About Autism

Parenting a child with autism can present many challenges and one of them is searching for the right treatment for children diagnosed with ASD.

Every year there are new treatments declared to be highly effective in treating individuals with autism, or professional interpretations and suggestions, anecdotal reports from parents, and drugs and medications claiming to cure autism, yet most lack the scientific rigor and testing to support its claims. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the only approach that has the most extensive research and has been scientifically proven to be the most effective treatment for children with autism to date. There is no other treatment shown to be more effective or has the same scientific rigor as do ABA, yet with the increasing number of children diagnosed, along with poor access to effective treatments and the broad range of autism treatments abound, families often resorted to complementary and alternative Medicines (CAM) treatments, biologically-based or not, in spite of the absence of supportive scientific data and/or presence of contradictory data and warnings from scientists.

Whether a treatment has been widely tested, adopted, and proven in scientific research and history is extremely crucial in determining the treatment outcome. As a result, parents should and must critically evaluate and scrutinize all treatment options available, inquire whether there is scientific evidence supporting each treatment's claim of effectiveness, and look at what really works and select a treatment that can deliver results and progress.