More about the extraordinarily bad design (to go along with those extraordinarily bad ethics) of James Adams' recently published autism chelation trial http://photoninthedarkness.com/?p=180

Ben Goldacre (him again!) goes to parliament, see http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/c...eopathy/ucm4002.htm

It's mostly about homeopathy, but here's how it starts:

"Sugar pills which have been prepared in accordance with the principles or rituals of homeopaths are physically indistinguishable from untreated or "placebo" sugar pills, and these homeopathy pills have overall been shown, repeatedly, in summaries of fair clinical trials, to perform no better than dummy placebo sugar pills. Any claims to the contrary rely on cherry picking the evidence to selectively reference only positive findings, to reference poorer quality studies which are not "fair tests" of the pills, and so on. Almost any ineffective medical treatment could be made to appear effective using these strategies: they simply reflect misleading and partisan scholarship."

More here http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/parliame...n-homeopathy-today/ including video.

A good popular-level explanation of systematic review http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/PDF/Se...stematicReviews.pdf though it does not differentiate systematic review from meta-analysis (which may or may not be part of a systematic review). Some of the explanation applies particularly to systematic review with meta-analysis.

Here is the last bit:

"Choosing studies for inclusion in a systematic review is not a personal or political decision but based on scientific reasoning."

Or at least that's how it should be.

In that link you gave Michelle (/m9954), the photos of people with Alex... the 2nd one is "MJ", Alex's TA from age 3 to grade 3. The 5th one from the end is "Miss Ross" (now Mrs. Ross Shepherd), his TA in Grades 4-6. The 7th one is his dad, the 8th is brother Ben (sister Jasmine can be seen in the background with the video camera here http://www.flickr.com/photos/runman/412427536)

Alex's Olympic Torch Run post with Photos, a link to more photos & the video is here: http://therunman.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-olympic-torch-run.html

:)

That "who better" was a sentiment I heard expressed by a lot of people on Sunday. Some were moved to tears....

I love that there's a picture from the race finish line Saturday of Alex and Becca (or "Rebecca" as Alex insists on calling her) side by side (http://www.flickr.com/photos/runman/4121670451) and one of them side by side again Sunday (http://www.flickr.com/photos/runman/4125017086).

And when Olympian Kara Grant (Modern Pentathlon) told Alex Saturday night that she'd see him Sunday at his run I thought she must be part of the motorcade as she's been working with RBC promoting the Torch Relay (she was signing autographs at the Charlottetown Celebration Sat. night). Nope..... she just came out like the rest of his "fans" to watch him run (http://www.flickr.com/photos/runman/4124250857).

I think I reached my link limit so I'll continue in the next post...

What the word "awesome" is for http://therunman.blogspot.com/2009/11/thank-you.html And who better to "represent and celebrate active and diverse Canadians"?

By the way, I think anyone who is considering putting an autistic child into an intensive ABA program should read the stuff I cite here http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2008/11/aba-success-stories.html including the long interview (from Green, 1987) with the boy who was considered a great ABA success story.

This extremely important episode in ABA history is not something you can find in the major ABA textbooks or in the current major book about ethics and ABA.

Re Amy's message ( /m9950 ) I have yet to see any truly competent criticism of Spreckley and Boyd (2009), a paper which deserves some very harsh criticism. And a lot of what has been written (by behaviour analysts, for example) has been the equivalent of shooting off fireworks declaring that the standards for autistics should be dropped as low as low can go.

Responding to Leah in /m9940 , that kid is in a very bad situation. So long as he is not in an intensive ABA program, he will be written off. This makes it extremely hard for him to do anything but badly (same goes for any written-off child).

The fact that this child is being written off at age 3, to his own great detriment, is a tribute to just how successfully autism advocates have imposed bad science and bad ethics on autistics.

The link Leah provided doesn't lead to a relevant study, I suspect this is the one she wanted http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17963434 If you search the title of this paper (Remington et al., 2007) in Google scholar, you will find a free pdf (there is no direct link, sorry).

The study is a nonrandomized controlled trial (it is a poor quality study by the standards in non-ABA, non-autism areas) where the control condition did not encompass enough hrs/wk to be considered "intensive" and involved little or no one-to-one teaching.

The authors premised their study design on their belief that ABA-based interventions have already been shown to be effective, and directly claim that good experimental design (that is, a fair test of ABA-based interventions) would be impossible as well as bad for autistics.

One of the findings in this study was that ABA-based interventions were ineffective in changing parent-reported scores with respect to overt autistic traits and with respect to what were called "problem behaviours." But as with all the other findings, these findings arise from a poor quality study.

For a description of a similar study in the UK which is somewhat better reported and was conducted by researchers with no relevant conflicts of interest (a rarity in the ABA literature in autism), see http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2007/08/a...ntrolled-trial.html One finding to note is the lack of connection between the earliness of the intervention and outcomes. So far there is no ABA controlled trial which shows that age at intake is related to outcomes, while there are four (one is a retrospective design, descending into even poorer quality) which show that age at intake is irrelevant.

And there continues to be a dearth of evidence connecting early autism interventions (of any kind) with later outcomes. Anyone claiming otherwise is being dishonest, although the current dominance of autism advocacy has made it much more likely that autistics who do not receive one or many popularly-marketed treatments starting very early in life will be written off.

As I've written many times, the best adult outcomes reported in the autism literature still belong to individuals who grew up before the era of early autism interventions, and who as children met the narrowest, strictest, most "severe" autism criteria ever devised.

In my view, accurate information (all of the above can be verified through reading primary sources) is always good for autistics. But this view has been rejected by autism advocates (including behaviour analysts) *and* by Autistic self-advocates (represented by ASAN).

Re Leah's /m9940
Well, first of all be very gentle when talking to someone who is currently upset. One might think that a stressed person would be happy to be told the stress is unnecessary, but that’s often not the case. When it comes to autism, some (though not all) parents seem to think that any criticism of interventions is a personal attack and an attempt to take something important away from them. It is probably best to slowly introduce the idea that ABA is not supported by good quality evidence.

I really like the Gernsbacher (2003) paper because it discussed the only RCT involving ABA, including the fact that the authors had to publish corrections of errors. It also included information on why ABA is so widely recommended and why that’s questionable. http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/Gernsbacher...fically_Proven_.pdf

You can find discussion of that RCT by Smith, Groen and Wynn (2000) and the errata they later published (in 2001), as well as discussion of other studies here http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2007/01/mr-dohertys-science.html

Of course you can just look through Michelle’s blog (and this message board) to find lots of discussion and links. For example, this recent meta-analysis of ABA interventions was discussed:
http://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(08)00777-4/abstract

That abstract might be helpful since it can be read quickly...however, there are some good criticisms of the study, especially regarding what should be considered a control group for a meta-analysis…

I haven't seen the "Horse Boy" movie, but this review http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/story.html?id=2215568 provides very pertinent information about a whale of a conflict of interest, among other things.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/outdoors/...-Horse-Boy-conquere d-autism.html

Stupid headline about 'conquering autism'! And there is some crazy stuff about how their two year old son was 'incontinent' due to his autism! Many or even most boys of two and three are 'incontinent' - It's called being a toddler! And that he had 'neurological firestorms' that made him scream and yell. Wow! Toddler has tantrums shock! And now he is seven he is different to how he was at two and three - how utterly extraordinary. Can only be attributed to riding a horse, eh? Goodness knows how regular kids manage to change without going to Mongolia...

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It is so clear from the film and from later interviews etc that Rowan is still - unsurprisingly - very much autistic. He is older and has changed in the way most children do from year to year, but the idea that he is somehow no longer autistic is a con, presumably done so as to sell more books.
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Many of the comments on the video are of the "he can't see the keyboard so he can't be having any input into the communication" variety. That is a very plausible interpretation, but I remember a video by Amanda Baggs where she showed herself typing one-fingered without looking. I can't find that video any more though. (Not the same situation, because Amanda wasn't using FC and she didn't have a brace on her finger limiting her feel of the keyboard. I just hate absolutes.)

By the way, this http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/houben-communication is the best article about Houben I've so far run into.