@jeffcliff >it should have been a signal out of the attempts to replicate wakefield and it wasn't.

It could have just got missed; I guess we can't know. Negative results don't get published very often, and we're interested in reading about a negative result. It's frustrating both from the perspective of researchers and an interested public.

>It screams 'attempting to salvage a known false hypothesis'

I agree. I'm asking if we can preemptively build a solid case against this thing I've said, because I'm going to bring the "PTSD is misdiagnosed as autism" thing up to people I know - some of whom totally buy the "vaccines cause autism" bit.

I think it's an obvious line of thought from that perspective. I'd like to sort of prepare to shoot it down, but I just kinda haven't figured out how to.

>The general "bad parenting causes autism" however has been looked at...It doesn't seem to wash at all

There's two points off about this.

First, it's off-center for what's being discussed: the claim isn't "bad parenting/trauma/etc. causes autism," it's "bad parenting/trauma/etc. causes ptsd which gets misdiagnosed as autism."

Second, if this research was only conducted before Wakefield, then it should be revisited: our notions of what constitutes "bad parenting" has expanded greatly, and it includes practices such as "spanking your kids unconscious."

One might reasonably ask whether or not spanking causes autism - I'm not sure if Boomers/Gen X simply spanked more brutally than past generations. However, I'd like to shelve that thought and focus on the PTSD/autism misdiagnosis link, and whether or not hitting kids with needles is potentially causing an upsurge in autism diagnoses as a result.