Since I don’t get to listen to much radio except Pirate Christian Radio (arr!) when I’m home, most people had already said what needed to be said by the time Michael Savage’s remarks got to my ears.
Some parents of autistic children have called for Savage’s firing after he described autism as a racket last week. “In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” Savage said on his radio program last Wednesday.Savage offered no apology in a message posted Monday on his Web site. He said greedy doctors and drug companies were creating a “national panic” by overdiagnosing autism, a mental disorder that inhibits a person’s ability to communicate.
On his radio show last week, he said: “What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, `Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, you idiot.’”
First of all, Savage is a shock jock. He’s going to state ideas in a way that’s going to cause people to react with emotion, both good and bad. This is not excusing his behavior; it is simply his modus operandi. Play his game, and he wins.
If Savage hadn’t gone over the line, using puffed up stats and mischaracterizations of kids and parents, he would have sounded closer to Thomas Sowell, whose opinions I very much respect, including his opinion on autism diagnoses.
Autism is a diagnosis that does not yet have a unique, well-described pathology, and this is one of many frustrating things about it.
Prior to 1882 tuberculosis wasn’t identified as bacteria, leading people to call it “consumption” and “vampirism,” from the way family members seemed to go down after one person got it. There were sanatoriums that attempted to treat TB with constant temperature and pure cave air. Did those prescriptions work? No. Were there people sincerely trying to offer cures and treatments for ailments they had no handle on? Yes. Were there charlatans? Of course.
This is where we are at now with autism. The Internet is full of stories where a child benefited at the same time the parent tried something. A single child a controlled study does not make, so parents seeking every possible advantage try as many things as they can afford and some they can’t.
If we were to find out down the road that of all the supplements, therapies, trips to Cleveland and Cincinnati, and the study from Boston we are participating in, that for example Vitamin E was all we ever needed, then yes, we’d feel very burned, but that information wouldn’t have been known at the beginning. That’s life on the bleeding edge of technology. It’s either spend as much as you can in research and everyday experimentation, or wait for someone else to come up with the answer 10-15 years later, after the window where we can do the most good closes.
Are some children being misdiagnosed with autism? Probably. Diagnoses are missed; recently doctors couldn’t figure out why my daughter was limping for a week. Medical doctors, two sets of X-rays, and $2000 (not what I’m paying, just what they charge) couldn’t do it. Are they charlatans?
Maybe Savage has a case with other disorders where drugs can be prescribed that alter a child’s behavior to make it easier on the parents. There’s no such incentive for autism. We don’t drug our child to alter her behavior. We are doing what we can to put her in the best possible position to employ the environment given to her.
Pray that we turn the corner from psychological and results-based diagnosis to medical and pathological diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. It’s so much easier to hit a target after it’s been identified. Prayers for my daughter and the family aren’t unwelcome, either.
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