Re: Prisoners of Silence

[Marie Helweg-Larsen]

Just a minor point of correction. The claim is that FC can help 
non-verbal children communicate. There is no claim (as far as I know) 
that the child is no longer autistic or changes in other ways. The FC 
folks argue that if you just allow a facilitator to help guide the hand 
of the child while the child taps on a keyboard the "true communication 
potential of the autistic child can be unlocked". Of course the whole 
thing looks very unpersuasive as the footage in the video shows the 
facilitator staring at the keyboard and the child staring up in the 
ceiling (or has his/her eyes closed).
Marie

Paul Smith wrote:

[snip]

In other words, even if that particular child really
WAS autistic before the treatment (and not autistic after the treatment),
that case study is still very susceptible to confounding variables. Maybe
something else caused the child's improvement.
   Now, I don't know that there are not good studies of FC demonstrating
effectiveness. I didn't mean my post to be about FC as much as it is about
the misconception about the purpose of large scale controlled studies. Even
if we learn that FC IS effective, and that the FC-true believer's conception
of autism IS the correct one, my point about the misconception re. research
methods still stands (as for example in the secretin example you raised).
 

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Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Dickinson College, P.O. Box 1773
Carlisle, PA 17013
Office: (717) 245-1562, Fax: (717) 245-1971
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