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In the broadcast, you touched lightly on the difference between an "educational diagnosis" and a "medical diagnosis".
Two years ago, my then-8-year-old son was "diagnosed" by his Portland Public school as having Asperger's syndrome. We took him to OHSU for a second opinion. After running a series of comprehensive tests, they came back and said that there was no way that he had Asperger's, and that it was inappropriate for the school to diagnose him as such.
There is a huge negative impact whenever a kid is misdiagnosed with a condition like autism. For my son, it meant that his teachers didn't expect much of him after the diagnosis. Their opinion of him changed overnight. They treated him like he was incapable of learning. He felt the stigma of being "different". If he had autism, I have no idea how this change in their behavior would have helped him.
Misdiagnosis doesn't just affect the family of the misdiagnosed child. For a kid with special needs like autism, the school would have recieved more funding for my son's education; funding that he didn't need, but that other children would need, and wouldn't recieve.
I would like schools and hospitals to share the same diagnostic tools and processes, to ensure that kids get diagnosed and helped appropriately.

posted 5 years, 4 months ago
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