That's exactly my issue with "autism" because it feels like lumping a bunch of things together just for the sake of simplifying health care. Meanwhile you have a bunch of people that have completely different symptoms, experiences and causes with the same diagnostic.
The vast amount of treatment for autism is therapies.
It really doesn't matter if the underlying cause is very different in terms of treatment because a speech therapist works the same with a kid with autism as they do with a kid with down syndrome.
If there were more pharmaceutical interventions then I might care a bit more. But there's just not.
In terms of the research, the researchers already have tools to sort and filter individuals based on their specific set of symptoms. Just because 2 people share an autism diagnosis doesn't really impact the research.
What objection do you have other than not liking that it's not a "pure" diagnosis?
It's lumping a bunch of things together because they are empirically linked together
People with sensory issues often also have more cognitive rigidity for example.
Autism, and many other psychological disorders, are quite literally just a lump of symptoms and presentations, because we do not have better options.
Sure, it makes navigating american health insurance easier if you can just say "Autism" and get various treatments paid for, but very similar diagnostic criteria and definitions are used in countries with fully socialized medicine.
Those people with those linked issues tend to benefit from similar treatment, and that's the entire point of a diagnostic criteria.
All the complaints come from people who seem to just not like the vibe of that?
Deal with it. Go fund more research into the heritability of neurodivergent pathologies if you want a blood test.
Some day we WILL be able to separate "Autism" into very specific diseases with specific causes, and some of those causes will have a genetic test. Unless we kill the concept of medical research because we elected morons who tear apart our institutions.
I have "Impaired vision", and I share that with people who are profoundly (but not totally) blind, and it does not matter that I can drive with glasses and they can't, and the name of that condition is not the important part.
All this handwringing about "but but but my mildly autistic son is mostly functional and I'm sad that he has the same name of condition as someone who cannot be educated past a 3rd grade level" is stupid. It does not benefit anyone struggling with autism to complain about it.
Are you aware that we have multiple medical conditions called "Palsy"s, and that they have drastically different causes and effects, such that my sister's Palsy which was caused by medical malpractice and prevented her from using her dominant hand in some cases is very different from my schoolmate's Palsy which left her wheelchair bound and requiring professional help day to day? They are both palsy because they are (partially) movement disorders stemming from nerve damage or dysfunction.
I honestly can't help but feel like the main point of people whinging at autism being a broad diagnosis is because they don't like that it makes getting treatment easy (especially coming from "the economist").
Maybe I'm not being charitable. But that really does feel like the only real outcome of trying to piecemeal the diagnosis.
I don't believe research or treatment is negatively impacted in anyway by the diagnosis being broad. If anything, that opens doors so that research isn't accidentally too narrowly focused.
The problem with broad definitions is that it causes false negatives in potential treatments. If you have a treatment that's effective on 10% of your group and useless on the rest you need a sample ten times as large to find an effect.
Or, consider TPA. It is an extremely dangerous drug (used correctly it still has greater than a 1% chance of killing the patient), if you administer it to "stroke" patients you almost certainly do more harm than good. The reality is that if you use it on a bleed type stroke it can (and likely will) only make things worse. Use it on a clot type stroke and you might save them. We of course know this and only use it when a CAT has confirmed it's a clot--but what would happen if we didn't distinguish the two cases?
> The vast amount of treatment for autism is therapies.
> It really doesn't matter if the underlying cause is very different in terms of treatment because a speech therapist works the same with a kid with autism as they do with a kid with down syndrome.
> If there were more pharmaceutical interventions then I might care a bit more. But there's just not.
There are a limited set of drugs involved in autism therapies, but they are general drugs that would be applied regardless the diagnosis (for example, antidepressants.)
In fact, it's much like depression in that sense in that it's a very broad definition with a number of causes. Some antidepressants even work better or worse for people.
I can't help but notice people want to define 'real autism' as only those who are impaired to the extent that they can't advocate for themselves, which conveniently means never having to listen to an autistic person's opinion on things. If you're communicating clearly, even through text on the internet, then you're just a quirky adult who is talking over the people with 'real problems'.
I'm rather dismayed by the recent outpouring of articles about splitting the diagnosis up by people who don't even have a horse in this race but have somehow become qualified to weigh in on psychiatric diagnosis.
