This is what you get when economists try to do medical studies:
Enter Michael Waldman, of Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. He got to thinking that TV watching — already vaguely associated with ADHD — just might be factor X. That there was no medical research to support the idea didn’t faze him. “I decided the only way it will get done is if I do it,” he says. Waldman and fellow economists Sean Nicholson of Cornell and Nodir Adilov of Indiana University-Purdue were also undeterred by the fact that there are no reliable large-scale data on the viewing habits of kids ages 1 to 3 — the period when symptoms of autism are typically identified. They turned instead to what most scientists would consider wildly indirect measures: cable subscription data (reasoning that as more houses were wired for cable, more young kids were watching) and rainfall patterns (other research has correlated TV viewing with rainy weather).
Related posts:
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- Should children with autism be diagnosed at home?
- Read my lips: No vaccine-autism link
- Vaccines and autism: The last word
- Autism or disease mongering?
- Vaccines do not cause autism in children, whether or not they have inborn errors of metabolism
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I am the mother of a nine-year-old autistic boy, Charlie; I emailed Michael Waldman and posted about it here on Autism Vox. Waldman noted that he is puzzled as to why no one has seen the correlation that most of us (parents of autistic child especially) find quite ridiculous and devised according to problematic thesis, and without noting any experience with autistic children.
FYI, I’ve posted a formal critique here.
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