In order to understand the concept of "Autism", we have to understand the concept of "diagnosis."

The problem with the current conception of a "diagnosis" is that there is a presumption that once a diagnosis is applied, there is some actual knowledge about what is going on.

Much of the time, this presumption is not accurate.

Most "diagnoses" are simply a reformulation of the initial complaint, but in medicalese. Show up to the doctor and say your joints hurt? Why, son, you have "arthritis" (means inflammation or pain in the joints.) Note -- no real knowledge of WHY this is happening -- you just get your initial problem parroted back to you with a different name. That's your "diagnosis."

So apply this to Autism. You go to the doctor because there is a behavioral problem. And they give you a diagnosis of "Autism" --but that doesn't mean they have any idea what is actually going on. They just lump a bunch of problematic behaviors together and call them a name, but you could have done that yourself.

The problem with the diagnosis of Autism is that there is no underlying conception about what is wrong. There is, in fact, no reason to believe that folks diagnosed with autism have even remotely the same thing going on.

For example, there are parents who go through the hell of their normal child suddenly regressing, getting severe bowel problems and cycling between horrible constipation and wicked diarrhea, being completely incapable of interacting in any functional way, retreating to corners with their hands over their ears because they are so exquisitely sensitive to sound -- no one who has had any interactions with these children would attempt to belittle their condition as somehow "normal." And yet -- you also have socially awkward children with no other physical problems who are also diagnosed with the same problem, or at least in another place on the "Autism spectrum."

So -- when you are muddying the waters by insisting on giving people with vastly different problems the same diagnosis, when you resort to Junk Science by putting everything that you don't understand into the same basket, is it surprising that we can't figure out what the problem is?

Imagine if every time your car stopped working, society called it "Dys-enginemia." And then, you tried hard to figure out what was causing "Dys-enginemia", but there seemed to be no pattern -- sometimes you would find battery problems, sometimes valve problems, sometimes ignition problems, sometimes compression problems, and sometimes fuel injector problems. But it wasn't always the same problem.

And so your conclusion would be that valve problems cannot possibly cause "Dys-enginemia" because not every engine with the diagnosis has a valve problem. And in fact, you can "scientifically prove" that valve problems cannot possibly be the cause of dys-enginemia because only about 5% of engines with this diagnosis have this problem. And similarly, compression problems cannot possibly cause it because not every engine would have that problem, and so forth and so on.

Do you see how the junk diagnosis, the insistence on lumping all of the problems under the same heading, makes it absolutely impossible for you to find the problem, because the problems in fact all stem from completely different issues? The root cause of your inability to locate the problem is your insistence on starting from the "diagnosis" and attempting to prove that they are all the result of the same problem, when in fact they are not.