AADMD INFO BLAST - For AADMD Members and Friends

From our colleague Linda Long at Mass Medical School, and the Alliance for Disability in Health Care Education

Rick Rader, MD
AADMD VP External Relations

I am forwarding this information sent originally by Lucy Berrington, the mother of a young person on the Autism Spectrum. I thought this would interest many people on the list.

This is an excellent short piece from an AMA journal on what physicians can learn from the neurodiversity (autism self-advocacy movement). AASPIRE is the Academic Autistic Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education (www.aaspire.org), a NIH-funded, community-academic partnership that uses a community-based participatory research approach to improve the lives of individuals on the autism spectrum. They are developing an interactive health care toolkit for autistic adults, supporters and primary care clinicians, and are about halfway through.

http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2012/06/oped1-1206.html

Incidentally, if you are not familiar with Amanda Baggs, who the author quotes here, she is a nonverbal autistic adult, profoundly disabled by most measures, who is also an extremely smart, fluent writer and video-maker -- demonstrating theory of mind and easily using metaphor and idiom, which autistic people are supposedly unable to do. Technologies are showing the extent to which autism has been misunderstood. This clip is well worth watching. The first part shows her stimming and humming; the second part is her explanation of those behaviors, using communication technology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

Lucy