Reply to best place for second opinion on ASD diagnosis?

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Reply to "best place for second opinion on ASD diagnosis?"

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[quote=Anonymous]OP, I have a child with a language disorder who got wrongly diagnosed at that age.  It often done to get insurance benefits.  With our insurance its easier with an ASD diagnosis than a language disorder so ASD has become a catchall.  At that age it is hard to tell.  I could tell the differences between mine and other kids who actually had ASD but we only had an hour office visit and that was it for the diagnosis (so its not really a valid evaluation).

I would do intensive speech therapy.  U of MD LEAP is a great program if you can swing that at age 3.  The director has changed so I don't know anything about the new director but it did wonders for my child.

We tried ABA at the insistence of one doctor. Since we didn't have any behavioral or other issues that we couldn't manage it was a waste of time.  The provider was very sweet but she did very basic speech therapy which wasn't helpful instead of true ABA. It was basically all play and I gave it up for more speech.  No reason not to try it.  We didn't have a negative experience but it wasn't as helpful as targeted speech therapy.  It really depends on the provider.

I'd wait a year and see at this point.  Its impossible to tease things out until 4-5-6, when the speech comes in (assuming it does) and the receptive gets better.

The real second opinion you want is from either Dr. Camarata at Vanderbilt or his wife Mary Camarata.  They are the "experts" at teasing it out.  We saw Dr. Camarata and he was great in person and really good at testing but he had someone else write the report and it was only raw test scores and not useful. He's so busy it was impossible to do any follow up but to answer the language vs. ASD, he/they are the go-to people.

I cannot say if all the speech therapy helped or it was just time and it had to happen in its own time but I have no regrets doing intensive therapies early on.  My kid is doing really well and just very minor lingering speech issues so its not all gloom and doom for some of these kids like some make it out to be.  It will tease itself out.

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