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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Does this also work in reverse? I.e. take supplements/drugs until the test is negative, and then be (temporarily) autism-free?

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I don't know, but there's preliminary evidence that autism can be reversed by dosing children with oxytocin and by using TMS on adults.

Because those approaches are considered to be fairly low-risk, I suspect research will continue in those directions until they hit a wall of some kind.

I have not heard of using oxytocin for children on the specturm. Are there articles, resources, or papers that talk about this?

I'm on my phone, so it's hard to search and link to articles. Here's the result of a quick search:

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/oxytocin-spray-boosts-soci...

Hopefully that serves as a jumping off point.

What does it even mean to “reverse autism”?

Most famous example: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/an-experimental-au...

It allows people to read faces and emotional context in a way they couldn't before. Some people find that their decision-making becomes less logical and more emotional. For others, nothing changes.

If you search "tms autism" there are other firsthand accounts that you might find interesting.

Have there been any scientific experiments already to validate this method?

As of 2 years ago, there were more than a dozen clinical trials. Evidence is preliminary -- populations are small, and measuring how autistic someone is is not easy.

https://www.autismspeaks.org/blog/2016/03/25/transcranial-ma...

it is like moonwalk but more autistic /s

No particular reason to thing so, until an experiment indicates the direction of cause and effect.

If you want to remove your autism today, you can try transcranial magnetic stimulation.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sister-the-edge-auti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...

If you mean it in the sense that one could cheat the results and not be diagnosed, then absolutely. Most of their metabolites could linked to dietary deficiency. We did have a metabolite panel done and my kid would have been a false negative.

As a parent of kid with Autism I experienced it first hand. However, instead of doing like many parents (including those with neurotypicals) we did not cave-in, but build a lot of incentive and rewards and it paid off very early. But this is my n=1, so I don't know if it is because of our parenting style or something else.

Out of interest, what was your parenting style like? Was it just a matter of clear expectations and consistent rewards and punishments?

Did you have a source for all this or did you work it out by yourself?

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