I have a few posts linking to Kristina Chew's blog, Autism Vox. I admire her from what I read in her website Autism Vox. She writes very well, about relevant issues, and with a perspective that I respect and usually share.
This is about other people, not me, or she, saying that the provision of services greatly affects how children are diagnosed. And she briefly mentions the increase in the imprecision of the diagnosis, with decreases in PDD-NOS, and more and more often use of terms such as mild or classic autism. With all the problems with the diagnostic manuals, they exist for important reasons and ignoring their guidelines might be leading to more problems than sticking to them. For example in genetics research or even intervention research, it becomes difficult to tease out variables when a group of children is supposed uniform (as uniform goes even in a group of well assessed children).
