Vaccination & epidemic

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Flint

The question is: are there actually more cases of Autism, as opposed to more diagnoses of Autism?

The book covers that too. There is no question that these children with the autism diagnosis have a developmental delay: they do not meet the criteria for entrance into kindergarten, and they wouldn't have met them 20 years ago either. (With Asperger's or ADHD, the lines are blurrier, and that's also seen in the fact that those kids aren't usually diagnosed until they're older, and they almost always attend a normal school classroom. But though people talk about "autism spectrum disorders," "autism" is still an actual diagnosis in and of itself, and as I mentioned, anyone who has actually lived with an autistic child would laugh at the idea that someone who behaved this way could ever go undiagnosed. Nor would the schools pay all the extra money to have them in a special education classroom if there was any chance they could be mainstreamed.) So then the question becomes, if there are only more diagnoses of autism today, then decades ago they must have been diagnosed as something else. So you would expect to find an equivalent decrease in the diagnoses of things like mental retardation, pathological speech delay, etc. There hasn't been one.