Meeting Professor Tony Attwood

Yikes. I really shouldn't be posting again as I have pre-clinical finals 2 weeks from today but I really thought I had to update you guys on a very exciting meeting I had with the one and only Professor Tony Attwood. He's currently touring the UK and today he was giving a seminar hosted by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen's group. 

I felt immense honour to see these two absolute legends of ASD research meeting for the first time since the early 80s, when they were only PhD students both studying under the supervision of Utah Frith. There was a definite sense of mutual respect and friendship as the two of them chatted whilst waiting for people to arrive.

Professor Attwood talked about his specialist area of Asperger's diagnosis in girls, his newly developed cognitive behavioural therapy programme for showing affection and also gave his opinion on the upcoming DSM-V diagnostic criterion (he thinks its b****cks)

Afterwards, Professor Baron-Cohen, who diagnosed my HFA just last month, was kind enough to introduce me to him. That's right, I was introduced to Professor Tony Attwood by Professor Baron-Cohen!! I half-expected Hans Asperger himself to walk through the door and complete the party lol.

I aske Tony about practicing medicine with an autism spectrum disorder, and just like SBC, he was extremely positive saying there is no reason why someone with Asperger's cannot become a specialist in any area of medicine. He says he knows for a fact that there are "loads of them" out there. He light-heartedly said I'll basically be like House

I was kinda hoping to carry on asking him about the distinction he makes between HFA and Asperger's but he was quickly hounded by the other people attending the talk. Luckily, I was able to get him to sign my copy of his book which SBC himself describes as one of the best resources for parents of, and people with Asperger's. He also requested that we stay in touch so if all goes to plan I can arrange a Skype interview which I shall  then report back on for this blog. In the meantime, here's one that was made earlier.

Signing out

AspieM

I Guess This Would be the Christening

I know I promised myself I wouldn't post again until after my exams but this is just so exciting that its been keeping me awake and I just had to share it. Basically, if you care to scroll down to my very first post you'll note that I said there were many reasons I didn't want to start my blog until some time into the future. The main reason for that is because at that point I hadn't actually been formally diagnosed with Asperger's yet! 

*gasp*

Thats right. When I started this blog and wrote my first two entries I was not "officially" aspergic. Some of you might think it was fairly preemptive of me to take the name Aspie Medic and also this blog title; but as I'm sure those readers who are themselves aspergic would understand, once I realised and accepted that I was on the spectrum, so many things in my life, both past and present, finally made sense and fitted the traits of this remarkably complex syndrome that diagnosis simply became a formality.

So anyway, yesterday, I had a 3 hour meeting with none other than Professor Simon Baron-Cohen who gave me a formal assessment and told me that I was "without a doubt" on the spectrum. After a very slight hesitation as to whether it qualified as Asperger's or High Funtioning Autism, he ultimately settled on HFA, on the basis that my pediatrician's notes described a language delay when I was a toddler. In that sense this blog was preemptive as it should technically be called "The HFA- or The Autistic medic"  but I'm simply too relieved at the minute to be caught up in semantics!

I really should try and describe how it feels to be diagnosed and to have my long standing suspicions confirmed. In a word, LIBERATING. It might sound cliched but its like this huge weight as been lifted from my shoulders. No longer do I need to ask myself why I can't handle certain social situations and try and search for excuses in the way my parents brought me up, or in my own character flaws for which I am solely responsible. I'm not claiming a diagnosis of Asperger's is an excuse to be anti-social, but there were some times when I genuinely felt alien and distant and autism was a soul-relieving explanation.

Anywho, I'm gonna go to bed cos its been a long day but let me leave you guys with this song which popped into my head as I sat in my room after coming home from Baron-Cohen's clinic and I just had to listen to it on my iTunes. I guess this must better explain how I feel deep down even if I can not express it outwardly with words, neither verbally nor in this post. Enjoy...