 3] Lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment... OK right at the outset here, I admit I have NEVER seen this one. Ever. But my exposure is limited to Aspie's.... honestly I have no idea if that is true for HFA or LFA, I don't think it is for Asperger's or PDD-NOS. In fact, the opposite is often cited. What else is droning on and on and on and on about our special interests to other people BUT a desire to share enjoyment? I mean, it's our special interest, so it GIVES US ENJOYMENT. We try to share. Duh.

[A 4] Lack of social and emotional reciprocity.... what? Are you telling me a diet can make my mirror neurons work?? It will give me empathy? It will make it less excruciating for me to be "social" with a barely functional person who can't seem to LEARN something basic no matter how many times I teach them? OK, a loan officer say (not that this REALLY ummm happened... yeah, that's it, it's "hypothetical") who might theoretically call me and ask if she can give a loan to a person with CRAP credit, who wants $7k of my bank's money to buy a car, that she probably won't pay for and we'll end up repossessing within 8 months for at least a $4k loss.... and when I ask WHY we would want to do that... the loan officer WOULDN'T say... "to rebuild her credit...". I wouldn't have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Put down the phone, go outside, LOOK at the front of the building and come back and tell me.... WHERE THE HELL does it say 'Charitable Organization' there?" Again as I said in a different place... only if my diet changes to single malt scotch. And if I get too many more of those phone calls, it probably will.

[B 1] So, I can see a drug therapy, or aversion therapy stopping the "preoccupation" with special interests. I can't say that I see that as beneficial.

[B 2] Adherence to rituals.... well, more or less that's OCD. I agree there are treatments for OCD, but they vary widely from person to person in how effective they are. The MOST effective are drug treatments with SSRI's etc. Since I seem to recall the OP trashtalking my main man Big Pharma (now THERE'S a rap name for you) I can't see that he would agree with me.... Of course you can use behavioral and cognitive therapy here as well. Effectiveness will vary WIDELY.

[B 3] Stimming... more or less, or Tourette's. Physical tics are a large part of Tourette's. Typically in mild cases it's left alone. The vocal tics can certainly be annoying... I recall a 1,500 mile drive from Florida to Northern Michigan where we had a couple of clucking chicken boys in the back seat. Drug therapy would have helped then... not them. Me. I would have gladly taken something.... For more severe cases, again, my man Big Pharma. Specifically, anti-psychotic drugs. Effective, but BIG time for the side effects. Caution, you should use, in this... as Yoda would say.

[B 4] Preoccupation with the parts of objects... ummm... how shall I phrase this? We call these people "mechanics, machinists, and/or engineers". It would be a BAD IDEA to stop them from doing what they do. Capice??

[C] OK, now here's a biggie. Social, Occupational or other areas of functioning. Yeah, I get that, I really do. In fact, I did treat my social AND occupational functions. I did it through education, and through understanding of what Asperger's is, and how it affects me. So, treatment? Yes. Behavioral, all the way.

[D] No clinically significant delay in language-I'm not thinking "treating" this is a good idea either. In fact from what I've seen, again limited to ASPIE'S here.... we speak, read etc. at an earlier age compared to NT's. How many here taught themselves to read?? <Raises hand> Bet I'm not the only one either.

[E] No delay in anything OTHER than social development... again, you don't want to slow down development, so no problemo. Now affecting SOCIAL development, that's well documented by early intervention classes and I HIGHLY recommend them to anyone who has them available. If they aren't available, advocate for them STRONGLY. There is no more proven strategy in socializing spectrum children than this. Oh did I shock someone? No, I'm NOT "anti-treatment", I AM anti-newagetotalbullshitstealyourmoney-ment.

[F] Criteria not met for another defined PDD or Schizophrenia. Self explanatory.

Dude, those are the symptoms. What are you talking about treating?? Seriously??? Stimming? WTF does it HURT? NT's stim too, you know... they call it football and beer. I'd rather see my kids flap their hands if they feel like it than see them drunk in front of a TV watching ritualized combat. I am NOT anti treatment. Behavioral treatments help some things. Fine, use them. Drug treatments help some things (oooohhh noooeeeezzz not BIG PHARMA) I advocate their appropriate use. You want to have people be able to look others in the eye, act more social??? Again, WHAT symptoms are you talking about, because MOST of the ones above I don't see as BAD. This is ALL addressing Asperger's I realize. Well forgive me for being an Aspie but that's my concentration. Must be one of my special interests.... If you're talking about treating a symptom for LFA, or PDD or whatever then please specify what you're talking about.

If you feel a gluten free dairy free diet makes you feel better then by all means deprive yourself, more donuts for the rest of us. Unless you're lactose intolerant or have celiac, any benefit you find will be minimal at best. If you think it helps you, fine. Frankly, believing exercise will help you and doing a couple miles a day on a bike will do you more good... now THAT'S a good way to get the old endorphins going.

The point of my post is to show that symptoms of other genetic conditions are treatable. Therefore, if autism is genetic that doesn't mean it's hopeless. There may not be proven treatments not but there may be in the future. More research is needed.

A Candida diet made eye contact easier for me, then antibiotics made it much worse. Many people report that antibiotics make autism worse and antifungals make symptoms better and one of the improvements with antifungals is eye contact. There aren't any studies on it and there probably never will be so I can't prove it.

The gfcf diet reduced the opiate effects and improved some social symptoms. There's a study on that below showing it effective. BTW, the gfcf diet has nothing to do with lactose intolerance or Celiac disease.

There are preliminary studies of effective treatments for autism symptoms:

Well, yes, but treatments aren't considered quackery because 'autism is genetic' but because they fail to deliver proper medical evidence.

Again.... Opiates are detectable in drug tests at VERY low levels. So low that Mythbusters actually proved eating poppy seeds can give you a false positive on a drug test. If eating gluten containing substances produced opiates everybody who ate KrispyKreme would get fired from Walmart... and since I'm betting they ALL eat KrispyKremes.....

That first study.... I'm sorry, but "hyperactivity"?? That's not a symptom of autism. And Omega 3's are good for a lot of things, including helping with gut disorders. I'd never tell anyone not to take those, unless they insisted on eating fresh fish to get them.

The second study... totaled 20 kids. Uh, look, studies of something like that really need to involve THOUSANDS of people. 20 can't give you a valid statistical model of anything. How many were caucasian? How many were African descent? How many had Native American ancestors? I'm not trying to be derogatory, but the model is deficient. Question, seriously, how would REDUCTION of an opiate effect make social interaction BETTER? Frankly, I'd do MUCH better at socializing if I had some, I know I seemed to socialize with the staff in the hospital better than I usually do and I was on heavy doses of opiates. People who are stoned generally seem to be quite friendly, I don't see how opiates would "cause" autism.

Gluten and casein (from milk) break down into gliadorphin and casomorphin. In most people, an enzyme called DPP-IV breaks these peptides down into amino acids. However, a few people (most autistics and a few NTs) have a problem with this enzyme and can't break them down into amino acids. If the person also has a leaky gut, they leave the gut and make their way to the brain. If I remember correctly, I tested positive for opiates the last time I was tested and I wasn't eating poppy seeds.



That's not how science works. Smaller studies are always done first before larger and much more expensive studies are done.



It's been known since 1979 that opiates cause social withdraw and autistic symptoms. Maybe your views on the opiate-autism connection caused you to experience a placebo effect when on opiates that made you more sociable and friendly but science has found that the opposite occurs in most autistics. "It was in 1979 that Jaak Panksepp published his paper which first drew attention to the similarities between the symptoms of autism and the effects of beta-endorphin in humans (and animals)...In the studies of Cade*, Reichelt* and Shattock*, approximately 80% of autistics are significantly improved (not synonymous with cured) by the STRICT removal of gluten and casein." http://www.gfcfdiet.com/Explanationofdiet.htm

zendude, you know what? I'm old and tired. How about we "agree to disagree". You don't like my science because I'm a shill for Big Pharma (and I'm STILL not seeing any checks in the mail, damnit!!) and I don't like your science because... well because most of it seems to come out of the twilight zone frankly...

Still, let's let it drop. Kinda like I'm Jewish and you're... ummm Jehovah's Witness or something. We don't agree. Never will. You go eat your twigs and berries and I'll got eat something bad for me. Honestly that's not hard. At my age damn near EVERYTHING is bad for me. You go drink some macrobiotic stuff and I'll go pop a handful of whatever the hell it is I take at night... alpha blockers, beta blockers, beta agonists, calcium channel blockers, genetically engineered hormone injections, proton pump inhibitors... pretty typical really. You know what I really need?? Chocolate.

Do you get to eat chocolate? If not, then that explains a lot... lack of chocolate will make you cranky, that's a well know scientifically proven fact...