Autistic Science Behind Autism’s Explosion?

Pres Trump revealed more than he realized when he warned about the “explosion of autism” diagnoses. His concern about “toxins” as the possible “cause” may more rightly be recast as a disease among medical “experts” who have grossly redefined it.

The point was articulated by Allysia Finley in her WSJ op ed titled, “What’s [Really] Behind the Rise in Autism Diagnoses.” She did not mince words in arguing, “Perverse incentives for education funding are a much stronger explanation than exposure to ‘toxins.’” How bad has “Left-wing environmentalists” fearmongering “exploited anxieties by stoking fears about environmental toxins harming their kids,” Finley might as well have asked? As Trump would have recently replied, “you can’t even believe these numbers, i.e., not so long ago,1 in 10,000 children had autism …And now it’s 1 in 36.”

Indeed, those numbers are not just hard to believe, but impossible to believe, suggests Finley. “The main causes of increasing autism rates,” she says, “are heightened public attention & broader diagnostic criteria, which have encouraged more diagnoses of children & young adults who wouldn’t have been labeled autistic decades ago.” As Bill Gates offered in his new memoir “Source Code,” if he were a kid today he would likely be diagnosed on the autism spectrum because he was hyper focused & struggled to read social cues. Others, Finley writes, “may [now] get diagnosed as on the spectrum if they are late to start talking or insist on following routines like sticking to a set bedtime.” The shame of it all is that making “autism” everyman’s disease is that it wrongly “stigmatizes people who happen to be wired differently.” Count a super-perfectionist 9-year old Davd Soul who would have been included in that class of victims. But for the Grace of God & being born earlier, there go I.

Davd Soul