A specter is haunting the pages of medical journals across the nation, bringing with it a rise in diagnoses and theories both plausible and stupid. That specter is autism, and a recent California study, published Monday in Pediatrics, now suggests that the spacing of birth between children may cause higher incidence of autism.

This, in my humble opinion, is trite drivel, unfit for publication in even the seediest periodical. Over the past few decades, diagnosis of childhood development disorders has risen exponentially. Your child can’t pay attention? They’re not attentive and too hyper- they have ADHD! Your child doesn’t want to socialize? They aren’t shy- they have… AUTISM!

As a person on the autistic spectrum (I have a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome), and a person whose little brother has the same syndrome, I find this study and its ilk to be absolutely reprehensible. One British study suggested in the early 90s that vaccination caused autism. Add one idiotic B-list celebrity (Jenny McCarthy) , and you have an epidemic of unvaccinated children, all from fear that vaccinations cause autism.

If the study on birth spacing were somehow to be true, then wouldn’t have the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when populations boomed and couples had 10-12 children within a few years, be the time of ruination, the heyday of the autism which they so erroneously fear? The fact of the matter is, autism is a modern phenomenon because knowledge of the spectrum has only come to light in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. It has only been 150 years since phrenology, a “science” in which the brain is divided into different departments of personality and the dimensions of the cranium determined the nature of people, was widely espoused and accepted. Psychology and psychiatry are relatively modern fields of study, and autism has only recently come to the fore as a condition that is not well understood by the majority of people.

The most disturbing thing about these studies is that they view autism, in the academic sense, as just another disease, a cancer to be examined and cured. It implies that the autistic are in a constant state of sickness. I am just another child, afflicted with a “disease”. Autism is not a disease in the traditional sense- it is a condition that has always been with humanity. Many of our great leaders have characteristics of the autistic, and it truly bothers me to see the mentally different seen with such condescending pity. So what if I don’t socialize normally? So what if I view the world differently due to the wiring of my brain? I am still a human being, a normal human being, autism or not!

The misinformation about autism illustrates the great issue in modern medicine. Studies are published constantly and spread over the Internet, leading to greater paranoia and a cornucopia of potential theories. There is no constant theory for the causes of the illnesses that plague us. It seems that every other month, a new study is released, saying A leads to cancer or B cures heart disease. In the rush of the Internet age, real study has been drowned under a sea of half-baked studies.

Like the small print at the bottom of pharmaceutical commercials, the mitigating information in these studies is hidden and ignored. The autism study did not include sydromes such as Aspergers, and more studies always have to be conducted to form a link between a habit and autism.

I am tired of the studies, of the lies and of the paranoia. Autism is not a mental disease ready to eat your children, and the cure for cancer does NOT lie in the newest natural miracle drug they found in the wilds of Durkastan.

–Brad Matthews ’11