Professional standards are important for ASD

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TL:DR

In the other thread on mild aspergers (which, of course, exists), CryosHypnoAeon made an impassioned statement against professional standards and state licensing for medical professionals and cast this in terms of some sort of libertarian principles. Comically, he described Fnord's position on professional diagnosis as a "socialist maxim."

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=290793#p6716298

I didn't want to further hijack that thread, so I thought it would be worth starting this one.

I disagree with the views expressed by CryosHypnoAeon in that post. I think that science and medicine are built on knowledge that takes time to learn and this why we have specialized medical schools and licensing requirements for those who wish to practice medicine.

The sad reality is that before there were professional standards and licensing requirements, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen and quacks of all stripes ripped people off and killed them with bogus or toxic treatments.

In the shady borders of contemporary medicine where faith-based systems like homeopathy and chiropractic have gained a foothold we find "doctors" like Kerri Rivera (D. Hom) who will tell you how industrial bleach enemas can purify away your child's autism.

Who's to say she's wrong? It's all just a matter of opinion, right? We don't need professional standards, do we?

The FDA is here to say she's wrong: http://www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch/Safe ... 220756.htm

And the department of Justice is here to stop people from pushing this dangerous "cure:"
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/seller-mi ... racle-cure

I think that's a very good thing. I am glad there are standards for these people. I don't think that's an Orwellian nightmare, it's people asking their government to protect them from poison peddling charlatans like the Miracle Mineral Solution pushers.

Another example is the celebrity crackpot theorist, like Jenny McCarthy or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. These citizens are entitled to believe whatever fanciful nonsense they want about vaccines, but they can't call it medicine. The only defense we have against their use of their fame to spread harmful lies is our system of professional medicine.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... sts.1.html

And then there is the sad and nasty case of Jeff Bradstreet.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/ ... ism-quack/

The thing is, most people are not in position to evaluate the safety of MMS or GcMAF--they need to rely on the educated opinion of professionals--but how do they know if the person in the office is a con artist, quack or real professional? Examination boards and licensing procedures are an imperfect protection and sometimes slow to correct problems (as illustrated by the Bradstreet story) but they are the best defense against criminals, quacks and con men that we have.

This kind of legal protection is just what we have government for and its a good thing.

As we learn more about the role of gut-brain interactions in regulating neurological functions, the complexity of gene-environment interactions and epigenetic control mechanisms, the subtle ways that exposure to variations in the prenatal environment can impact fetal CNS development, and all the myriad discoveries that our rapidly progressing research is making, we need licensed medical professionals to help us understand and interpret the huge amount of new information that's coming from that process.

This doesn't mean there can't be very informed unlicensed non-professionals or that their views aren't worth hearing, or that people who suspect that they may be autistic shouldn't research autism and self-analyze until they think the preponderance of evidence suggests to themselves that they are or are not autistic. But it is to say that we do need to rely on licensed professionals and there's nothing Orwellian, socialist or totalitarian about that.

I think some degree of self-diagnosis is normal for an undiagnosed adult questioning the possibility that they may be autistic. If you want or need a definitive determination, you are not going to be happy until you have the opinion of someone who has the training and experience to assess you. If you're OK with "that sounds like me" and don't need official recognition of disability, then that's fine for you but when you need a professional view, you don't want the opinion of random neighbors-you want a professional and you expect the system of licensure and board examination to ensure that the person who claims to be a professional actually is one.

Last edited by Adamantium on 06 Aug 2015, 10:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yep...there must objective, professional standards. We have to ward off the Snake-oil salespeople!

Yes, I think I'll copy that as the TL:DR version.

While I agree with you, I think, as a more political topic, this post belongs in a different sub-forum.

Interesting. I would have thought it was more about science and understanding autism than politics, but I can see that it's both.

I find this to be the correct subforum--for it is directly related to autism. The Autism Politics section is also correct.

Six of one, half dozen of the other.

Adamantium - an excellent subject for a thread, and a beautifully reasoned, relevant post. I've been taking a break from WP for the last month, so it's nice to come back to sanity and intelligence.