The Fairytale of a Static Rate of Autism – Chapter 2

Posted by: passionlessdrone on: January 31, 2010

• In: Autism | Prevalence | Synthetics | The Fairytale | Willing Disbelief | You Can Call Me Curebie
• 1 Comment

Hello friends –

This post really ought to be Chapter 1, but since I wrote the other post first, and sort of liked the title, so  we’ll just pretend; these posts are all about make believe in any case, right?

There is only one valid reason not to vigorously pursue environmental causes of autism; you need to believe that our observation of an increased rate of autism, one hundred percent of it, is an artifact of the four horsemen of the imaginary increase:

• Diagnostic Substitution
• Greater Awareness
• Increased Accessibility to Diagnosis
• Widening of Diagnostic Criteria

Lets start off with a couple of honest admissions and the reason they don’t make a whit of difference if our goal is to expose the notion of a static rate of autism as a fairytale, and a dangerous one at that. 

• I have read very few papers regarding prevalence fully.  In fact, I can’t think of the title of a single one.   In the context of a precautionary principle, however, the methods and discussion for this type of study don’t really matter much;  because the brush strokes used to craft the results are so necessarily broad and imprecise that they are admitted as meaningless even by people who believe in the fairytale.  Think about it.   The only way we have a static rate of autism is if all of our previous studies utilized methods of such poor quality that they missed ##-## per 100,000 cases of autism, where you get to replace ##-## with any set of numbers lower than 100 as you move backwards in time.  The conclusions in our previous prevalence studies are so discordant over time that the flaws in their methodology are the super strings of the fairytale; responsible for all of our observations of increased autism rates while having  natural physical properties that render them impossible to elucidate on completely.  Given that even the proponents of the fairytale don’t give the methods of previous studies any currency, why should anyone? 

 

• I cannot provide meaningful estimates on what percentage of the observed increase in rates is real versus artifact.  Again, however, in the prism of a precautionary principle, it doesn’t matter, because any amount of real increase is alarming, and the only possible unalarming possibility is a zero percent increase.  Here is a little thought exercise to illustrate this; imagine you are on a debate team and the topic is; “Autism rates have risen by X percent, health crisis or not?” and your team has drawn the ‘not a crisis’ side.  Insert any number greater than zero for X, and then try to construct debate points to make this argument to a crowd of skeptics.  This argument is implied whenever the fairytale is invoked, sometimes with the assertion that any real increase is “minor”, but one surefire way to get a storyteller to dissolve from a discussion is to try to get a value more concrete than “minor”  for X.   Autism is a disability, and while there are arguments to be made that it is also a ‘difference’, it isn’t a difference like having red hair or being left handed anymore than dyslexia is a different way of reading; any true increase has broad implications for us all. 

 

• I have no doubt that the four factors listed above are, indeed, responsible to one degree or another towards what we are observing in autism rates.   Unfortunately, unless we are able to explain our ever rising rates of autism completely with these explanations, we still must contend with ramifications of a true increase.  

Even with the above caveats, a compelling case can be made that what we are observing is comprised of an actual increase in behaviors consistent with an autism diagnosis,  and the argument that autism rates are static is long on faith and very low on the lifeblood of science; reliable data. 

– pD

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Tags: Autism, Fairytale, Incidence, Prevalence