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by suddenlybananas 192 days ago
The crucial difference is that we know the etiology of COVID and so are justified in treating those two people as having the same disease. Autism is much more complicated because we don't have a thing to define it other than a bunch of disparate symptoms.

It might turn out like if we treated the cold, COVID, tuberculosis and lung cancer as the same thing because they all involve coughing.
2 comments
cardanome 192 days ago
We know that autism has a strong genetic link.

Furthermore we employ differential diagnostic and check whether your symptoms could be better explained by another condition. You don't just diagnose people with autism because they have a few symptoms.

Furthermore autistic people can generally relate to each other. Even if two autistic people show very different symptoms there is often a feeling of belonging together.

It is always possible that we will learn more in the future and maybe we will have other diagnosis criteria or discover some people currently diagnosed under autistism would fit better under something else.

However the current diagnostic criteria for ASD is the current state of our scientific knowledge. A lot of clinical research is baked into it.

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jjk166 192 days ago
> It might turn out like if we treated the cold, COVID, tuberculosis and lung cancer as the same thing because they all involve coughing.

Well there are 200 different viruses that cause the common cold. We lump them together because they all involve coughing.

Basically all cancers are unique, even for the same type of cancer. Again, these are lumped due to shared symptoms.

Tuberculosis is caused by 9 different species of bacteria, but these are at least related species.

Covid is basically exactly the same disease as SARS, just caused by a particular strain of coronavirus, though that strain divereged into multiple ones that now produce quite different symptoms. In addition to SARS, other coronaviruses are among those 200 that cause the common cold.

Diseases are historical groupings that someone at some point thought would be useful, nothing more.

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