Families of autistics sue over therapy
Families of autistic kids sue over therapy's elimination
I just read this article this morning. Apparently, some parents have been denied funding for Floortime for their kids. Budget cuts are hitting everyone hard, and autistic kids are no exception.
Their reasoning? Floortime hasn't yet been subjected to a large-scale controlled study.
Hello, Autism Speaks? You've got some serious explaining to do. Didn't you say you were going to spend all that money we sent you for scientific resarch? Why has Floortime--a well-known, logical, established therapy for autism--not even been investigated?!
Oh. Right. Silly of me; finding that prenatal test is more important. Obviously, it's much more important to abort autistic fetuses than it is to help autistic people alive today. It makes more sense to just ignore currently living autistics. Autistic people can't possibly have a good life while still autistic, because, y'know, autism makes you a walking tragedy.
It's not just Autism Speaks, of course. There are a lot of people doing research of this sort--either prevent or cure; nothing touching on education or therapy. Just down the hall from where I did statistics (and occasional heart-and-kidney-weighing) for a toxicology lab, another lab had been working on the possibility that oxytocin had something to do with autism. Every other day, Medline pulls down another article about some gene or some hormone related to autism; almost never is there anybody doing studies on how to best educate autistic children, how to make workplaces autistic-friendly, or how to help families raise their autistic children successfully.
That Floortime hasn't been investigated rigorously seems like a glaring oversight to me. What I know of the method seems like it would be a very good way to teach an autistic child, especially if there were little functional communication available. Imitation is how many children learn things; and if the child can't imitate yet, having the therapist or parent do the imitation makes a lot of sense--especially since that ties in with one of the simplest things any child learns: Cause and effect. If I do this, they do that. If I do that, this other thing happens. Interaction and communication can be learned that way (PECS takes advantage of the simplicity of cause-and-effect, for example). And it's a great deal less stressful for the child, apparently--and remember that in autism, stress is a big problem--because the child does much of the initiating. If anything, giving the child a good deal of the initiative might be a solution to the problem of prompt-dependence so many ABA therapists struggle with--and yet, no real research has been done on it. That is ridiculous.
I know, I know--it's difficult to recruit enough people; definitely more difficult than recruiting a bunch of rats, or even, as the researchers down the hall did, gathering samples from autistic children. It's difficult to blind parents, students, and therapists effectively--therapists can't be blinded at all. There's the problem of control groups--you can't very well leave your control group of autistics without any therapy whatsoever; and wait-list controls can only last so long. And there's the reasoning (kind of stupid, in my opinion) that because ABA has been proven to work (i.e., proven to extinguish autistic behaviors), it's unethical to use anything else, whether or not half the ABA kids get traumatized along the way and the other half can't do anything unless they're ordered to do it. (Exaggerating here. Not by much, though.) And yes, it's long-term. Anything with autism has to be, or you can't see the way the kids develop.
But really, is it too much to ask to get somebody, somewhere to do some research on this? It seems really promising, and it's been around for ages. And yet, nobody's even checked it out.
I just read this article this morning. Apparently, some parents have been denied funding for Floortime for their kids. Budget cuts are hitting everyone hard, and autistic kids are no exception.
Their reasoning? Floortime hasn't yet been subjected to a large-scale controlled study.
Hello, Autism Speaks? You've got some serious explaining to do. Didn't you say you were going to spend all that money we sent you for scientific resarch? Why has Floortime--a well-known, logical, established therapy for autism--not even been investigated?!
Oh. Right. Silly of me; finding that prenatal test is more important. Obviously, it's much more important to abort autistic fetuses than it is to help autistic people alive today. It makes more sense to just ignore currently living autistics. Autistic people can't possibly have a good life while still autistic, because, y'know, autism makes you a walking tragedy.
It's not just Autism Speaks, of course. There are a lot of people doing research of this sort--either prevent or cure; nothing touching on education or therapy. Just down the hall from where I did statistics (and occasional heart-and-kidney-weighing) for a toxicology lab, another lab had been working on the possibility that oxytocin had something to do with autism. Every other day, Medline pulls down another article about some gene or some hormone related to autism; almost never is there anybody doing studies on how to best educate autistic children, how to make workplaces autistic-friendly, or how to help families raise their autistic children successfully.
That Floortime hasn't been investigated rigorously seems like a glaring oversight to me. What I know of the method seems like it would be a very good way to teach an autistic child, especially if there were little functional communication available. Imitation is how many children learn things; and if the child can't imitate yet, having the therapist or parent do the imitation makes a lot of sense--especially since that ties in with one of the simplest things any child learns: Cause and effect. If I do this, they do that. If I do that, this other thing happens. Interaction and communication can be learned that way (PECS takes advantage of the simplicity of cause-and-effect, for example). And it's a great deal less stressful for the child, apparently--and remember that in autism, stress is a big problem--because the child does much of the initiating. If anything, giving the child a good deal of the initiative might be a solution to the problem of prompt-dependence so many ABA therapists struggle with--and yet, no real research has been done on it. That is ridiculous.
I know, I know--it's difficult to recruit enough people; definitely more difficult than recruiting a bunch of rats, or even, as the researchers down the hall did, gathering samples from autistic children. It's difficult to blind parents, students, and therapists effectively--therapists can't be blinded at all. There's the problem of control groups--you can't very well leave your control group of autistics without any therapy whatsoever; and wait-list controls can only last so long. And there's the reasoning (kind of stupid, in my opinion) that because ABA has been proven to work (i.e., proven to extinguish autistic behaviors), it's unethical to use anything else, whether or not half the ABA kids get traumatized along the way and the other half can't do anything unless they're ordered to do it. (Exaggerating here. Not by much, though.) And yes, it's long-term. Anything with autism has to be, or you can't see the way the kids develop.
But really, is it too much to ask to get somebody, somewhere to do some research on this? It seems really promising, and it's been around for ages. And yet, nobody's even checked it out.