My personal experience as an ASD individual, and my research on ASD, has convinced me that society is on the brink of a significant breakthrough re. ASD treatment, yet few in the ASD community are aware of this.
The video link below is the story of a woman, now 37, who suffered a massive stroke in the womb. As a result she was, effectively, born without the left side of her brain, but the right side of her brain has 'taken over' some of the functions normally carried out by the left side, enabling her to live something of a normal life (though not 100% normal). Although she doesn't have ASD per se, she exhibits some of the limitations of an ASD individual, and she's a savant (she can 'calculate' the day of a particular date).
As I stated on another thread, I myself have enjoyed considerable improvement of my ASD symptoms/limitations in recent years. So have a number of other ASD individuals worldwide. Yet ASD improvement remains a subject that is rarely discussed in the ASD community, partly because the prevalence of it is unappreciated, and partly because there's quite a bit of the 'I'm proud of being an Aspie and I don't have any need to improve' mentality. Of course no-one should be ashamed of being an Aspie, but if you couldn't maintain successful conversations in the past, or drive a car, or hold down a job and now you can that IS improvement. It's pretty silly to suggest that none of those things matter to most people. We're part of a NT society whether we like it or not. Besides, there's a big difference between being a mild Aspie with a few eccentricities and someone suffering from severe Autism and facing a lifetime of dependence (and who's parents would give anything for some improvement I can guarantee you)!
I'm NOT taking the Jenny McCarthy position here. I don't believe ASD is caused by vaccines, and I don't believe it can be 'cured' by diet, etc. However, I'm as certain as I can be that what happened to me is similar to what happened to the woman in the video (though not as extreme), i.e. over time parts of my brain that were 'damaged' (for want of a better word) in the womb gradually 'healed', and/or other parts of my brain compensated for the loss of function inflicted during gestation. I also believe that 8 hrs per day, for nearly 10 years, of mental stimulation (reading/studying/surfing) may have contributed to my improvement (I won't use the word recovery, as I know some people don't like it).
If I'm right this is a massive breakthrough for ASD. It seems that the brain is much more capable of repairing itself, following injury, than previously believed (as argued by Dr. Doidge in the video), and that this may explain ASD improvement. If so it's vital that doctors investigate this properly, and try to identify what, if anything, can be done to stimulate ASD improvement, e.g. intellectual stimulation as I described above, maybe.
I honestly believe that this is all a potentially massive breakthrough for ASD, and I urge the ASD community (including the parents of ASD children) to press for answers on this.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/1 ... nnSTCVideo
18 Apr 2010, 7:14 pm
