Instant Cure Autism Outcomes: When Treatments REALLY Works!

If an autism therapy takes six months to show outcomes, is it really working? This is a tricky question for two major reasons. First, autism therapies are typically applied to very young children, who are rapidly growing, changing and maturing. Six months in the life of a three year old is an enormous amount of time - time enough for even a typically developing child to build a vocabulary, develop social skills, learn to manage emotional overloads, and so forth. If you have to wait six months for results, it becomes extremely difficult to know whether it's ABC therapy or simple maturation that's making the difference. Second, most children with autism are involved in multiple therapies during any six month period (in addition to school, which may be therapeutic in its own right).

It can be very tough to know whether it's the speech, occupational therapy, physical therapy, social skills therapy, dietary supplements, behavioral interventions or special diet that's most effective in changing behaviors or improving skills. Is there really any therapy, though, that can show outcomes "instantly?" The answer is yes - and I can vouch for this because I've seen it, both in person and in videos. Two such instant outcomes stand out in my mind. The first relates to my son. When he was three, he had virtually no idea of pretend play. He'd play chase games or scribble with a marker, but make believe had no place in his world - and this was a major issue in his social/emotional development. I had read a book by Stanley Greenspan about Floortime therapy, and, based on his examples, I started to teach my son to make believe. In just twenty minutes, my three-year-old had gone from no symbolic play to "getting" the idea of pretending to feed grapes to his stuffed cat - and was well on his way to role-playing with his Thomas the Tank Engines. The second comes from a video I viewed about the proper use of PECS picture exchange cards with children on the autism spectrum.

PECS are simply cards with images of often-desired objects; non-verbal children trade the cards for the actually objects as an initial step in the process of building communication skills. In the video, I literally watched a wild thing turn into a small human being within moment by the simple measure of being offered the means of communication. Frustratingly, Pyramid Educational Consultants (inventors of PECS) does not offer this or similar videos for free - though it looks like their site will soon offer downloads. Both of these events brought tears to my eyes, as they probably would to yours. And both proved to me that improvement for kids with autism is not only possible but probable - and that we need not wait for days, weeks, months or years to see positive outcomes. While my son - and almost certainly those children I watched in the PECS videos - are still autistic, they've come a very, very long way.