Do we really need a instant cure for autism?

Autism is now seen as a spectrum disorder, in which those with the diagnosis have similar communicative, social and other challenges, in different degrees of severity. As a result, autism is a diagnosis given both to a college student majoring in a STEM field who is an eloquent advocate for autism rights and to my son Charlie. A teenager, Charlie attends a special school for children with severe behavioral issues and intellectual disabilities. He talks in short phrases but is not able to ask why is it raining so that he can't ride his bike or how did he get so big that I can't carry him anymore.

When my son was first diagnosed in 1999, we sought out ways to "recover" him from autism. But when he turned five and we saw that he would not be able to go to kindergarten, we began to devote ourselves to figuring out how to make the world a better place for him. The dramatically higher numbers of children diagnosed with autism have led some to declare that there is autism epidemic. This ignores the fact that we have developed a better understanding of what autism is and thus diagnose it more often. This sense that autism is drastically on the rise, coupled with the difficulties of caring for an autistic child have fueled recent calls to "cure" autism. It's something I have grappled with watching my son grow up and learning more about this condition. Since autism was first identified, there have been efforts to cure it. The word autism is from the ancient Greek word autos, which means self. Autism was first described as a disorder in which a child is not engaged with the social world. Who would not want to alleviate such a condition and bring an autistic person "back" into society? Leo Kanner did not propose a specific cure but, due to his noting that "there were very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers" among the parents of the children he first observed, his name has become associated with a treatment that now seems simply sinister. So-called "refrigerator mothers" were deemed so emotionally cold that they failed to bond with their young children, who withdrew into "autistic withdrawal". The "cure" for such an ailment was to remove the child from his or her parents. Self-styled early childhood expert Bruno Bettelheim became renowned for using this method to aid autistic children at his Orthogenic School in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s.

 Bettelheim has since been revealed as a fraud. Tragically, many families, mothers in particular, had their lives turned inside out by the accusation that they had caused their child to become autistic. Parents are still very sensitive about the troubled history of autism and its treatment. Some vehemently insist that an external agent (environmental hazards, a vaccine) caused their child to become autistic and seek out various treatments (some highly experimental) to "heal" their child. This search for an autism cure hasn't gone unnoticed by the media. The question is often asked, if we can cure cancer, why not autism? A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association generated a lot of interest for its finding that women in Norway who took folic acid prior to becoming pregnant lowered their risk of having a child diagnosed with autism. Cancer and its treatments offer ill-suited analogies with autism and addressing the challenges and needs of an autistic individual. Autism is a neurological disorder; it is not, as originally classified, a psychological one. Currently there is no known biomarker for autism, and the disorder is diagnosed based on observations by teams of experts. Most scientists agree that autism is of genetic origin and begins to develop while a child is in the womb. Autism is a lifelong disability that cannot be cured in a medical sense. But consider another meaning of cure, based on the Latin word, cura, which originally means not a cure or remedy for an illness but care or concern. Thanks to the efforts of his teachers, therapists and others, my son Charlie is learning not to isolate himself in his own obsessions and anxieties and to learn skills to live independently. If there is a "cure" for autism, it is the creation and maintenance of programs and policies that acknowledge the challenges of autism, build on autistic individuals' abilities, and make it possible for those on the spectrum to live and thrive in the community and in the world.