How Is Autism Treated?

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Dr. David Hill and today we're going to be talking about how autism is treated. Now, treating autism is an incredibly controversial subject and it's a difficult subject to study so the amount of really solid scientific evidence that we have for autism treatment is sadly rather limited. There are a couple of treatments however that have been well-studied in literature and have been shown quite well to help with the symptoms of autism spectrum disorders. Applied behavioral analysis is probably the best demonstrated of this. This is a technique where a behaviorist observes the autistic child's behavior, sees what parts of the environment are working well and working poorly, and then restructures the environment ideally to help the child learn new skills and new ways of dealing with the world around him. There is also the teach method which is a structured teaching approach, this involves a high degree of structure to help children learn new tasks and pick up new skills. When you get into the subject of treating autism, unfortunately, you get into some territory where there is a lot of pseudo-science and a lot of complete honestly charlatanism. There are plenty of people out there willing to sell you vitamins, chelation therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, immunomodulating therapy and wide range of other potentially dangerous and unproven therapies, all for the treatment of autism. Among these, the single most dangerous is chelation therapy. We know that heavy metals do not cause autism. That doesn't mean they don't cause other things but autism they don't. We also know that chelating is not a very effective way of removing heavy metals and autism has already happened. Why would you take the metals out after the disease has already occurred? The only deaths that are known to be associated with autism treatment have been associated with chelation and I would avoid that. There's no reason to spend large quantities of money on vitamins or other immunotherapy. None of these had any scientific basis for curing or treating autism. Try and stick with an established autism clinic where people are using well-established methods or well-researched methods such as applied behavioral analysis or structured teaching and work carefully with your child's behaviorist to figure out works, what works best for your child. Discussing treating autism, I'm Dr. David Hill."