Autism parents are highly vulnerable to quacks.
Assisted spelling is used to help nonverbal people communicate by pointing to letters on boards or using keyboards with physical help from another person.
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But leading professional groups for autism science, as well as those representing psychologists and speech pathologists, point to research showing that these methods — premised on the idea that people with autism have the normal range of cognitive powers but are imprisoned in malfunctioning bodies — are flawed or fraudulent.
Other, validated methods enable nonspeakers to communicate through digital and analog pictures and letter boards. But assisted spelling isn’t autonomous communication, critics say: Consciously or not, the board holder may be influencing or responsible for the typed or pointed-at words — as with a Ouija board.
For many parents in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again community, the spelling controversy is angrily ringing the bells as the notion that vaccines cause autism — which they refuse to consider debunked. As some people see it: Established medicine damaged them with vaccines and now refuses to accept a helpful treatment....
“In this underfunded disability environment, I don’t want a single penny diverted to debunked interventions like spelling,” said Amy Lutz, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Pennsylvania and an autism support advocate who described her 27-year-old son as “profoundly autistic.”
It’s not only a waste of time, she said later in an interview, but “people subjected to spelling are not given access to evidence-based education. Every interaction turns someone like my son into a puppet, and I find that very objectionable.”
See a review of the literature from the Association for Science in Autism Treatment.
