Technology
Autism and Lupron
05/21/09 05:49 Filed in: Research
The Chicago Tribune has an excellent and disturbing article in today's paper about a small group of practitioners who are prescribing Lupron, a drug that shuts down the production of testosterone in males, for treatment of autism.
The author, Trine Tsourderos, does an excellent job of investigating many of the key points that we often discuss here in terms of investigating and critically analyzing claims. Among other key points, according to the article, it notes that the practitioners developing this "treatment" have no specialty or background in either autism, or the types of medicine subspecialties that would provide training and background either in the treatment of autism or in endocrinology, the type of specialty that would typically oversee treatment with Lupron.
But perhaps most telling is the fact that the developer himself is directly quoted as claiming that "Lupron is the miracle drug". As Carl Sagan once said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Any time someone - anyone - is claiming miraculous results it should be a red flag.
It is a sad but completely unsurprising fact that despite the completely unproven - and frankly uninvestigated - nature of this treatment, the practitioners have been opening clinics in a sort of franchise model across the country. This begins to make fairly clear the motivation behind their approach...
The author, Trine Tsourderos, does an excellent job of investigating many of the key points that we often discuss here in terms of investigating and critically analyzing claims. Among other key points, according to the article, it notes that the practitioners developing this "treatment" have no specialty or background in either autism, or the types of medicine subspecialties that would provide training and background either in the treatment of autism or in endocrinology, the type of specialty that would typically oversee treatment with Lupron.
But perhaps most telling is the fact that the developer himself is directly quoted as claiming that "Lupron is the miracle drug". As Carl Sagan once said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Any time someone - anyone - is claiming miraculous results it should be a red flag.
It is a sad but completely unsurprising fact that despite the completely unproven - and frankly uninvestigated - nature of this treatment, the practitioners have been opening clinics in a sort of franchise model across the country. This begins to make fairly clear the motivation behind their approach...
New Look!
03/15/09 14:27 Filed in: Product Reviews
After a couple of years of running the same website format, we’ve updated Forest City Behavior’s look as you see here. I’m especially pleased to note that this new format not only looks nice and clean (in my humble opinion, of course), but is also designed for friendly reading on mobile web browsers like those found on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
For better or for worse, Forest City does its web design in-house. While it’s not especially behaviorally relevant, I’ll note that this job was made much easier by the addition of a program called RapidWeaver to our software arsenal. This is a program designed specifically for the Macintosh platform to make web design easy, but to still allow for powerful web features. Regular visitors to the site will be seeing some of those as you explore and as the site grows in the future.
And - while it’s not directly relevant to behavioral treatment, it is indirectly so. Anything that makes website management easier and take less time is also allowing us to spend more time on the direct behavioral work that we do here.
I hope you like it as much as we do here in the Forest City. Enjoy!
For better or for worse, Forest City does its web design in-house. While it’s not especially behaviorally relevant, I’ll note that this job was made much easier by the addition of a program called RapidWeaver to our software arsenal. This is a program designed specifically for the Macintosh platform to make web design easy, but to still allow for powerful web features. Regular visitors to the site will be seeing some of those as you explore and as the site grows in the future.
And - while it’s not directly relevant to behavioral treatment, it is indirectly so. Anything that makes website management easier and take less time is also allowing us to spend more time on the direct behavioral work that we do here.
I hope you like it as much as we do here in the Forest City. Enjoy!
