davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
 I’ve just got to be really clear about this: there is no evidence to link the use of paracetamol by pregnant women to autism in their children. None.

In fact a major study was done back in 2024 in Sweden, involving 2.4 million children, and it did not uphold those claims. So I would just say to people watching: don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine. In fact, don’t even take my word for it as a politician. Listen to British doctors, British scientists, the NHS."

I don't always agree 100% with Wes Streeting, our Health Secretary, but he nailed it this time.

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

I haven't read much more than the first few pages of either, but there's a couple of autism papers I've seen threads about in twitter in the past couple of days (the second by its author), that really caught my eye as interesting.

Autism, Girls & Keeping it All Inside

TLDR: The way autistic people raised as girls don't outwardly present the classical behavioural markers of autism contributes to under-diagnosis of autism in people raised as girls.

“Autism research is in crisis”: A mixed method study of researcher’s constructions of autistic people and autism research

TLDR: This looks like an epic piece of research into how autism researchers view autistic people. To quote the first author's thread: "To put it politely - the data was a shit show. ... 60% of responses contained dehumanizing, objectifying and stigmatizing attitudes towards autistic people - often portraying autistic people as lacking in complex emotions, agency, uniquely human-traits, community, identity, culture, or warmth. It was stomach churning to read" and "snapshot of results: while controlling for career length, and other contact with autistic people (familial & non-familial), medicalized approachs to autism predicts a significantly higher odds of ableism, while involving autistic people more in research predicts lower odds"

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
For non-Brits fortunate enough never to have encountered her, Katie Hopkins is a former contestant on <i>The Apprentice</i> who has gone on to build a career based on attacking whichever minority group she thinks she can get away with in the most outrageous way possible, and has found her natural home at Murdoch's 'The Sun'. Past exploits include suggesting the wife of Labour Leader Ed Miliband should have her head stuck in a gas oven (doubly egregious as Miliband is of Jewish extraction), attacking the Scottish nurse who caught Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, attacks on people with dementia, and describing migrants as cockroaches and applauding the drownings in the Mediterranean. Her most recent attack labelled Labour Ed Miliband as looking like he was 'on the Spectrum' while doing a live-tweet of one of the leader's debates, and it's clear she didn't mean that in any sort of positive way. "ED STOP LOOKING AT US. You are weird. Look at people not a machine. Try and act off the spectrum"

But here's a rather good response from Lucy Hawking, daughter of Stephen Hawking and whose son has autism:

Dear Katie Hopkins. Stop making life harder for disabled people


I'm not sure I agree with her line about occasionally needing to apologise if her son stares, as I don't feel disability related behaviours need apologising for, but otherwise she nails it, Hopkins is an unpleasant flashback to the attitudes of the 70s.

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
Interesting Guardian piece on the topic: Is the NHS Failing Women with Autism?

I'm utterly *headdesk* that the new guidelines don't even mention specific issues around women when they're so apparent.

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David Gillon

May 2026

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