I get really annoyed when people appear with 'Autism Cures.'
Not only do they imply that Autism is a disease, with no benefits but the people who sell them are basically the snake oil merchant of the 21st century. I don't mind people being ripped off with Reflexology or Cyropractory as that doesn't hurt anyone... Well, depending on what you have done at least but in this case, it's the lowest that you can go, selling phony cures to people who believe that their child is smitten with a terrible affliction.
If people spent the money on cure research into providing speech therapy, specialist equipment (such as tablets/laptops with learning programs on them) and addressed their individual needs, then maybe more autistic people wouldn't find it difficult to integrate with society. Maybe, if you taught them not to hate themselves and worked with them at a young age to teach them much needed social skills, through speech therapy, maybe you could get one step closer to your 'cure.'
To be honest, I don't even know how you'd 'cure' an autistic person anyway. It's like curing someone of their homosexuality, it's not possible, because it's pretty much wired into the person. The minds of people with ASDs aren't broken, they're just different and need a different approach, when it comes to teaching and learning social skills, not a diet of worms or electroshock therapy.
It also blew my mind when that (ex)doctor said, in his report, that vaccinations 'caused' autism. How? It's not transferable. I could not 'inflict' autism onto another person, whether I snogged that person's face off, forcefully put my blood inside their body or... whatever else, it's not possible. You can't catch it or get it through 'poisonous vaccines' or through eating too much cholocate, you're born with it.
The funny thing is, most people who say that they have seen children, who are otherwise fine, get autism from vaccines usually say that this happens between the first and second year of the child's life. How funny that children show symptoms of a developmental disorder, whilst they are... you know... developing?
I think that the reason that it exasperates me is that people have done atrocious things in pursuit of a cure, things that would traumatise anyone and shift them away from the path of normality, parents have been lied to and cheated by shmucks, who exploit their pain to sell bullshit cures but, to be honest, the whole concept is the thing that it basically paints all autistic people as 'wrong,' 'Tragic,' figures who will never live normal lives. I know two autistic people who are published novelists, several of them who are now in higher education and plenty who live 'normal' lives, who are married, with children. I myself am currently at University and I aspire to be an author some day.
I won't deny that autistic people need help from time to time, some more than others and I'm not blind to the fact that some of them will always struggle to live independently. I've known people on the 'high' and 'low' end of the spectrum, yes but what people fail to realise is that they can achieve 'normality' and even brilliance, with the right amount of help, that little push in the right direction could do more for them than a 'cure' ever could.