Our editorial team frequently discusses our expectations for autism organizations, both internally and during outreach efforts. We thought it time to formalize those expectations here on our site, as a resource for like-minded individuals. -The Editors At Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, we believe organizations that support autistic people must adhere to the following five principles: Support, not cure: autism is a naturally occurring human neurological variation and not a disease process to be cured. Medical or health issues that may accompany autism should be addressed independently. Evidence-based medical and clinical interventions: from our inception, we have advocated for helping autistic individuals in ways that are based on peer-reviewed empirical studies and which have been deemed effective by the wider scientific and academic communities. Inclusiveness: Autistic people must have significant, meaningful, and primary roles in all aspects of the organization, especially at board and executive levels with regards to planning…
Tag: evidence
Liane Kupferberg Carter http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liane-kupferberg-carter Though this essay references legislation and congressional matters specific to New York State, the entire autism community could benefit from improved insurance coverage. -Eds “Your child has autism.” It’s a devastating diagnosis for a parent to hear. But it’s a one-two punch when your insurance company then refuses to cover the critical, medically necessary therapies your child desperately needs. When our then-2-year-old son was diagnosed with a developmental disability 16 years ago, a team of medical experts prescribed a rigorous program of therapies. However, state-funded early intervention services were only able to offer us an hour and a half a week of speech therapy — for a child who wasn’t talking. We found private therapists to work with our child. But when we tried to file an insurance claim, the insurance company turned us down flat. “We don’t cover educational treatment,” they told us. We appealed.…
JoyMama elvis-sightings.blogspot.com My six-year old daughter Joy loves Baby Einstein videos, and has found them mesmerizing since infancy. I’ve heard them so often that I practically know them by heart, including the promotional material at the end of the VHS tapes. In one of the self-advertising sequences, Julie Aigner-Clark, creator of Baby Einstein, is heard to exclaim, “As moms, we’re all looking for help … and if a mom tells you, ‘Try this, it works,’ you automatically try it if you’re a mom!” She wasn’t talking about alternative therapies for autism. But as the mother of a child on the autism spectrum, I hear the echoes. One place I heard such reverberations was in a Time magazine article on Jenny McCarthy and autism1, in the March 8, 2010 issue. Actress and former Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy, whose son was diagnosed with autism in 2005, has become the celebrity-mom face of…