I'm reading NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman, and while I'm not all the way through, the narrative of there being a "real" autism (and specifically as identified by Kranner) is very problematic at several levels. First, Kranner hired multiple staff who had worked under Asperger and therefore there are questions about priority. But putting that aside, Asperger was actually aware of the more serious autism cases and intentionally hid them to protect his patients from Nazi concentration camps (or just straight up murder in their "psychiatric" facilities), which in the early days targeted many children who would today be diagnosed with autism (with horrible consequences, obviously).

Kranner also intentionally set up his referral network to filter out the lower end of the spectrum of cases, such that he missed what Asperger has correctly identified before him: that is, that it's a spectrum.

Being a spectrum means that there is an extreme end where things are really, really difficult. I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing that, but that's not to say the spectrum isn't real or there hasn't been a battle to get to the point of recognizing that it exists.

As to the GP's comments specifically, NeuroTribes provides a lot of evidence that searches for autism "cures" have almost universally hurt autistic people, and I mean this is a very practical, and frankly horrifying, sense, not in the "my feelings are being hurt" sense. The piercing irony of a lot of these cases was that Kranner's own follow up to some of his methods indicated that his own techniques were actually making children's lives worse, not better. Some of the children who did the best were frankly just left alone---which says a lot about what we've done for them.

So, I don't know what the answer is, but I think it's worth being at least aware of the history, because a lot of it is frankly really dark.