Regarding facilitated communication, I share your skepticism. However, I think much or most of it is done with good intentions by well intentioned people. People subconsciously assisting in a fraud for altruistic reasons. However, medical professionals need to address this honestly and accurately.

My wife is a medical professional and developmentally delayed infants have been her specialty for years. She’s seen a lot of autism and she does think it’s becoming more prevalent. Her theory is twofold: more women having children late in life and a society and medical profession more attuned to finding cases on the “more normal” end of the spectrum.

She also works with kids and their parents, and most all of the parents are susceptible to anything that might help their child. It’s interesting; it seem that many of the fathers try to deny it, or try methods like the “throwing on sand” technique written in a prior comment whereas the mothers seem motivated to finding techniques, exercises, foods, medicines… that will result in improvements. Many couples divorce.

She is a skeptic and a good, critical thinker, but she is trained in Sensory Integration techniques and they really can help in many instances. Things like brushing, wrapping in blankets, music, swinging (there are even charges that are like cocoons, suspended from ropes that envelop the child as he swings… As in the Temple Grandin excerpt someone provided, overstimulating some of their senses seems to help them focus or tune the real world in.

Have you turned off your spambot filter?

I disagree with Grandin that this is not facilitated communication. It’s not fully facilitated communication, it is partially facilitated communication. The facilitation is not so much in the typing itself (although I believe the mother is cuing him somewhat there, too) as in the transcribing and translation and rephrasing/rewriting.

I wonder whether Grandin actually watched the video.

Some 7 years have passed since Isaacson, his wife and autistic child made the healing trip to Mongolia. It would be interesting to check up and see how things are going now.

Incidentally, when I mentioned this book to my Montana horse-owning cousin and her husband, they were not surprised at hearing the response of an autistic child to horses. They had seen the same when a special ed teacher brought some of her charges over to their acreage.

There was a book … an essay? that I read so long ago that I really can’t remember much of the particulars – basically, a young couple’s youngest daughter was what we now recognize as autistic and at the age of three or four (maybe – it’s been a very long time) and displayed a whole spectrum of phobias and odd behavior. One of them was of walking on sand … which came up all of a sudden. A family outing to the beach, or something? And her father was just at the end of his tether. He picked her up and dumped her on the sand. Several times … and that was a kind of break-through. That particular act broke through whatever sensory barrier the daughter experienced. They were able to reach their daughter, and she was able to reach to them. She still needed rather intensive schooling, but developed after that in a more normal way. Anyone else remember this account?

People with autism, for some reason, don’t understand human deception and what human nature is. Well, if they did, they would probably adjust themselves in better ways first.

So if they hear stuff about environmentalism, which is present in Japan and is independent of the PC movement in the West, it’s not like they can tell the difference between truth and false universes.

Pick any author in the West that is supposed to be educated and ask them about Global Warming. See the difference?