Claim: A child diagnosed with autism is no longer in the
disorder’s spectrum because he was cured from the disorder with ABA.
Before starting to read the article
entitled “The Kids Who Beat Autism,” I was confident it would be about a child
who was misdiagnosed with the disorder. I was wrong. The article talks about
the journey of two mothers and their kids with ABA – applied behavioral analysis.
I had heard about ABA before but as a treatment to improve lives of autistic
children and not as a cure. When I started to analyze the article I tried to
see how a cure for autism would be possible at all.
Autism is a disorder (actually, a
spectrum of disorders) caused sometimes a single gene and sometimes hundreds of
them. No on really knows for sure what will trigger autism in a child but
several genes have been linked to he disorder. It involves several behavioral
symptoms – such as struggling with communication and repetitive behavior.
Knowing what I know about autism made it hard to accept that there would be a
cure, until I realized that no one knows enough about the disorder to
invalidate that claim.
We still cannot pin point a cause to
the disorder so how can we say there is no cure? ABA focuses on the principles
and explanation of how learning happens; it uses positive reinforcement when
the child does something to communicate properly. It is used very intensively
(25 to 40 hours every week for 1 to 3 years) and results vary a lot.
To check whether the claim was
reliable I did the 3 truth checks. Truth of coherence, truth of correspondence
and pragmatic truth. At first the claim did not seem coherent to me but if I
took my opinion out of the equation, it could make sense; there could be a cure
for autism using ABA. It fit correspondence as well and definitely pragmatic
truth (who wouldn’t want a cure for autism?). When checking the source (New
York Times) it made the claim more reliable as well. The only problem was: it
went against everything I had learned about the disorder. Medical journals,
physicians I have talked to, and other articles all stated clearly that there
was no known cure autism. How come all of them have missed ABA? That was when I
realized how much the word “cure” has an impact. To “eliminate (a disease,
condition or injury) with medical treatment. If ABA. was doing just that, why
the reluctance to use the term cure?
When reading the rest of the article
I saw that only one child was cured, while the other did not improve at all and
that’s when I realized why not use the word. Even though several cancer
patients are cured from cancer after months of chemotherapy, no one says
chemotherapy is the cure for cancer. Why? Because it doesn’t work for everyone.
Likewise, ABA isn’t called a cure because, though it treats most or all
symptoms of ASD (autism spectrum disorders) it doesn’t work with every autistic
child. The word cure carries heaviness with it when used as a noun. So even
though the verb is frequently used, the noun is not.
Having accepted that a child could
be cured from autism, I tried to think in what way that could happen. If autism
is a brain development disorder how does behavioral analysis change a person’s brain?
It seemed very improbable that intense repetition of an action could have any
change in the brain of a child that is already prone to engage in (other)
repetitive behaviors. But then I realized that, even though autism affects
brain development, the children must still have some sort of neuroplasticity. I
wasn’t sure so I did some research and saw that scientists are attempting to
develop so called “plasticity pills” to treat autism and schizophrenia. When I
read that it seemed like suddenly ABA made no sense again, if autistic children
have no neuroplasticity. However, when encountering another article in New York
Times I was struck with another fact: only 10% of children treated with ABA
recover (meaning that they are cured completely). Now the first knowledge claim
made more sense but only if I elaborated my own theory. The theory I came up
with was that the children who are cured must be the ones who have a higher
neuroplasticity. It would make sense then why those are cured while other
children aren’t. Of course my theory would have to be tested but since I cannot
test it (at least not while I’m in high school) I decided to see if it was at
least valid by applying the falsifiability test. For my theory to be valid
(scientifically) it has to be able to not work – it can’t be correct in every
situation. Since my theory wouldn’t work if neuroplasticity were the same in
all children (cured and uncured from autism through ABA), it is falsifiable.
I cannot know if my theory works and
I haven’t found a similar theory to see results from the experiment so I cannot
accept that the initial claim works due to my theory; however, I can accept
that, even though we might not know exactly why ABA works, it does work in a
few cases. It isn’t a panacea but it helps those 10% of kids who “lose” all
symptoms of ASD.
A lot of research has been done on
ABA, to better assess the claim I would need to know why ABA works but it isn’t
known yet. However, with the information provided, the claim makes sense.
Studies and researches have been done to point out it is possible to use ABA to
get rid of all ASD symptoms, making the claim even more reliable. After the
research I did I can conclude that, even though I don’t know the specific child
the article is referring to, I can accept with certainty that it is a justified
knowledge claim. If that child happens to show symptoms again, even though the
claim will no longer be true to that child, the claim: “a child with autism can
get out of the spectrum through ABA treatment,” will be true. Thus, the initial
knowledge claim, though surprising, seems very reliable an accurate.
WC:
1027
Other
sources I used:
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