Leave the pro-cure groups alone

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To the person who says autism gets worse as you age.

Not sure about other people but here's what happened.

I am still learning social skills. I've managed to learn alot but still have problems in that area. I've still learned though and continuing to learn and who's to say that because people can talk alot that they have great social skills if all that is being talked about is fashion, movies basically small talk and gossip? Is that really all that "good"?


Sensory issues, with both lights and sounds, it's getting worse as I age. Not better. Then again walk in just about anywhere and there are very bright lights. Alot of noise and traffic.

I'm not as aloof with people. That hasn't gotten worse. Although I can't really be in group settings without going off in my own world due to not being able to make out what people are saying and may get strange looks, the only way it bothers you is if you actually like that sort of thing. It does bother me however when people give strange looks in an obvious manner but for the most part, it's usually just the minority in a group setting doing that.

Special interests? I'm very happy with my interests just as I am sure that others are happy with their interests. I don't consider my interests to be "special" don't know why it's labelled that unless by society standards of normal interests are also special interests because people sure do spend alot of time paying attention to sports and their own brand of magazines that interest me none but because it's not for the majority mine is called "special" well that's great but it's still just an interest.

In some ways, for me anyway, when I get better at some skills I was not so good at, it seems like some other traits amplify or wane like adjusting a sliding scale.

For the most part on an average scale, while sensory issues seem to be getting worse, some things are still the same and others are better based on normal standards.

Oh and sense of humor? I have one. I just refuse to laugh at jokes that aren't apparently jokes nor funny. Some people will fake the laughter even when they don't find it funny. You can count on me to not do that. It may upset you as it's not standard procedure but when you want to tell jokes people will laugh at no matter what, go to those that will turn on the laughter. When you want someone to discuss broader and focused topics with, you can come to my world.

Nice straw man argument you have there. I never said anything about screenings, and screenings aren't cures so I don't know why you brought that up.



Perhaps I should reclarify my statement (as I seem to have to do with every single post I make since people are just so determined to make me out to be Mr. Bad Guy): The longer a person waits to get treatment for autism, the less effective treatment is. Which leads us to something you said in your post:

"There's no treatment for autism. None. There's therapies..."

Notice anything contradictory in that statement? In case you weren't aware, therapies are considered treatments.

Finally, your last comment is more or less nothing but semantics. I'm not going to waste my time arguing over something that trivial. I'll admit you're right, but why you bothered to write a paragraph over something that inane is beyond me.

How about, "No"?

There is stuff for that, but most of it's illegal and/or harmful to the body, if you catch my drift.

In my vocabulary, therapies are treatment. What, for you, is the distinction?

It doesn't matter if you mentioned screenings or not, I'm talking about what's going on as a form of a "cure". You can do your own research to understand.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7013251/

Buxbaum says there could be a prenatal test within 10 years.

“If we get to the point where we have 10 genes that predict risk to some significant degree, then there is a prenatal test,” he said.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where all this bad media awareness plus prenatal screening in the future will turn into.

Those advocating for a cure are actively seeking genetic research for prenatal screening. That is their idea of cure.

When people hear the word cure, they think of something nice as in treatment. I'm all for treatment but not the idea of cure in form of prenatal screening and pregnant women being fed all these horror stories through the media which will incite enough fear to get her to abort.

knowing enough about molecular biology that makes me nervous. It wouldn't eliminate autism and you would have to define "risk" and "significant degree" and you would most likely just be aborting perfectly good fetuses in the "hopes" that they actually would have autism. Sounds silly.

and you can hear the doctor's

"Your child has a 60% percent chance of being born with autism"

means

"Your child might have 10 genes that we think predicts ASD with a 60% chance of being correct. And since LFA is approximately 20-40% of the ASD... we are just going to go with 60% chance of autism since you watched Rainman and we don't like to be honest or do the math. Fear Mongering FTW!"

Screenings aren't cures. A cure is something that eliminates a disorder/condition/disease/illness/etc in a person who is already afflicted. No one would think of screenings as a cure, but rather a way to avoid getting saddled with the extra responsibility and financial burden of raising an autistic child (not so bad in cases of HFA and AS, but much more so in LFA children). If, however, we came up with an actual cure then even with screenings I don't think many abortions would happen.

You do know that autism is often overlapping with giftieness, right? Where'll we get our future heads of companies if you remove everyone carrying a substantial proportion of "the genes"?

Someone once told me, nature/genetics is the winding hill road, and nuture is the weather that comes at any particular moment, opportune or otherwise. Either can delay development to various degrees.

Screenings aren't cures in a sane mind but the insane like to believe that aborting autistic children in general is the idea cure and that should not be the option.

I'm all for treatment, not mistreatment.

Sure, I'll leave pro-cure people alone - on the condition that they leave autistic people alone, or at least let them make their own life decisions without condescendingly imposing their own wishes and beliefs on them.

That's the problem, however - too many people, like you, would assume that since THEY value good social skills, and since THEY see marriage, sex and reproduction as the be-all-end-all of life, that EVERYONE does, and if they don't, there's something wrong with them that needs fixing. However, if what makes another person happy is being single and spending their time learning how to play complex pieces on the violin, or studying trains and building models of them, or memorizing the anatomy of a certain type of animal, who is the person who values marriage and family to tell them that this is wrong or inferior? A person has the right to define themselves and act on that identity provided it imposes no burden or harm on others. Someone who forces their "normal" values on others who are not like themselves is causing MUCH more harm than someone who is eccentric but keeps to themselves about it.


As for the question of cures and how they would be implemented, I strongly believe, for both medical and psychological treatments, that children and other dependents should not be forced against their will through treatments that:
-Are not for the purposes of restoring crucial functions lost, saving a life (the person's or someone else's who is endangered by them) or giving them a GUARANTEED benefit from the perspective of everyone involved. (i.e., if someone has adjusted to living with autism, they should be able to stay autistic if that's what they prefer and know how to live with)
-Are significantly risky given what the treatment involves AND/OR are extremely painful and invasive, causing significant impairment or psychological harm. (i.e., certain medications with severe side effects and aversives used at places like the JRC)
-Could be replaced instead by less risky and uncomfortable procedures. (i.e., social skills therapy, occupational/physical therapy for those with movement problems, teaching them to communicate in alternative ways, etc.)
-Are more for the parents or guardians so they can have the person they want to see rather than being based on what the person him or herself wants out of life and how he or she sees themselves. (The difference between "I don't want to deal with an autistic person because it will make me look bad and it will be hard to deal with for me" and "I want to help give my child/charge the tools they need to do what they want with their life.")

People, however old they are, whatever their mental state and whatever they may look like, are not dolls to be altered to other's liking. If they pose a clear threat to others and in some drastic cases themselves, yes, their rights should be limited. And should they be at risk for losing crucial aspects of functioning, there is nothing wrong with advising them to seek treatment. However, I know all too well that even children have a sense of self that they want to preserve, and that having other people's will imposed on them when it's not even necessary so much as it is self-interested on the parts of those forcing treatments can be extremely damaging - psychologically as well as due to the risks incurred from the actual treatment.

I fully support people being able to choose a cure for themselves and themselves alone - just as I am allowed to define myself as a person with physical and mental differences, they are free to define themselves as normal people waiting to happen. However, I fear that if any sort of cure was invented, no matter how makeshift it was at first and no matter what the potential costs were, parents would line up to put their kids through it without thought about the ramifications, immediate or long-term. The first people on which these cures would be used would not be seriously disabled adult LFA volunteers who are desperately awaiting a cure. In fact, my guess is that they would be, ironically enough, the last ones able to afford the treatment or otherwise have access to it. No, the first wave of those "cured" would be children who had no more choice in the matter than lab rats have a choice of whether to have cosmetics poured in their eyes or not. This issue, more than any ideas about Aspie superiority or the potential for genocide, is why I am wary about a cure that could fully transform an autistic into an NT.

Yep, and this is exactly what Autism Speaks and some researchers wants to do. Autism is associated with a personality-type, and trying to exterminate this personality-type through abortion is nothing else than genocide.



Complete BS, of course.



Do you think this is why I and many other adult Aspies today live a productive life while the new generation that is "treated early" is sky-rocketing in diagnosis, anxiety and ineffective treatments?



There is no cure for personality-traits. You just need to face reality.



You have no clue, do you?

I'm having to agree with rdos' comment^, 100% there.

I'm sorry if this was posted here before:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article379.html

They actually admitted their goal is to "eradicate Autism from exsistence."

You act like I'm an NT coming on here to bash aspies. I'm not, I also have AS. I'm just not deluded into thinking that it's this great, magnificent diagnosis that has so many huge benefits and only one or two very minor drawbacks. Unlike many people on here I don't really see it as my personality. Sure, it's a part of my personality no doubt, but I'd like to think that perhaps I'm just a little bit more autonomous so as to have my own, unique individuality rather than one that is preordained and controlled by AS. If I were to wake up tomorrow and not have AS anymore I think the only things that would change would be that I would have a better gauge of how to act in social situations, I would find it easier to make friends, and I probably wouldn't sit in odd postures anymore (though in the latter case that's not necessarily something that would be missed seeing as how I ruined my spine by sitting in said odd postures my whole life). I'd still be a very logical guy, I'd still be smart, I'd still have an obsessive personality (thanks to OCD), I'd still be an atheist, I would still be a tech geek, I would still be creative, and many other positive things.

Anyway, in direct response to your comments (in order because I hate doing that multiple box quote thing):

1. So you're saying that Autism Speaks has an agenda to commit mass murder and/or sterilization against those on the autistic spectrum? Because handing someone a pill that cures them of social deficiencies is hardly wiping out the gene pool.
2. You can read my response to everyone else who raised that point because I'm tired of repeating myself
3. I was mostly referring to LFAs. But as far as AS is concerned, I do think that it's important to catch it as early as possible. I got treatment starting when I was 9 or 10 and today I'm MUCH better off as a result. On the flip side I've seen kids who didn't get treatment until their teens, if they did at all, and those kids are as socially awkward and oblivious as I was when I was 12.
4. I'm not referring to personality traits. I'm referring to aspies difficulty learning social skills and LFA's difficulties learning just about everything, as well as issues with sensory overload.
5. For you last comment about me "having no clue" tell me just what it is that I don't know. Because, you see, I think I do know this quite well. How do I know? Well I'll explain it to you:

"No doctor in their right mind is going to purposefully harm a patient (and this would be considered harming a person)."
Doctors are sworn to the hippocratic oath which binds them professionally to never harming a patient. Society would view giving someone a PDD like autism or AS as harming them. Granted some doctors may be willing to do this if it can be proven that this is what the patient truly wants to the point where it's almost a need, but those docs are hard to come by. Case in point: There are some people who, despite being perfectly healthy, feel that they need to have an amputation of particular limbs in order to feel "right" (which limbs these are differs from person to person). While some doctors have gone through with amputations in these cases, those docs are very hard to come by as most will simply refuse outright to do such a thing, even if they think that the person truly wants it to be done.

"No pharmaceutical company is going to pump out a drug that gives people a PDD."
Considering that society would consider giving someone a PDD as harming them, such a drug would be viewed as having no benign uses. So unless the company likes being buried in lawsuits it's not going to manufacture such a drug. Even assuming that it did become an acceptable practice to intentionally give someone an ASD, such a drug would still never get made because the profit motive wouldn't exist. There simply wouldn't be a big enough of a market to warrant the billions of dollars in R&D costs that it would take to make the drug.

"No scientist is going to research how to turn people into aspies unless they happen to stumble upon that fact in the process of developing a cure, or if they're doing some sort of weapons research."
Researchers working at universities are bound to ethical overview by their institution's IRB. Of the many ethical considerations are whether the research would benefit anyone. In this case, whether it would or not would be extremely controversial. As such it's unlikely that an IRB would greenlight research meant to figure out how to give people a PDD. Of course, once you know how to cure something you usually know how to cause it as well, which is why I said "unless they happen to stumble upon that fact in the process of developing a cure". Weapons research is thus the only way that such a goal would be deliberately met. And even then most researchers refuse to do weapons research due to their personal ethics. The ones that don't mind doing such research are usually already working for the government for weapons development companies.

Ok, as far as the cure is concerned, if you want it, by all means support it. We're not stopping you. The only problem we have is when pro-cure groups labor under the assumption that ALL aspies and auties want to be cured, when in reality many of us could care less. It's not the idea of a cure we're against; but it's the idea of forced cures, euthanasia, and prenatal screening/abortions that groups such as Autism Speaks are propagating that are the reason most of us here are on the verge of inciting open rebellion.

Merry Christmas!

Roxas