I certainly did not intend to suggest that your child was misdiagnosed. If I gave that impression, I am very sorry. I was speaking only from my own experience with doctors and special ed teachers who make snap judgments rather than referring people to professionals who really know what they’re doing. Sadly, there is a whole segment of the medical community that follows fads instead of hard science when it comes to behavioral issues in children, and I fear that a lot of them are jumping on an ASD bandwagon right now–which is not good for anyone.

2nd comment – I don’t know anybody that takes diagnosis lightly. In fact, autism diagnosis is taken with quite a heavy heart I would guess in a large majority of cases. If you daughter “clearly does not have AS” – what exactly were you looking for at the doctor’s visit?

It took 15 months before we were able to get our child diagnosed. It was pages and pages of paperwork as well as 3 multiple hour long appointments with MD and PhD level professionals.

However, if you go to your pediatrician at your child’s 12 month appt. and there are red flags including no eye contact or no pointing than your doctor would be remiss in not sending you on to a further appointment. This external behavior should be enough to require follow-up. We NEED early diagnosis, so we can get our kiddos in therapies as early as possible for the best possible outcome.

I have two daughters, and one has Asperger Syndrome–which for those who don’t know, is considered an ASD (though there is actually some debate about this).

When you spend a lot of time with someone who has Asperger, you pick up on the kind of thought process that is at work. But to recognize it in other people, you have to know them *really* well, because you have to know how they think. External behavior alone is not a good indicator.

My other daughter clearly does not have AS, and probably doesn’t have any ASD at all; and yet a doctor decided she probably had AS, based on her failure to make eye contact with him. (He didn’t know about her sister’s diagnosis.) Of course this is just silly: There are all kinds of reasons why someone might fail to make eye contact. But because this doctor jumped to conclusions, my NT daughter will probably be counted among the 1 in 88 in statistics like these.

I believe we’re seeing a problem similar to what happened with ADD and ADHD in the 90s: There is so much publicity about ASD that people are hypersensitive to the warning signs. ASD has become the go-to diagnosis for any issues someone might be having. It’s a real disservice both to the kids who are wrongly diagnosed, and to the kids who really have an ASD and are lumped in with every problem student imaginable.

Diagnosis in high-functioning cases should not be taken lightly. My AS daughter’s diagnosis came after a months-long exhaustive study of both her personal history and our entire family history, including many hours interviewing her and observing her behavior and interactions across a variety of settings. Any diagnosis of a high-functioning ASD without this kind of evaluation is highly suspect.

I’ll pray for your family, and you pray for ours — especially since some of the autism pathologies currently under research connect very closely to Chron’s and autoimmune disease.

We have gifts, and we can and should use them where we are able.

Depending on the government for our research seems pointless and wasteful to me. It ends up that Peter ends up paying for Paul’s research, and Paul pays for Peter’s research. Let’s cut out the government middle man and support the causes we want.

I believe we should support the neighbors that God gives us, as we find them. We all suffer.

With respect to your second: Definitely!

Second, might not governmental prohibition of public acts of Christian mercy indeed be an instance of the Church having to bear the cross?

God says it twice: before the Fall, and after the Fall, after He saved Noah and Co. in the type (Flood) prefiguring Baptism.

To the Site: Water can be and often is trucked to location. Water also come from nearby wells. Water can also be recycled from previous fracturing treatments.

Sometimes the web site talks about “1-8 million gallons” per job, and then later says a well can be fractured up to 18 times. When we get those multistage jobs, each frac is not going to be 1-8 million gallons. So, don’t multiply 18 x that huge job size. An 18-stage job can be millions of gallons, but each stage in that job isn’t.

Fracturing Site: I’m not going to contest the 40,000 gals of chemicals. Yet, not all of those 40,000 gals of chemicals are lethal, carcinogenic, etc.

Fracking Fluid: 600 chemicals? All at the same time? Let’s see, if we have two blender trucks out there, each with 2 dry-adds and 4 liquid-adds, I’m an engineer so get the calculator, but I get 12.

Down 10000 ft: Nothing to quibble with here.

The Math: Again, I dispute the 8 x 18 in that math. We can get as high as 25, maybe even 30 stages in a job, but in those cases each of those stages is not 8 million or even 1 million gallons.

Shale Fracturing: YES! That’s what we want! Shale is naturally impermeable, and all that gas can’t get out unless we do something about it.

Contamination: see the original post about contamination. Proper well construction alleviates it.

Drinking Water: And where it happens, the oil and gas industry should be responsible.

Left Behind: The 30%-50% is water, sand, and chemicals, not just chemicals. Water and sand make up 90-95% of a treatment, so the amount of chemicals left behind is significantly less.

Harmful VOCs: Some jobs have VOCs, and some don’t.

“300,000 barrels of natural gas” — gas is measured in cubic feet, oil is measured in bbls. There is risk, to be sure, but our webmaster seems to like his/her plastic computer and electricity. It would have been nice to ditch the fancy JavaScript and hyperlink the references so I could easily see where all the numbers are coming from, but we’d rather have our paper tiger than a discussion, I guess.

—Brian

Can I ask you about underground aquifers?

Coal seam gas exploration and extraction is a new and growing industry in my neck of the woods. One of the arguments used against it is that the chemicals used could contaminate the underground aquifers from which local farmers get much of their water. Eastern Australia has a large underground aquifer known as the Great Artesian Basin. Presumably the local aquifers are part of this larger underground water reservoir.