The enemy of my enemy is a parent, too

As a parent activist, I often look to the autism parent community for inspiration. The parallels are many: an illness that strikes in childhood, was once cruelly blamed on parenting, and an activist community that has changed public opinion and professional practice dramatically in one generation.

Ah, but there is also the cautionary tale of how vehement feelings on both sides of the vaccine debate has divided the activist community.

When positions are so deeply taken, a win for one side, as in court nixes link between vaccines and autism is necessarily a blow to others who would otherwise be one's allies.

There is a lesson there for us in the ED community as well, I feel sure. We are all fighting the same illness, the same feared outcomes. We will not all turn out to be right, but we will always have more in common than different.

Comments

  1. I think what both the autism and ED world need are better evidence-based treatments. My cousin has autism, and I've done research for my aunt about new treatments (most of which have been rejected in favor of ill-tested pseudoscience, but that's another story) and it almost seems more confusing than EDs!

    But the difference is that people are looking at both EDs and autism for what they are (neurologically based illnesses) and really working on developing newer and better treatments.

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