You understand that you are helping to make a point. Cystic fibrosis is genetic and it is recognized as a medical condition. Autism is shoved into a psychiatric category. For the medical community, it is locked behind the blood brain barrier and untreatable. This is why, with the numbers as high as they are, precious little medical research is being done.
This is also why the fight over vaccines has been so toxic. So much of the little research that has been done has been dedicated to proving that vaccines did not cause the rise in autism. It has made all of the statements on the antivax side false and all of the statements on the provax side true. Neither is correct and that makes the autism medical research base a house built on a foundation of sand.
It is also why I understand the desperation that leads so many parents to try other treatments. If medicine had anything with even reasonable efficacy, most of the alternatives would melt away.
While the experts decry the alternative medicine and the backlash against vaccines, their lack of progress has plowed and sewn the field where these things grew.

…. recognition of at least a few different methods of teaching/therapies that were well-researched, and a consensus reached that they would work for at least some children

ABA’s worked “best” for Charlie with a lot of flexibility and willingness and open-mindedness to incorporate different ways of thinking and teaching.

@alyric, I’ve been thinking about Charlie’s spontaneous speech vs. what he was taught to say—-there’s a lot of the spontaneous speech but the meaning is not always as clear to any listener. Often the “rote” phrases taught to Charlie tend to be ones he says really really fast and without always seeming to know what they mean.

@Ed,
Certainly it’s always important to consider the effects of what Charlie’s eaten on him—-from the biomedical interventions that we’ve known of and tried, I’m not sure that any of them could provide complete or lasting solutions. But then, we’ve found that educational solutions have had the most long-lasting effects for Charlie (for Charlie, not sure of course about everyone else!).

In my experiences learning styles are even more disparate among autistic children and teenagers- what works for one child can be actively harmful or useless for another. I know that I’ve mentioned our horrible experience with my son and ABA, while my daughter who did ABA with the same therapists at the same time responded to it very well.

My personal preference would be that there would be a recognition of at least a few different methods of teaching/therapies that were well-researched, and a consensus reached that they would work for at least some children. Although I’m a huge fan of the phrase “do what works”, unfortunately that can sometimes imply things like dolphin therapy and HBOT

We’ve been lucky to have teams of professionals and teachers who are all pretty on the ball, prefer scientifically valid studies, and want to help me make the best decisions for our kids. In the long run, I’ve found what works best for my kids is taking bits and pieces of different things- ABA, floortime, OT- including sensory diets and things like Snozelen rooms, social stories, speech, music therapy, etc. I think that I would be uncomfortable in a world where there was a consensus on only “one” thing (unless we find something new that we haven’t found yet that truly does work for all children and teenagers).

Hopefully at some point our discussions in the autism world can move past vaccines into things that can truly make a difference for the autistic people in our lives.

My son is 21 now and I have been through it. There is only so much that can be done with an autistic child through ABA or any other behavioral teaching method. So now what?

There has to be a medical change. ABA et al try to break through the blocks that are in the way of autistic learning. Only a medical change will remove them. It can be done but not while the focus is on “I didn’t do it” research.

You mentioned some time ago that Charlie’s spontaneous speech was more fluent than his ‘trained’ for want of a better word. There seemed to be some clash between what came naturally and what came via ABA.

Seems to me that if problems are going to arise with whatever teaching method, it’s going to be years after the event. So yeah, we need the range of methods and they need to be based on something a bit more concrete than somebody’s bright idea or antiquated psychological theory.,which is AFAIK currently all of them.