CeleRate
11-04-2003, 12:44 PM
The following is an excerpt from a book in press:
In one well designed study of a treatment for autism known as auditory integration training
(AIT), Mudford, Cross, Breen, Cullen, Reeves, Gould, and Douglas (2000) evaluated AIT in a
crossover design procedure in which all children experienced AIT and a sham or placebo condition.
Children with autism were assigned at random to one of two groups to which AIT was administered
either before the sham procedure or afterward, and parent and teacher raters and research assistants
collecting the data were uninformed (i.e., double blind conditions) about which treatment the children
were receiving at any particular time as a control for expectancy effects. AIT was administered using
procedures taught to the researchers by one of the Directors of the Society of Auditory Intervention
Techniques and the special AIT machine used met the Society’s standards for such devices. In AIT, the
person with autism listens to specially filtered sounds through headphones. In this experiment, this was
done during the AIT condition, but during the placebo condition the identical music, now unfiltered,
was piped in through speakers in the room and nothing was played through the headphones the children
wore. Mudford et al. (2000) found that the children did better on parent-report and teacher rating
measures of behavior following the placebo condition! In school, behavior observation detected only a
trend for children to put their hands over their ears more during the AIT treatment condition.
Interestingly, promoters of AIT, Rimland and Edelson (1995) reported exactly opposite results, but
their study was on children whose parents had paid $1,000 plus hotel and travel expenses for the 10
days the treatment required, and no one had been blind to the treatment condition. The degree of
commitment alone by parents who bore such expenses would tend to bias them to see improvement in
their children, to say nothing of their hopes and desires and their trust in Drs. Rimland and Edelson.
(Mulick, 2003)
In one well designed study of a treatment for autism known as auditory integration training
(AIT), Mudford, Cross, Breen, Cullen, Reeves, Gould, and Douglas (2000) evaluated AIT in a
crossover design procedure in which all children experienced AIT and a sham or placebo condition.
Children with autism were assigned at random to one of two groups to which AIT was administered
either before the sham procedure or afterward, and parent and teacher raters and research assistants
collecting the data were uninformed (i.e., double blind conditions) about which treatment the children
were receiving at any particular time as a control for expectancy effects. AIT was administered using
procedures taught to the researchers by one of the Directors of the Society of Auditory Intervention
Techniques and the special AIT machine used met the Society’s standards for such devices. In AIT, the
person with autism listens to specially filtered sounds through headphones. In this experiment, this was
done during the AIT condition, but during the placebo condition the identical music, now unfiltered,
was piped in through speakers in the room and nothing was played through the headphones the children
wore. Mudford et al. (2000) found that the children did better on parent-report and teacher rating
measures of behavior following the placebo condition! In school, behavior observation detected only a
trend for children to put their hands over their ears more during the AIT treatment condition.
Interestingly, promoters of AIT, Rimland and Edelson (1995) reported exactly opposite results, but
their study was on children whose parents had paid $1,000 plus hotel and travel expenses for the 10
days the treatment required, and no one had been blind to the treatment condition. The degree of
commitment alone by parents who bore such expenses would tend to bias them to see improvement in
their children, to say nothing of their hopes and desires and their trust in Drs. Rimland and Edelson.
(Mulick, 2003)