The 'scientific' approach warning that people should try only one change at a time, worries me a bit because autism is often not one thing so making one otherwise positive change can sometimes mean the environment incidentally alters other important things in ways that make the condition more extreme.
So, for example, my dairy and gluten intolerance is underpinned by salicylate intolerance and its impact on gut inflammation and immune suppression.
So if in removing dairy and gluten, my environment increased my high salicylate fruit intake, then no effect would be seen even though I needed BOTH the dairy removed and Salicylates reduced.
Another example, I struggle with mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders which significantly impact my sensory perceptual and information processing challenges.
These mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders are heightened or decreased in my case by certain dietary/nutrient changes.
Let's imagine that one tried tinted lenses with me to reduce visual perceptual fragmentation but in the same week I discovered nectarines or honey and put up my salicylate levels with these substances that are 18 times the high level of Salicylates. Now Salicylate intake increases my visual fragmentation, so even if the tinted lenses would have helped, on this particular week, this would not have appeared to help.
I'm socially phobic and am significantly more challenged when forced into compliance based face-to-face programs, but if you simultaneously turned off the overhead lights and reduced the sensory clutter you might mistakenly conclude that the socially-invasive program was 'working' when, in all other sensory environments the same thing would fail badly and you'd then be mislead into avoiding less socially-invasive programs which may have had far greater success.
I have an auditory processing disorder which can lead to accumulated processing delay and cause extreme panic. Yet similar reactions can come about because of social phobia responses and if gestural signing were brought in but done in a manner that was socially invasive, you'd wrongly conclude that gestural signing was no use to me.
You see my point.
Well I could give 100 examples from my life or those of others on the spectrum (often with different combinations of challenges) but the bottom line is that there are two basic approaches to autism,
1) a wholistic one which thinks about how COLLECTIVES of underlying conditions INTERACT and
2) the so called 'scientific approach' which emphases studying one single track at a time, but can lose sight of treating the PROCESSES that are going on, processes that may need to bring in three simultaneous approaches to cover all bases involved in a single autism-specific challenge.
Whilst the 'scientific approach' works if you have a one cause-one issue relationship, in many cases this won't be so. Instead you'll have a PROCESS underpinned by a small collective of causes, the treatment of which will not appear to work unless the combination of things are brought in that fit THAT COLLECTIVE of causes. The 'scientific approach' has dominated 'treatment' for a long time, but in the last 10 years a wholistic approach has certainly begun to be recognised for its logic and success too. Those who follow only the 'scientific' approach often condemn wholistic approaches as 'psuedo science' but I'd hope that wholistic approaches are not saying they are science, but logic and that its not always about proof and accountability, its also about people and what works.
For those interested in the multitude of underlying issues that can be at work, how they can interact and how to identify WHICH ones are most likely at work in WHICH individuals so that a RANGE of simultaneous, but most FITTING approaches can be brought in together to achieve the best potential progress, then have a look at The Jumbled Jigsaw which provides the basis for this form of wholistic approach as well as a checklist with which the environment can identify and quantify the degree to which a range of interacting underlying causes may be going on under a label of 'autism spectrum'.
Just for the record, I am NOT an expert and I do completely support and believe in a scientific approach to many medical conditions. But autism, like Asperger's SYNDROME is still a label with no single identifiable cause in any majority of cases.
A syndrome is a collective of BEHAVIOURS, where a medical condition is a collection of SYMPTOMS. It may be easier to apply the one cause-one condition stance and justify the 'scientific approach' to the treatment of baldness than to autism. A wholistic approach may be essential to getting successful results in a whole range of conditions which have an INTERACTIVE multiple COLLECTIVE of underlying causes.
For the record, I am NOT an expert. I'm a sociologist, a teacher, a person with autism and someone with over a decade of experience as a patient in the fields of gut and immune problems (and 8 years as a consultant to people with autism). I am simply a social philosopher, a researcher, an observer and a results-oriented person. I believe science has a valuable place, but that it is not any kind of 'god', omnipotent in every and all circumstances, and that other approaches have a valuable place in a wholistic and workable understanding of all kinds of processes, of which autism is merely one of them.