The Fight for a dignified life for Rasmus.

Now began a 6-month long and intense struggle to get expenditure ABA training for Rasmus. Fortunately, the municipality management took our request for ABA seriously, and a few of their experts was set to examine what ABA was about. Unfortunately for us and many other parents in the same situation, the Etiba report was just at the time published. The Etiba report was a 5 million dkr expensive study launched by the Social Welfare. The intensions were good. It would identify the effects of various autism treatments. Unfortunately, a local politician arranged that the Marselisborg Centre was getting the task together with the AKF (Applied municipal research). Normally, such a task was set out in licitation so that competent resources could bid on the task, but in this case the task was (in mysterious ways) given to a centre which was totally without experience in autism related work and never before had carried out effect studies.

The result was like expected. The evaluation process was a disaster and the result was exactly the opposite all the other international studies, namely (roughly) that ABA in most areas did not show significantly better results than the methods from the established health-care system.

The ETIBA report's conclusion is, to say the least, looking like, an ordered and purchased conclusion and not an objective and fair conclusion, as we should expect from the AKF.  At very manipulative manners there is  draws comparisons between the various treatment in a number of areas which can not be compared with when we are comparing a newly established system against an established system. It concluded for example that there is greater turnover in staff running the ABA, which is very obvious with a newly established system which of course must have a longer adjustment and running in period. It further more concludes that the ABA treatment costs 2 to 3 times as much as the traditional method of treatment. The truth is that you can easily run a quality ABA treatment for about  600,000 dkr a year where the child is secured between 30 and 40 hours of "one to one" training, while a special institution "care taking" offer in our municipality costs around the  400,000 dkr + expensive TAXI transport arrangement where the price is dependent on the distance between the institution and the home. At the special institutions, there is usually a nomination of 1 educator to 2 children which eliminates the possibility for the essential "one to one" training. The special institutions that we visited could carry out the maximum 1 "one to one" hour a day. I am therefore convinced that society, in the long run, will save enormous amounts of money if parents could choose the ABA method, since the vast majority of children who at an early age receives ABA would increase their development potential considerably and thus be less resource demanding in their adult life. I also have a (not proven) suspicion that the established health-care only integrate normally gifted children with autism, while the ABA treatment also include children with autism and various degrees of retardation. If this assumption hold true, then there will also be a significant disparity in comparison on this point. Here you can download the ETIBA report and here is some factual critism on the kritik1 Kritik2 Kritik3 Kritik4 Kritik5, ETIBA report's conclusions. Shortly before the publish of the ETIBA report was the CASA (Center for Alternative samfundsanalyse) report released. This report deals with the same ABA trials in Copenhagen as part of ETIBA report but the conclusions are much different.

Well, the Etiba reports erroneous conclusions ruled our case. We got a refusal. The Management convicted ABA out due to lack of evidence. This was in a way difficult for them to go against a 5 million dkr report.  

I could not accept the refusal since I could easily prove that ABA globally and without parallel, is the world's most evident autism treatment.

So I continued an intense dialogue with the administration who I believe was about to be tired of the almost spam like volume of e-mails with scientific reports, etc. I had bombarded them with in almost 6 months.

To their credit, it must be said that the management faithfully replied all my E-mails, and to our great joy we were offered a ABA treatment pilot project approx one month after the refusal. Our joy was indescribable. We had just embarked on a home-ABA treatment and was about to realize all our funds to give Rasmus the ABA treatment as long as our life savings could cover it.

At the time of writing this, Rasmus have now been 3 months in a self financed low intensive ABA treatment and the results have far surpassed our wildest hopes.

For 3 months ago, I had virtually no interaction with Rasmus and today I played the picture lottery with Rasmus and his little sister.