Double-tap Autism – perhaps an important variant
In spite of the recent drive to improve autism awareness, mainly in North America, very much more could be done to understand the condition itself. Rather than just giving it different names (now ASC rather than ASD, for example) and broadening the “catchment area” of the autism diagnosis, would it not be wise to better study the “disease” itself? In most countries, people with autism are not treated by any doctor, so a huge pool of possible information is lost forever. We just have anecdotal evidence, and much of that can be emotionally distorted by care givers. Whether I want to or not, I just can’t keep noticing things in the media that make me take note. I do get lots of people writing to me, sending me links to articles and I do admit to looking at some other people’s blogs. The clever researchers studying autism, and the handful of clinicians writing about it, do not seem to notice the same things as me. So I will go a little further and define a new...