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James_Miller comments on How to tell apart science from pseudo-science in a field you don't know ? - Less Wrong
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To the best of my knowledge (and I've looked) there is not a single scientific long-term randomized study showing the effectiveness of any type of treatment for autism. This means that when deciding on the best way to help the kid you are going to have to rely on the judgment and intuition of family, friends and special needs specialists. Besides the normal biases the huge problem with doing this is that as an autistic child gets older you would expect him, in an absolute sense, to make improvements in many metrics (just as typical kids do) even if whatever special stuff was being done for him had absolutely no impact on his condition. Another problem is that, based on my observations at least, the women who devote their careers to the needs of "special children" tend to be of the very happy/uplifting/optimistic types which undoubtedly causes them to have a more positive assessment of treatment than should be justified and this bias outlook negatively impacts the research that makes use of the subjective judgments of autistic professionals.
Rather than spending time reading about autism you can probably better help this child by playing with him and doing stuff for his parents so they have more time to play with him, although ignore this advice if you enjoy reading about autism and so your doing so isn't a cost.
In my (very limited) experience autistic children aren't very interested in playing with people, so a minimum of reading might be useful if only to understand what kinds of "playing" are likely to interest an autistic child, and also which kind of "playing" have chances of slightly improving his communication/interaction skills and interests.
There's an autistic three-year-old that often plays in the sandbox with my kid - he's much more interested in playing with a single toy than in the other kids or his parents; unlike my 20-month-old who evaluates toys by how much attention the other kids are paying to them (resulting in the classical "everybody fight for the shovel, five minutes later everyone fights for the truck"), or uses toys to bribe other kids (preferably bribing with someone else's toy). The autistic kid can eventually tolerate playing with another kid (like, both fill up the same bucket), but has to be prodded to do so, and will usually end up going back to playing alone. The only "game" I've seen him play with someone else is being chased around by his parents, which he seems to find fun.
One theory is that you start with what the kid will do without prompting and then gradually introduce yourself into his play using trial and error to identify actions he appreciates and responds to. This is called floortime. The other main paradigm is Applied Behavior Analysis.
Why isn't there? There would seem to have been more than enough time & funding for at least one. Is there some more subtle problem here?
(I'm thinking a scenario like "parents of autistic kids are constantly trying new approaches both quack and genuine, and would refuse to stop this, thereby making the results worthless; and this is foreseeable in advance by any would-be experimenters.")
No one wants to be in the control group.
Do you know that, or are you guessing?
Because there's no cure?
But there could still be studies demonstrating that some treatments had no effect.
That raises the question - did that opening sentence of the head reply mean 'showing the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of any method', or 'showing a method to be effective'?
I meant to imply "effectiveness or ineffectiveness"
Thanks
This is very good advice.