You know, it wouldn’t hurt if actual help for families of children with autism wasn’t so hard to find. Especially in rural areas, you are so alone dealing with really hard things, and either there are no service providers in your area or insurance won’t cover enough to make any kind of difference. So you’re desperate and you know your kid needs help and you turn to people who tell you they can help. It’s not hard to see why alternative medicine becomes very appealing when the alternative is to feel hopeless.
5 Likes
“In our cult, we don’t ‘drink the kool-aid’ — we force our kids to.”
5 Likes
hey, alright. Good time to test out the thread mute feature.
1 Like
I agree that families that have autistic kids could use lots of extra support (true of many other kinds of families, too), but this isn’t about access to real help, it’s about a far right ideology that has come to believe that kids with autism are “bad” or “broken” and need to be fixed, combined with their anti-medicine/Vaccine BS… I’m guessing that plenty of the people doing this DO have access to good information but they are so tangled up in this right wing mindset that they can’t see past it to embrace it…
15 Likes
I live in a rural area but often go to a major city in the adjacent state (work, medical, etc.) and there are a lot more autism centers in the rural areas – and billboards to let people know about them – than I’ve found in the city. Especially when you think about it as a per capita thing, there’s more visible support for autism in the country versus the city.
Now, that support usually comes with a strong Christian (nationalist) undercurrent, which is why I don’t use their services, but they’re definitely there.
10 Likes
Even when these children come down with severe side effects from taking Ivermectin — blurry vision, nausea, vomiting, pain, seizures — parents in this group, called “Learning to Fly,” are told to just have their kids push through it.
“Bleeding or mucous or vomiting or diarrhea or acne or pealing or aches/pains or hot flashes & sweating are all good signs of clearing out your body,” one Qult member said. “This is healing, keep going.”
“I have been applying Ivermectin liquid to my granddaughter’s feet, belly button, and swabbing her ears for six weeks now,” said another blind follower. “She complains of sporadic blurry vision and sometimes headaches.” Sadly, in response, the group mantra did not waiver. “Press on through…It’s working.”
This is like fucking Snake-handlers, abusing their children to suit their weird theology. 
11 Likes
I was right there with you until the last sentence. In this day and age, there is good information available easily. Of course, there is plenty of bad info as well. Most pediatricians are comfortable at least helping to sort good from bad. It’s a desperate place, and there are areas where it is easy to feel alone, but there is help available most everywhere. Your peds is a good place to start.
16 Likes
Autism Speaks has made its business model from crowding out all other sources of information and filling the space with itself.
Including making its favorite abuses into Insurance Company mandated “treatments” (ABA I’m looking directly at you), to the point that in many places there’s no recognition that there are other approaches, let alone funding or support for them. Including among many pediatricians, I suspect.
I remember you yourself saying that your refresher training on Autism was that “ABA is the best treatment”, and I think the implication was that no others were even mentioned. (That’s my impression and interpretation, though, and I am happy to be corrected.)
No, Autism Speaks isn’t as harmful as the Bleach peddlers, or these Ivermectin fuckers, but they’re ubiquitous, and they’re influential, and they’re powerful, and their goal is to be the single primary source for Autism information.
Until ASAN is more widely known than Autism Speaks, the bad information is better organised than the good (which is spread among places like ASAN, and innumerable blogs and podcasts and Youtube channels and Tiktoks, which are fighting for space with the toxic sort of “my autistic child needs a cure” sort of blogs and etc.)
17 Likes
I dunno if I’d compare these fucks to the snake-handling folks. They have some odd practices, to be sure… but these q-anon folks are just full on fascists… I doubt that’s universally true of whatever of these churches are left.
I think we need to get out of the mindset that the rural, poor folks are the problem, when it’s more often than not people cosplaying as rural, poor folks who are the q-anon set…
Ugh… those jerks…
I wonder if there is some cross-over, though?
9 Likes
All of that is true, and ABA is pretty much the poster child for badly done info. But if the goal is to find support you have to start somewhere. I am not really representative of “most” pediatricians, and would not care to try to be. I am familiar, intimately so, with the desperation of trying to find help for my autistic child. And that there are mediocre and even quite bad “reputable” sources. I can say it has gotten better over the last couple decades, and i feel that most of us can sort out the worst dreck. Given a choice, i would feel better with a random peds than a random internet dude. YMMV, of course.
16 Likes
Coming in cold and given the choice between a random paediatrician and a random guy on the internet, I’d pick the paediatrician every time, no doubt.
12 Likes
Is this coming out of ivermectin becoming an article of (bad) faith during COVID; or is it an outgrowth of the ‘everything is actually parasites; as can be proven by misidentifying the bits of intestinal epithelium the snake oil is causing you to expel’ stuff?
6 Likes
There really are a wide array of therapies available, and ABA is but one. Our son was diagnosed with ASD early when he was a little more than two years old. Floortime therapy helped draw him out of his focus on things and develop his early verbal communications skills. But ABA really helped him develop his independence. The quality of ABA varies from therapist to therapist. A lot of them have almost no experience practicing it. Over 10 years of working with our son, we had a wide range of results using ABA. Probably the most impactful experience for him and other local kids diagnosed with ASD was the occupational therapy administered in a gymnastics arena by a former drummer for Frank Zappa.
1 Like
And it’s not simply a right-wing attitude that ASD kids need to fix themselves. There are actual behaviors that ASD kids need to learn in order to function in a society, not simply to act like a normal person or because they seem weird or broken. There’s good shit and bad shit. Discerning parents know ivermectin therapy is bad shit. But related to ivermectin therapy and far right ideology, soon after our son’s diagnosis, my wife and I attended a Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) introduction to autism workshop in Costa Mesa. We are deeply grateful for the information and encouragement provided to us by TACA to navigate the California regional center and public school systems in order to arrange for proper therapy and help. TACA was one of the only organizations providing this information at that time nearly 20 years ago. They clearly explained our son’s legal rights and arranged for one-on-one legal guidance from practicing attorneys. That was some good shit. But when the PowerPoint presentation continued with explanations of chelation therapy, leaky gut theory, the alleged vaccine-autism connection, and DAN! protocols, discerning parents checked out.
4 Likes
Those are almost definitely ABA (applied behavioral analysis) places, which most actual autistics consider to be abuse. I wouldn’t take my dog to ABA.
6 Likes
I could write a treatise about what you’ve brought up here. I mean, I think the idea that ABA sucks is finally getting out there beyond the autistic adults community. ABA does look like the “best treatment” on paper, because their measuring success by their own standards. Like if I was measuring who’s the world’s best dog, obviously my dog will win. ABA is measuring based on how well the kid can act neurotypical when they’re done. I can act neurotypical too, then I get burnt out and sit and play pokemon and eat ramen and not function. ABA is not measuring the kid’s quality of life going forward.
Honestly, I’m just hoping the ivermectin won’t be as bad for these kids than the bleach enemas they were doing a few years back?
I’m like 2000% done with us having to learn to function in weird NT society, they can go to therapy or whatever to learn how to quiet down and leave people alone once in awhile.
18 Likes
I think a lot of the ivermectin crowd were bleachers who switched to the latest gimmick when it popped up.
It has a lot of alt support as a “miracle cure”, and even dressed up as MMS, it has to be a harder sell to get people to ingest bleach. Ivermectin’s purpose in killing real parasites blends into their belief in imaginary ones.
Presumably they’re still using a lot of (hopefully late) Jim Humble’s material, but I don’t feel like tracking down any of his Dollar Stare Scientology.
6 Likes
I’ve been thinking recently about how there are many in the deaf community who don’t want cochlear implants or other medical interventions and don’t want to learn how to ‘speak’ so that hearing people can understand them. They are happy using sign language and living without spoken speech. They get a lot of pushback too, and I think it stems from the same source: the fear of difference. They shouldn’t have to have to fit in just so that ‘normal’ people will feel justified in believing that normalcy is optimal.
For people who already live in fear and high sensitivity to disgust — authoritarians — having a child who pushes those buttons due to being on the spectrum must seem like the Worst Thing Ever. Thus, the desperation to shut them up, one way or another.
13 Likes
I reckon it shares its DNA with both. It’s a mix of ‘everything is actually parasites’ and ‘the liberals and the government scientists tell us not to eat invermectin, therefor we should’. Oh, and of course a big ol’ dollop of Andrew Wakefield’s ‘autism is actually an intestinal problem’. That pig****er needs stringing up.
I don’t think there’s any separation between the different strains of conspiracist belief systems any more, they’re all hybrids now, or more like different tendrils of the same malignant mass.
6 Likes
