A good dissection of bullshit “science” about vaccines - this dissection also highlights good general points to think about when applying critical thinking to any such out of left field “scientific” claims on the internet or those blathering dolts on TV news segments.
https://theunbiasedscipod.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-failure-why-this-latest
Dig into things before promoting them on social media.
Evidence please.
You’re also arguing that it both is and is not a disease. It can’t be both.
And you still haven’t explained why people want to be “cured.” Homosexuality used to be considered a disease that can be cured too, by the way. And there are still parents who force their kids into those “cures.” That is what you are advocating here, except for autism. As if people with autism have no agency.
For adults, check out the studies referenced in this analysis, for example. A few figures from there are “never employed: 74%”, “Living independently: 15%”, “No friends with shared interests: 47%”, and institutionalization rates varying from 30% to 50% depending on how you define it. The analysis notes that the two studies which had notably better results were on samples with relatively high intelligence. As for outcomes in children, there’s this one about physical aggression, and this meta-analysis giving a figure of 42% self-injurious behavior without a significant age dependence.
It’s a matter of definitions - if you have a condition which has small chance of making you slightly better at some kinds of intellectual work, high chance of making you have too much sensory and other issues to be unable to work or live independently, and a medium chance for those issues to be so bad as to require you to be institutionalized, is it a “disease”? I’d say yes, since the overwhelming majority of outcomes are negative, but one could techically argue that the rare positive-ish outcomes disqualify it.
But more importantly, I don’t think it matters whether something “is a disease” or not (I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that word at all). It causes suffering on net, so no matter what you call it, it’s moral to research a way to prevent people from getting the condition.
I think you’re still treating this as a more complicated moral issue than it actually is. Forget for a second all the people with high-functioning autism, and consider a clearer case. Let’s say there’s an autistic child with severe sensory issues that make them distressed by random sounds to the point of screaming, which distresses them more until they start self-harming by hitting their head against a wall and trying to bite their fingers off. They are mentally disabled and non-verbal, and hence can’t tell you their opinion on medicine. And let’s say you have, in this hypothetical, a cure that can fix all of that. Is it moral to give it to them, even though you can’t possibly get informed consent? For me, it’s pretty clear that it is. Do you agree with me on this?
If yes, it seems to me that’s sufficient to argue that a cure for autism is very important to make. It’s not about the mild cases which go on to live fairly normal lives, and write newspaper articles with titles like “I don’t want to cure my autism, I want to own it”. It’s for all the severe cases for whom a normal life has never been an option.
Cool. Conversion therapy camps for autistic people and queer people it is.