Problems with Definition

I see the the 'Autism United' writers have fallen into that exasperating habit of using the word 'recover' as both interchangeable with the word 'cure' and also of simultaneously using 'recover' to imply something that really means 'improvement'.

That autistic people 'improve' (by which I mean cope better in the world) as they age is a fact. It is also a fact that some autistic people move so far along the spectrum that their diagnosticians remove the autism diagnosis. Does that mean though that they are now no longer autistic? And if it does, how exactly do we attribute this to some sort of cure?

A 2006 survey determined that the average autism parent is trying on average 7 therapies at any one time. In order to say with confidence a person is 'cured' we have to say they are cured by something. If we don't know what might have brought about the cure, then how can we judge?

The trouble is that for a lot of Alt-Med practitioners, there is no published case studies and therefore no scientific evidence. In fact, the idea of spontaneous recovery, or just general advancement over time is more likely to account for these cures or recoveries. Even Bernard Rimland realised this:

"Mysterious spontaneous recovery. It hasn’t happened often, but it has happened often enough for the phenomenon to be worth noting:
over the past 25 years I have received a handful of letters from
parents which read something like this: 'Please remove our address
from your files. Our child has continued to improve so greatly - we
don’t know why - that now he is no longer considered autistic."

I challenge Autism United and Dr Hirani to present scientifically valid case studies of cured (not recovered or improved) autistic people that establish exactly what the mechanism of cure was.