Today's forecast - more autism cure hype and early interference

I've heard on the news that our government's latest big initiative might be a national disability insurance scheme, and this could cover people who are deemed to be disabled from birth, presumably funding more of those much-hyped early intervention services. This would certainly apply to conditions on the autistic spectrum. I've no reason to believe that such funding would be conditional upon proper scientific evidence that such interventions are effective and do more good than harm. I've already seen so much uncritical hype in the Australian mass media supporting interventions that target autism, and I've never heard an Australian politician daring to question the effectiveness of such "therapies". Did you see Ross Coulthart's story about autism quack therapies on the Seven network's Sunday Night TV show last week? A heap of quackery, some of it potentially very dangerous, was shown in that story, and only the mildest tweet of scepticism from Mr Coulthart. Before I saw that story I had thought very highly of this journalist. Now I can see that he is of the same league as the 60 Minutes crowd.

What could this disability insurance scheme mean for autistic people? I guess it could mean that masses of children, many of them barely autistic or misdiagnosed, could be aggressively funnelled into the various types of early intervention, which are time-consuming and represent some burden to the parents and the subjects, some of which could make no difference at all to the children's trajectory of development.

I can also forsee another possible negative consequence of this. These highly qualified therapists are expected to produce good outcomes. There would be an ever-present pressure on them to identify improvements or even cures in their young patients. I can imagine that there could be many young autistic kids being put forward as success stories who are no longer autistic. And how many of these kids will go on in life to feel different, to feel like an outsider, to be an outsider, to run into brick walls and difficulties when faced with social situations that are unsuitable for them, only to be told that this is all nonsense because a nice lady therapist said they were cured of autism many years ago when they were 4 or 5 years old? It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a service, if it is essentially ineffective and misguided, the results will be nothing more than a delusion.