Why we do it this way
On every question here, we go find all the research — the studies that agree, the ones that don't, and the ones still unsettled — and we lay it out in plain language.
We also leave the trail: the exact search we ran, the rules we set first, and every study we read. You can retrace any of it whenever you want. Below is what we do, point by point, and why.
We don't tell you what to think.
You may have been told you were overreacting before. So we never grade what you believe. We show where the research sits and how settled it is, and where you land stays yours. Every topic starts with why the other view makes sense — because it usually does.
We show you who paid for each study.
You can't always see who funded a study, or what the researchers stood to gain. So we put that right next to every source. When we can't find it, we say so instead of hiding the gap.
We show every study, not just one.
One hopeful story travels faster than a hundred careful ones. So we show you the whole body of research and how strong it is — never the single study that happens to fit a headline. A wall of evidence and a lone study should not look the same here.
We tell you how settled the science is.
Science sometimes changes its mind. So we mark how settled each answer is, and when a stronger study lands we update it in the open, with the date on the page. A change of mind is honesty, not a cover-up.
We show all of our work.
"Trust the experts" has not always earned your trust. So we did the legwork and we don't hide how. The exact search, the rules we set first, and the full list of every study are all published. Take our word for it, or retrace every step yourself.
We use the words autistic people ask for.
Your child, and autistic people, deserve respect in how this is written. So we use the language the community asks us to use, and we count lived experience as real evidence, not a footnote. Questions that are about values, not facts, we name as values and leave alone.
The standards we hold ourselves to
None of this is our own invention. We follow the same public methods that bodies like the World Health Organization and Cochrane use to weigh medical evidence — so the way we work can be judged against a recognised bar, not just trusted on our say-so.
We will show you where the research stands.
Where you land is yours.
You've been through the whole path. You know how to read a study, how we read them for you, and why. Come back any time a "studies show" post makes you pause.