Everything
you do entails some level of risk. What
is important is to understand the risk and takes steps, where necessary, to mitigate
it. We do this every day, even if we do
not realise it.
In
the field of autism there are many risks to consider in daily life. Many of them are the same risks that apply to
very young typical children; running out
into the road without paying attention to the traffic, falling into an unattended
swimming pool, even touching a hot iron, or hot pan on the cooker. These are risks you can mitigate by good
parenting.
When
it comes to chemical/pharmacological interventions extreme care should be taken
by the parents. This puts them in an
awkward question. They undoubtedly want
a miracle cure and thanks to the internet there is no difficulty in accessing
them. When such therapies are
put forward by actual medical doctors, mainly from North America, you can
hardly blame the parent for turning off their built-in risk assessor. The doctor must know best.
I
am not going to give you a list of the various chemicals/supplements/drugs that
some parents are even injecting into their kids.
I
think you need to do your own risk assessment of whatever intervention(s) you
are going to use, be it behavioural, chemical, musical, swimming with dolphins
etc. If you are not able to assess the risk, then best not to take it.
If
there is no downside, it is not going to be the end of the world if there turns
out to be no benefit. It may just
lighten your wallet a little.
For
me, the biggest issue has always been the risk of doing nothing.
My own experience with risk
I
have taken some seemingly big risks in my time, but because I usually took
mitigating action, I never came to regret them.
I travelled once from Delhi, up through floods in Nepal, across the
Himalayas to Tibet, across to Hong Kong, then back to Beijing and across what
was then Soviet Russia, to Moscow, then East Berlin over to the English Channel
and home. This was all done over land
with public transport. I came back without
even a scratch, although several kilos lighter.
When
you stop thinking about the risks, is when trouble will find you. A year after
graduating from Imperial College, I heard that my favourite professor, Neil Watson, a world renowned expert on turbochargers (page 2 of link), had fallen off a ladder at
home and killed himself. Many years
later, I nearly killed myself, on my own building site, falling backwards into an
empty swimming pool.