FTC Cracks Down on "Brain Training"

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

The conventional wisdom is that any kind of treatment is likely to be less effective as the child gets older, so parents of autistic children usually believe that they are working against the clock. They will not be satisfied with the ambiguities surrounding ABA, nor will they want to wait for some future research finding that might slightly increase its effectiveness. They want results now. Because there are no scientifically-validated drugs for the core symptoms of autism, they look outside the boundaries of mainstream medicine and FDA approval.

A May 18 release from the Federal Trade Commission: (h/t Disability Scoop)

The developers and marketers of the LearningRx “brain training” programs have agreed to stop making a range of false and unsubstantiated claims and pay $200,000 under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.

According to the FTC’s complaint, LearningRx Franchise Corp. and its CEO, Dr. Ken Gibson, deceptively claimed that their programs were clinically proven to permanently improve serious health conditions like ADHD, autism, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, and concussions and that the training substantially improved school grades and college admission test scores, career earnings, and job and athletic performance. They also allegedly claimed that LearningRx brain training is 10 times more cost-effective than tutoring.

“Companies that say they can significantly improve serious health conditions or how your brain functions in everyday situations need to back up those claims with sound science,” said Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “In this case, the defendants couldn’t show their training provides the health or other real-world benefits they claimed.”

According to the FTC, the defendants promoted LearningRx through LearningRx.com and affiliated websites, as well as through a blog, Facebook and Twitter posts, print and radio ads, and direct mail pieces. They also allegedly used Google search ads to target consumers searching for terms such as “cure for ADD,” “autism cure,” “Asperger cure,” and “severe traumatic brain injury cure.” The defendants, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, offered LearningRx training through more than 80 LearningRx centers that it franchised in 25 states.

The proposed order settling the FTC’s charges prohibits the defendants from claiming that their programs improve performance at work or in athletics, or improve the cognitive function of individuals with age-related or other health conditions, unless the claims are not misleading and substantiated by human clinical testing.

The order further prohibits the defendants from making unsubstantiated claims about the performance, benefits, or efficacy of their programs, including claims about improvement in school grades or scores on standardized academic tests, performance on everyday tasks, increased income, or superiority to academic tutoring. Finally, the order prohibits the defendants from misrepresenting the existence or results of any tests or studies, and from providing others with the means to make the prohibited claims. The order imposes a $4,000,000 judgment against the company, which will be suspended upon the payment of $200,000 as disgorgement of ill-gotten gains.

The Commission vote authorizing the staff to file the complaint and proposed stipulated final judgment and order was 3-0. The complaint and order were filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

NOTE: The Commission files a complaint when it has “reason to believe” that the law has been or is being violated and it appears to the Commission that a proceeding is in the public interest. Stipulated final orders have the force of law when approved and signed by the District Court judge.

The FTC is a member of the National Prevention Council, which provides coordination and leadership at the federal level regarding prevention, wellness, and health promotion practices. This case advances the National Prevention Council’s goal of increasing the number of Americans who are healthy at every stage of life. These cases are part of the FTC’s ongoing effects to protect consumers from misleading health advertising.

The Federal Trade Commission works to promote competition, and protect and educate consumers. You can learn more about consumer topics and file a consumer complaint online or by calling 1-877-FTC-HELP (382-4357). Like the FTC on Facebook(link is external), follow us on Twitter(link is external), read our blogs and subscribe to press releases for the latest FTC news and resources.

Autism Employers

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the employment of adults with autism and other developmental disabilities. Many posts have discussed companies and nonprofits that provide them with training and experience. 

Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz reports at The Chicago Tribune:

Ford this month kicked off a pilot program funded by the Autism Alliance of Michigan to give individuals with autism on-the-job training in product development, with the chance to be considered for a job.

Deerfield-based Walgreens, which became a leader on the issue thanks to a senior vice president with an autistic son, counts about 12 percent of its distribution center employees as having a self-disclosed disability, many on the autism spectrum.

Microsoft last year launched a small pilot program to hire at least 10 people with autism for full-time positions such as software engineer and data analyst. German software company SAP has made it a goal to have 1 percent of its workforce composed of people on the autism spectrum.

Northwestern University recently hired its first employee from Project SEARCH, a program that puts young adults with autism through three 10-week internships at the university. The employee will be performing clerical and support roles in its office of alumni relations and development.

Other organizations make autism central to their business model.

AutonomyWorks in Downers Grove employs 20 associates, all of whom have autism, to perform back-office digital advertising tasks for corporate clients, said David Friedman, founder and CEO.

Distrusting Science

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  

In his CalTech commencement address today, surgeon Atul Gawande speaks of mistrust of science. The New Yorker carries the text:

People are prone to resist scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs. They don’t see measles or mumps around anymore. They do see children with autism. And they see a mom who says, “My child was perfectly fine until he got a vaccine and became autistic.”

Now, you can tell them that correlation is not causation. You can say that children get a vaccine every two to three months for the first couple years of their life, so the onset of any illness is bound to follow vaccination for many kids. You can say that the science shows no connection. But once an idea has got embedded and become widespread, it becomes very difficult to dig it out of people’s brains—especially when they do not trust scientific authorities. And we are experiencing a significant decline in trust in scientific authorities.

The sociologist Gordon Gauchat studied U.S. survey data from 1974 to 2010 and found some deeply alarming trends. Despite increasing education levels, the public’s trust in the scientific community has been decreasing. This is particularly true among conservatives, even educated conservatives. In 1974, conservatives with college degrees had the highest level of trust in science and the scientific community. Today, they have the lowest.

Reactions to the Anti-Trump Ad

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally -- including his shameful mockery of a disabled journalist.

A previous post showed an ad highlighting this incident.  More reactions:

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post:

The ad is running in seven swing states — Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Iowa — and it’s backed by a $4 million buy for its first week, as part of a broader $20 million buy between now and the conventions.

Note that this ad doesn’t merely show footage of Trump mocking the reporter. It shows a family with a disabled daughter discussing how hurt and shocked they were to see him abusing someone with a similar disability.

The spot is another sign that Democrats think they can render Trump unacceptably toxic before a general election audience by relentlessly spotlighting his profound cruelty — as displayed by Trump himself. This strain runs through much of the evolving Democratic critique of Trump and, more broadly, of Trumpism. In one early tell, the Clinton campaign released a web video recapping footage of Trump calling for mass deportations and a ban on Muslims, and linking those to his vow to revive torture and take out terrorists’ families. More recently, Elizabeth Warren’s big speech pillorying Trump focused hard on his suggestion that he relished making a profit off a housing crash, but crucially, she argued that his own quotes revealed his cruel, cavalier attitude towards the millions of people who would be badly hurt by it.

Sarah McCammon at NPR:

Whether or not these ads persuade voters to cast ballots for the Democratic nominee, they can have another effect. Some political science research suggests that well-timed and well-crafted negative ads may be effective in reducing turnout among would-be supporters of the candidate who is attacked.

"Everything we do is designed to do both. Obviously it's a negative ad, so this is more about defining Trump than turnout amongst Democrats," Priorities spokesman [Justin] Barasky said. "You can't do one without the other."

He said they are "under no illusion that Republicans are going to cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton" in large numbers. But the superPAC believes that some Republican voters, as well as a substantial number of independents, are "troubled by the things that Donald Trump has said and done throughout the course of his campaign and his career" and could be persuaded, at minimum, to abstain from casting a ballot for him. 

Eric Levitz at New York:

The fact that Priorities USA has decided to focus its early anti-Trump messaging on his misogyny and apparent mockery of the disabled signals the Democrats' desire to play for a landslide: For the party's base, Trump's racist statements and discriminatory policies are likely more salient than his imitation of Kovaleski's arm. But white suburban women who lean Republican may find his sexism and cruelty toward the physically infirm more discomfiting. Or so Trump's Republican rivals seem to have thought.

Steve Benen at MSNBC:

Democrats no doubt understand that they need to avoid a garbled, overly complicated message. They don’t necessarily need a bite-sized label like “Little Marco” or “Lying Ted,” but if Dems try to pitch voters on the idea that Trump is an unprepared, dishonest, racist ignoramus with ugly controversies in his personal and professional life, who’ll endanger the country with misguided ideas about the economy and foreign policy, it might not resonate. Effective messaging needs to be more focused.

And so the Priorities USA ad suggests Democrats will go in a more straightforward direction, effectively making the case that Trump is a bad person who says and does monstrous things.

Vouchers and Choice

In The Politics of Autism, I write about special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The Council for Parent Attorneys and Advocates has a report titled  School Vouchers and Students with Disabilities: Impact in the Name of Choice.  Key findings:

• Parents often choose a voucher regardless of the availability of civil rights protections due to the urgency of their child needing to change schools. 
• Parents like knowing they can explore their options when vouchers are available, even if they end up keeping their child in the neighborhood public school. 
• Little data exists with regard to families choosing vouchers that limit or terminate IDEA rights once those families leave the traditional public school. 
• Voucher funding is rarely sufficient and generally does not cover the full cost of the child’s education, meaning that only parents with adequate finances have a choice. 
• Some schools accept children with a disability (and the voucher funds) and then expel them for behavior or other reasons forcing the children back into a poor or inappropriate school situation. 
• Special‐education specific voucher programs typically fail to include all students with disabilities and it is rare for programs to accept students who are twice exceptional.
• Too little data exists to compare the academic outcomes of students with disabilities [and other students] participating in voucher programs to public school students.

From the report:

Some states that offer special education vouchers distinguish the voucher amounts depending on the disability of the student. Ohio’s Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship Program provides students with disabilities with a range of maximum scholarships based on the student’s disability.Ohio also has an Autism Scholarship Program, providing public funding for students with autism to attend their non‐district school. All students with disabilities are otherwise eligible for the Jon Peterson Scholarship, with the amount depending on their disability category.Voucher amounts are determined through a complex funding formula that considers the average cost to educate a “typical student in a typical classroom” plus the estimated additional costs of providing special education and related services based on the child’s disability. This past year, Louisiana implemented a “School Choice Program for Certain Students with Exceptionalities.”This program provides vouchers for students with the following disabilities: autism, developmental delay, mental disability, other health impairment, specific learning disability, traumatic brain injury

..

“Actually, some districts won’t identify students as having autism or as being IDEA eligible so that parents can’t access {the scholarship} since much of the money comes out of the district’s budget.”

Civil Rights Data

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the civil rights of people with autism and other disabilities. 

A release from the US Department of Education:

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today unveiled new data from the 2013-2014 school year showing gaps that still remain too wide in key areas affecting educational equity and opportunity for students, including incidents of discipline, restraint and seclusion, access to courses and programs that lead to college and career readiness, teacher equity, rates of retention, and access to early learning.

U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said that, despite significant work from districts across the country, the persistent disparities shown in the new Civil Rights Data Collection—which collected data from all public schools and school districts nationwide for the 2013-14 school year—highlight the need for a continued focus on educational equity, especially in the implementation of the new Every Student Succeeds Act.

...

Students with disabilities are more than twice as likely as students without disabilities to be suspended in K-12 settings. They also represent two-thirds of students who are secluded from their classmates or restrained to prevent them from moving—even though they are only 12 percent of the overall student population.

Other findings from the report:

•  Students with disabilities served by IDEA are 12% of students in schools that offer Algebra II and 6% of students enrolled in Algebra II; they are 11% of students in schools that offer calculus and 1% of students enrolled in calculus; and they are 11% of students in schools that offer physics and 6% of students enrolled in physics
• To close the participation gap in physics, more than 104,000 additional students with disabilities served by IDEA would need to participate in physics classes nationwide
• Similarly, students with disabilities served by IDEA are 12% of all students in schools offering GATE programs, but represent fewer than 3% of GATE students nationwide.
• Students with disabilities served by IDEA and English learners are 12% and 5% of high school student enrollment , but 21% and 11% of high school students held back or retained.
• High school students with disabilities served by IDEA are 1.3 times as likely to be chronically absent as high school students without disabilities.
• Elementary school students with disabilities served by IDEA are 1.5 times as likely to be chronically absent as elementary school students without disabilities. 

Ad Takes on Trump Over Disability

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally -- including his shameful mockery of a disabled journalist.

Moving Away from Sheltered Workshops

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the employment of adults with autism and other developmental disabilities. Many posts have discussed programs to provide them with training and experience. 

At The Boston Globe, Katie Johnson writes about sheltered workshops.  Triangle, a 45-year-old Malden nonprofit that once housed a large sheltered workshop, has shifted to placing disabled people into jobs in the community.

“It’s a human rights issue,” said Coleman Nee, chief executive of Triangle, who was the state’s Secretary of Veterans’ Services during the Deval Patrick administration. “Everybody has the ability to be competitively placed if that’s what they want, regardless of the nature of their disability and how much work it might take to get them there.”

Slightly more than one in four working-age people with disabilities is employed, according to the Department of Labor. But the movement to get more of them into the workforce is growing, part of a shift toward inclusion and self-advocacy by people with disabilities, said Margaret Van Gelder, director of employment and family support at the state’s Department of Developmental Services.

“They’re coming into their own, speaking up for themselves, pushing for opportunities they want,” she said.

A decade ago, about 6,000 people with disabilities toiled in 90 such sheltered workshops in Massachusetts, according to the state. In response to federal policy changes, the agency unveiled a plan two years ago to close all such workshops and get everyone into day programs or jobs in the community, a goal it says it will hit by the end of June.

Nationwide, the number of sheltered workshops with sub-minimum-wage certification has dropped by almost half since 2001, from 4,724 to 2,417, according to the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Recent federal lawsuits over sheltered workshops in Oregon and Rhode Island accused the states of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Rhode Island is facing a $1 million annual fine for not taking steps to move people out of these workshops.

Replication

Uncertainty is a major theme of The Politics of Autism.  One source of uncertainty is the absence of replication studies.

At Remedial and Special Education, Matthew C. Makel have an article titled "Replication of Special Education Research: Necessary but Far Too Rare." The abstract:

Increased calls for rigor in special education have often revolved around the use of experimental research design. However, the replicability of research results is also a central tenet to the scientific research process. To assess the prevalence, success rate, and authorship history of replications in special education, we investigated the complete publication history of every replication published in the 36 journals categorized by ISI Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Report as special education. We found that 0.5% of all articles reported seeking to replicate a previously published finding. More than 80% of these replications reported successfully replicating previous findings. However, replications where there was at least one author overlapping with the original article (which happens about two thirds of the time) were statistically significantly more likely to find successful results.

The incentive structure of academia may contribute to the problem.  A few years ago, cognitive scientists Gary Marcus wrote:

For many reasons, science has become a race for the swift, but not necessarily the careful. Grants, tenure, and publishing all depend on flashy, surprising results. It is difficult to publish a study that merely replicates a predecessor, and it’s difficult to get tenure (or grants, or a first faculty jobs) without publications in elite journals. From the time a young scientist starts a Ph. D. to the time they’re up for tenure is typically thirteen years (or more), at the end of which the no-longer young apprentice might find him or herself out of a job. It is perhaps, in hindsight, no small wonder that some wind up cutting corners. Instead of, for example, rewarding scientists largely for the number of papers they publish—which credits quick, sloppy results that might not be reliable—we might reward scientists to a greater degree for producing solid, trustworthy research that other people are able to successfully replicate and then extend.

Trump and Disability Issues

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally.

Irin Carmon writes at MSNBC:

Twenty-six years ago, a Republican president signed the bipartisan Americans with Disability Act, or the ADA. That was then.

In the past year, the Republican presumptive nominee for president, Donald Trump, accused a reporter whom he had mocked of “using his disability to grandstand.” As a real estate developer, Trump’s properties have been sued several times for violating the ADA. At a rally in Florida, Trump said, “Nobody gives more money to Americans — you know, the Americans with Disabilities Act—big act. I give tens and tens of millions of dollars and I’m proud of doing it.” (On Tuesday, Trump responded angrily to reports questioning whether he had given as much to veterans as he claimed.)

 Then there’s the title of his most recent book.

“When I saw Trump had a book called Crippled America, I was excited,” joked Emily Munson, a Republican disability rights activist and attorney in Indiana, about the title using a commonly pejorative term for people with disabilities. “I thought it was full of policy ideas on employment for people with disabilities.” Activists swarmed the #CrippledAmerica hashtag on Twitter, trying to use Trump’s book promotion to raise awareness.

Issues of disability have traditionally crossed party lines. But the era of Trump, along with a growing skepticism of laws like the ADA by some congressional Republicans, has many activists worried that times have changed.

The First ABLE Accounts

 The Politics of Autism includes a discussion of the ABLE Act.

A Tuesday release from Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel:

COLUMBUS – Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel announced today the nationwide launch of STABLE Accounts, making Ohio the first state in the country to offer enrollment for eligible individuals living with disabilities.

STABLE Accounts are made possible by the federal Achieving a Better Life Experience (“ABLE”) Act passed by Congress in 2014. STABLE Accounts allow individuals with disabilities the opportunity to save and invest money without losing eligibility for certain public benefits programs, like Medicaid, SSI or SSDI. Earnings in STABLE Accounts are not subject to federal income tax, so long as funds are spent on qualified disability expenses.

...
“National Disability Institute, along with the ABLE National Resource Center, congratulate the State of Ohio on the inaugural launch of the country’s first 529A ABLE program,” said Christopher Rodriguez, Senior Public Policy Advisor of the National Disability Institute. ...

STABLE Accounts have similar features to normal bank accounts, but are also investment accounts, similar to 529 college savings accounts or 401(k) retirement accounts. When a participant deposits money into their STABLE Account, the money can be invested in different options chosen by the participants. While participants can still withdraw and spend money as needed, a STABLE Account also allows money to grow and to save long-term for disability expenses.

Eligible individuals can set up their STABLE Account for free at www.stableaccount.com. An initial contribution of at least $50 is required in order to set up an account.

These tax-advantaged savings accounts allow families to set aside money to use on qualified expenses such as education, healthcare, housing and transportation. Earnings and distributions from an ABLE Account for qualified disability expenses do not count as taxable income of the contributor or eligible beneficiary.

There are minimal costs associated with maintaining a STABLE Account. Ohio residents will pay $2.50 per month ($30 annually) to maintain their accounts. Residents of other states will pay $5.00 per month ($60 annually) to maintain their accounts. Ohio residents will also have a small asset-based fee of between 0.19% and 0.34%, depending on their chosen Investment Options. Similarly, non-Ohio residents will have an asset-based fee of between 0.45% and 0.60%, depending on their chosen Investment Options.

Under the Federal ABLE legislation, which was signed into law on December 19, 2014 with strong bipartisan support, each state is responsible for establishing and operating ABLE accounts. On July 16, 2015, Governor John Kasich signed into law HB 155, which passed unanimously by both the Ohio House and Senate, authorizing the Treasurer’s Office to open and administer these accounts.

For more information please visit www.stableaccount.com.

Anti-Vaxxer for Trump

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.

At Right Wing Watch, Miranda Blue reports that an anti-vax activist spoke to the GOP national committeewoman from Iowa:

Tamara Scott, an Iowa conservative activist and Republican National Committee member, invited Eileen Dannemann, who runs an anti-vaxxer website called the Vaccine Liberation Army, to her “Truth for Our Time” radio program last week to discuss Dannemann’s concerns about vaccines. (Scott has invited anti-vaxxers onto her program before; in a previous interview with Dannemann, she alleged that “socialistic teaching” in schools, not parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, is causing disease outbreaks.)

Dannemann told Scott that attempts to investigate a CDC vaccine cover-up have so far been quashed, but that things will be different in a Trump presidency.

“With Trump as president, with Carson as the secretary of HHS and with Christie taking Lynch’s place [as attorney general], we have a team here that absolutely will investigate the CDC corruption and the safety of vaccines,” she said.

Court Case on IDEA

In The Politics of Autism, I write about IEPs:

At these meetings, the district has several advantages, starting with Board of Education of the Hendrick Hudson Central School District v. Rowley (1982), the first IDEA case to reach the Supreme Court. Amy Rowley was a hearing-impaired girl whose parents wanted her to have a qualified sign-language interpreter in all of her academic classes. The Court said that the district was already supplying her with sufficient supports, and that the law did not require this additional step. Even though the legislation’s sponsors said that its goal was educational equality, the majority found that there was no substantive language in the statute itself regarding the level of education that children with disabilities must get:

While Congress sought to provide assistance to the States in carrying out their constitutional responsibilities to provide equal protection of the laws, it did not intend to achieve strict equality of opportunity or services for handicapped and nonhandicapped children, but rather sought primarily to identify and evaluate handicapped children, and to provide them with access to a free public education. The Act does not require a State to maximize the potential of each handicapped child commensurate with the opportunity provided nonhandicapped children.[i]

[i] Board of Education v. Rowley, 458 US 176, at 177.  Online: http://supreme.justia.com/us/458/176/case.html.

Amy Howe reports at SCOTUSblog

[The US Suprme Court] asked the federal government to provide its views in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the case of an autistic child whose parents’ dissatisfaction with his education in a local public school led them to enroll him in a private school and seek reimbursement for the cost of tuition. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Endrew and other children with disabilities are entitled to a free appropriate public education, which is implemented through an individualized education program, or “IEP” – a program tailored specifically to each child. But the courts of appeals disagree on what kind of educational benefits schools must provide. The Tenth Circuit held in Endrew’s case that schools must merely provide some non-trivial benefit, other courts of appeals have held that schools must provide a substantial benefit, and other courts fall somewhere in the middle. There is no deadline for the federal government to file its brief, but it is likely to do so in the fall.