Hasbeen,

Children diagnosed with autism are done so by a specialist using a rigorous testing proccedure. You don't just take a trip down to your local GP to get a diagnosis.

The rest of your post only demonstrates that you have absolutely no idea what autism is. Are you trying to challenge Hanson on ignorance or something?

Oh god! AJ Philips displaying his very false sense of superiority AGAIN.

Stomach ulcers were diagnosed by highly trained specialists too, weren't they?

Hasbeen,

How am I demonstrating a sense of superiority? All I did was correct your misconception of how autism is diagnosed and point out your astonishing ignorance of what autism is. (I mean, “grow out of it”? Jeez!)

Don’t get so precious.

<<Stomach ulcers were diagnosed by highly trained specialists too, weren't they?>>

I don’t know. Maybe in cases where endoscopies were required to confirm their existence? Why’s that? Are you suggesting the doctors were seeing things?

Or is this yet another attempt at a fallacious ‘The science has been wrong before’ argument?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Science_was_wrong_before

The whys and wherefores of autism are beside the point, and beyond the ken of most of us. Pauline Hanson's comments were the topic of this thread, and more people than not agree with her.

However, I tend to agree with Hasbeen; there is an over-diagnosis of everything these days, including autism. I recently read an article on 'bulls..t jobs', the growth of which is outstripping useful, productive jobs by hundreds of times. Too many useless degrees, with holders eager to prove that they are worthwhile - wild predictions and 'answers' for everything, and to hell with the unnecessary fears and costs ensuing from their wild pontificating.

My wife was a special education teacher who remembers the first cases of autism, which started when heavily processed foods were coming on to the market. Poor diet; women leaving it late to have children; use of alcohol and other drugs by mothers. The causes are simple and obvious - traceable back to parents.

Here's another one for those of you more interested in assuming knowledge of autism than commenting on the topic,'Pauline Hanson is Right on Autism - think about mothers outsourcing their children to child-minding farms when kids need their mothers most.

ttbn,

There is no evidence to suggest that any of the factors you list cause autism.

http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&q=causes+of+autism+spectrum+disorder

Autism has always been around. The milder cases just went unnoticed, while the more severe cases were written off as insanity or retardation.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/07/11/is-autism-an-epidemic-or-are-we-just-noticing-more-people-who-have-it/#.WU3WP2iGOUk

Is there any topic where you don’t take the most ignorant possible position? Try educating yourself for once, instead of just assuming everything based on what it is that you want to believe.