The Cause of Autism

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
1

There is a great deal of disagreement as to what the cause of autism is; the various causes suggested range from genetic anomalies to vaccines and formula feeding - most of which are mere speculation.

I propose, however, that autism is not strictly a neurological or psychological disorder, but rather a sociological one.
I think there is a critical point in infant development during which the brain develops the basic blueprint for all social interactions. If a child misses this window of development, it can hinder the child for the remainder of his/her life.

Although correlation does not necessarily indicate causality, there may be recurring similarities between autistic individuals, such as the absence of breast-feeding. Any established correlation may simply indicate sociological trends and would not necessarily indicate a cause. Lack of breast feeding, for example, may deprive an infant of a basic hormonal communication between mother and offspring - this may cause disruption in the child’s development in a number of ways: psychologically, the child may experience dissociation from its mother, or begin having episodes of terror which might be an instinctive response to isolation.

Especially in our modern society where a deficit in interaction would be easy for a parent to overlook, as a child needs very little actual support from its parents in basic terms of survival - as long as it gets fed and has its diaper changed, there is not much else needed to meet the basic requirements of survival; the body will continue living so long as it is given food and water.

2

Although those issues do play a role, the fundamental cause is not genetic, but medical. But that medical practice is an issue of social architecture. So you are correct in a certain sense.

3

Medical as in medicine or medical as in physiological?

4

You know, I don’t normally believe in deleting posts, but I think my original post should be deleted, because I think all it’s going to do is stir up bad emotions, and re-reading it I don’t necessarily agree with it.

5

Where can i find Your original post?

6

That is the original post; it just seems sort of mean or rude to say, especially when I don’t have any proof for it… “It’s your fault your child is autistic. You’ve become so separated from anything resembling a ‘natural human environment’ that those ‘little missing differences’ which are key to a normal childhood development have combined with all of the industrial man-made poisons we’re swimming in, accumulating into what is observed as your child’s mental disorder … You might even be able to try fixing it, but you’re too dissociated from typical human interaction, and possibly just too frightened by the idea of having to yell at someone or lecture them when they do something wrong.”

I’m not autistic myself, just wanted to mention that since re-reading this thread it sounds like the author could be a child with autism on a rant or something. No, I do think it’s a possibility that autism could actually be a sociological phenomenon that manifests as a psychological disorder.

I’m only qualified to give my opinion in that I’m your typical street wise smart-ass who likes to dig deep into scientific and medical literature and find ways of pointing out how the privileged-educated do not even truly care about their field of study. t’s a sad state of affairs when kids in middle school can read a wikipedia article and know more about the pharmacokinetics and dynamics of a medication than the doctor who is trying to prescribe it to them.

I’m personally of the belief that if a doctor can’t demonstrate to you a rudimentary understanding of how a medicine is metabolized (enzymes, half-life, route of excretion, bioavailability, etc.), its mechanism of action (affinity as an agonist/antagonist for receptor subtypes, enzyme inhibition, etc.), or what other medications are going to interact with it, then they should not be practicing medicine, or at least need to attend some sort of class refreshing them on everything.

Point being, the ‘experts’ coming up with ideas for cures and treatments have to defer to a money-hoarding pharmaceutical industry as well as a medical community comprised of doctors and scientists who were irresponsible rich-kids that surfed into their place of employment from med school on an avalanche coming out of their parent’s bank account. Any image you had of your doctor being some angel of mercy with a passion for medicine, looking down at the sick and the wounded and declaring an oath before God not to rest until finding a cure was just a convenient self-induced hallucination you had so you could give yourself peace of mind.

Now, I don’t want to be disrespectful. There are many doctors out there who are basically performing genuine miracles on a day to day basis, but we need to be honest about something else: there are a lot of shitty doctors out there, and there are a lot of people who have died as a direct result of their incompetence.

On a related topic, the US mandating healthcare which people are forced to pay for out of their own pockets does not, in any way, put an end to the shortcomings in the medical system (which the current administration claims is a result of a ‘for profit’ medical industry), but rather, it ends up making that very corrupt ‘for profit’ medical industry federally funded.
Now I don’t really think it was some conspiracy put in play by a shadow society of evil pharm industry lobbyists, I think it was just a poor attempt at finding a genuine solution. It sort of seems like the country is bending over backwards trying to avoid instating what has been deemed ‘evil socialism’, so they keep passing the tab to the person next to them which ends up costing more in the end, and then they all have to resort to some backdoor solution that is less cost-effective than it would have been to just re-work the federal budget to include social healthcare.

A lot of people think that free healthcare would demean quality treatment and impede advancement in the medical field, but they don’t understand that those things do not come with money, but from dedicated and passionate doctors and scientists. So what do we do now? Well, first of all, good look finding anyone who has the attention span to go over all of that with you. Then, once you’ve both gotten on the same page, good luck contending with other political parties who register your ideas in their minds not as being simply incorrect, but as you launching an assault directly at their political dogma. Then, after that, good luck getting the masses to feel involved enough to take your side - assuming clever marketing schemes haven’t already got them on board to a different agenda that persuaded them using sex and trendy music and bright flashing colors.

I strongly suspect the current administration has a financial incentive when they put in place their plans for political reform, which seems to be what is preventing them from working. That’s bad news for us, because either:
A) No one will care enough to reverse it and stop the imminent onset of dystopia.
B) Things will get so bad, that people will want to elect the exact opposite for the next administration, making the problems that never got fixed even worse.

Basically, we’re going to have to wait another 10-20 years before people feel like actually fixing these issues again, and maybe we’ll be lucky enough to only have to start so far back as a Clinton-era economy and hopefully not to screw it up next time.

7

I know the topic of this thread isn’t necessarily healthcare, but here’s what good social healthcare would look like (not this affordable care act garbage):
The whole thing with treatment costing some arbitrary amount as determined by a war of paperwork ensuing between hospitals, insurance companies, and pharm companies needs to end. Social health insurance would pay out to doctors, hospitals, and pharm companies based on an assessment of costs/materials/labor required for treatment as determined by a third party government agency that would be subject to regulations to remain as objective and unbiased in their assessment as possible.

Also, if you still want commercial medicine with only theoretical/experimental efficacy, that’s fine, but you’ll have to pay for it yourself, and you’ll have to have a doctor’s approval.

To keep doctors and pharmaceutical representatives separated, doctors would prescribe medicine and provide treatment provided by a list of treatments and types of treatments approved as safe and effective by the government agency; this does not mean the agency limits selections based on cost - expensive forms of treatment, when determined by a doctor to be the best considering the conditions, would not be restricted. If the doctor believes a different experimental form of treatment (or any treatment not otherwise approved by the agency) to be the best option, the doctor’s office contacts the agency for approval, who would then approve the treatment if they deemed the doctor had legitimate reasoning for it. Doctors working in emergency rooms as well as operating room surgeons during surgery (in the event of having to make a life-saving decision) would not be subject to this latency.

Concerning intellectual property and research and development: if there’s something we should have learned in the past few decades, it is that the research and development of new medical technology by commercial medical companies very rarely leads to the development of a new viable form of treatment; they often cause more harm than good and have caused a large amount of grief, death, and injury over the years - as such, they should not receive federal funding. In the scenario that a viable new form of treatment is determined as only capable of being developed by having interaction with the market economy, then those forms of treatment will be deemed a form of ‘experimental treatment’ with certain perks granted by the government agency to aid development of said technology until the technology is sufficiently developed so that it can be made widely available with social healthcare, at which point it will cease to be classed as experimental. This is considering new technology (in vivo micro-tech, etc.) that have high costs yet unproven efficacy/viability. If efficacy/viability becomes reasonably proven through usage, the agency will find routes of reducing the cost of the treatment so that it can be made widely available (such ‘routes’ would typically be innovating production techniques for mass-production, and things of that nature).

Universal healthcare and for-profit medical companies can co-exist; its just that for-profit medical companies would not get ridiculous sums of money from the government. If they want large profits, they’ll have to get it out of the market economy themselves. It is not the governments job to help people become obscenely rich by keeping loopholes in the system held open for people to exploit them at the expense of others’ health. The government does not prohibit becoming rich either; if an individual finds a way to earn money and become wealthy, no one is discouraging them. It is however the government’s job to protect people, which includes protecting them from illegitimate medical practice.

Everyone would have universal healthcare for free as a basic right of a human being. A person could request not to have it if for whatever reason they did not want it (in the event that such a system were to become corrupt, people might need to be able to opt out of being enrolled in the system. If that happens however, it would likely mean that the country was experiencing a load of other major problems, and would not necessarily be a fault of the decision itself to provide universal healthcare).

Private insurance companies would also still exist; privately owned clinics would also still exist - I do not think one or the other, private or public, would necessarily end up becoming dominant over the other - they would simply have slight differences in how they operate. This diversity would be a good thing, for if some reason major faults were to arise in one or the other, people could resort to the other until hopefully the fault became fixed. This is just hypothetically considering, ‘the event of’ something bad happening. I don’t think that anything would lead to it however; I was thinking that one or the other might end up using only one form of treatment for a certain disease, which turned out later on to be dangerous and cause unforeseen injuries, but I don’t know why that would happen since there would always be multiple forms of treatment to choose from, and a doctor would choose the best one for the circumstances.

Some might say that doctors would end up getting irritated by being told what to do by the government, but honestly I think right now they’re far more irritated having to deal with private insurance companies than they would be having to deal with the government.

Simple, right? Why isn’t something like that put into place?
Because a lot of the people you’ve elected whose job it is to actually put it in place care more about money. Those who do care, however, have to compromise with the people who don’t so that everyone gets fucked instead of just one small part of the economy getting fucked - and losing that small part of the economy (for-profit medical companies) would be of no loss to anyone anyways, as it consists of businesses which revolve entirely around exploiting consumers to make large profits - if they couldn’t swindle the consumer by buying out doctors and flooding your TV with advertisements, they wouldn’t be profitable. Medical companies with good business practices would actually see their business improve (that doesn’t mean your business would turn into a gravy train all of a sudden, but your business would steadily improve).

“Whose going to pay for all of this free healthcare? Our taxes?? Why should I have to pay for Joe’s new lung, I don’t even like Joe, and if he hadn’t been a smoker he wouldn’t need a new lung”. Alright, but have you thought about where your tax money actually goes? A small fraction of it would go towards free healthcare, and it would probably be so small that it would be unnoticeable. You should be more concerned about your tax money that goes towards blowing up villages in countries you don’t know or care about (which takes up a much larger chunk of the federal budget I might add) instead of worrying about Joe’s lung.

So, after covering all of that, I think we’ve covered all of the reasons for and against universal healthcare. Time to do it?