OK, here's my letter I'm sending to WKOW:
Dan,
Hi, my name is aargh57 and I wanted to comment on the piece I saw last night on FC. This is not only a "controversial" therapy, it has also been shown numerous times to be a fraud. There have been many simple tests that have shown FC to be nothing more than the ouija or idiometer effect. For example, when the facilitator puts on headphones so they can't here the question's being asked the child no longer gets the questions right.
FC is a harmful Fraud. This is not my opinion. This has been documented numerous times.
PBS "Frontline" did an expose of this in 1993. You can see the transcript here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts/1202.html
From the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies:
http://www.behavior.org/autism/
Green added that there are now eight professional organizations that have issued statements to the effect that facilitated communication has no scientific validity or reliability and should not be used as the basis for important decisions. These include the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association on Mental Retardation, the American Psychological Association, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the Massachusetts School Psychologist’s Association, the Association for Behavior Analysis, and the International Association for the Right to Effective Treatment.
Only one organization, the Association For Persons With Severe Handicaps, has endorsed facilitated communication.
Also, at the request of Anne M. Donnellan, professor, School of Education/Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education, UW,
magician and psibuster James Randi came to the University to do a series of tests.
From this article Facilitaded Communication: A Cruel Farce
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-68966515.html
"
In 1992 a group of facilitators at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, became convinced that some of their children were gifted with psychic powers. For example, while they typed with their hand held, their sentences often revealed what their facilitator was thinking. Suspecting ESP, the facilitators began giving their children tests for telepathy. They would show a child a picture, for example of an elephant. Another child, in a distant room, would type "elephant" when asked what picture the other child had seen. Of course both facilitators knew the target was an elephant. The Madison facility was and is headed by Anne M. Donnellan, a professor of education with forty years of working with autistic children. Convinced that her patients had psychic abilities, she invited magician and psibuster James Randi to visit Madison and evaluate the ESP evidence.
Randi realized at once, even before making the trip from his home in Florida to Madison, what was going on. The facilitators, not the children, were doing the typing. Naturally it would seem that the typing child was reading their mind. The apparent ESP was explained by the fact that the facilitators were communicating with each other. In a letter to me before he left Florida, Randi predicted correctly that if he made a few simple tests in which the facilitator at the receiving end did not know the target, and no ESP took place, he would be met with strong resistance from the therapists. He would be accused of destroying ESP by his skepticism and his insulting experiments.
Randi's first test was to shuffle a set of cards with different pictures, then randomly select a card. A facilitator was asked to leave the room while Randi showed the picture to her child and to everyone else in the room. When the facilitator returned, held the child's hand, and asked him to name the picture he had seen, he typed only incorrect names. Similar tests for telepathy were also total failures. The receiving child was correct only when his facilitator knew the target.
As Randi anticipated, no one at the Madison facility welcomed his disclosures. The children too, their hands held, began to type such messages as "I don't like this man from Florida. He is upsetting my facilitator. Send him home."
Thank you,
aargh57
