If Gupta has indeed made such statements, could someone please post some of them in this thread?
Out of curiosity, I just finished a second attempt of my own to track down such statements. The easiest way to do this would be to play the CNN video, "
CNN Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta examines the controversy over facilitated communication", but like gdnp I am unable to do so. So I tried using the Google instead. My assumption remains that if Gupta has indeed made statements significantly supportive of FC that someone should have quoted them some time somewhere.
First I checked Daily Kos, since there have been a number of diaries about Gupta there this week and many people there are critical of the appointment. A search of diaries and stories about Gupta turned up a couple dozen. I clicked on 8 which seemed most promising; from a quick read, I could see nothing in any of these diaries about FC.
But the search brought up only the diaries, not the comments. On the chance there was something significant in the comments, I did a Google search for
site:dailykos.com "facilitated communication". Result:
12 hits, none relevant to Gupta.
Second: I did a site search for Huffington Post. This turned up two relevant items: one in the January 6 post "
Sanjay Gupta: Surgeon General?" and once in the January 9 post "
Conyers: Obama Should Not Nominate Sanjay Gupta".
In both of these, the mention of FC occurs in the comments rather than in the main posting. The January 6 comment by sciencedude is written in an authoritative tone:
"Dr. Gupta's strong advocacy of the discredited technique "facilitated communication" (FC) has given false credibility to fakes and charlatans who prey on the desperate parents of children with autism."
But no evidence other than confident assertion is provided to back up this statement.
Ah, but the January 9 comment section is more helpful. Sciencedude posts again, as does ataraktos -- and both of them provide the source for their assertions. Unfortunately that doesn't do us much good --
because both of them got their idea that Gupta is an FC supporter from us. The source sciencedude cites in support of his belief that Gupta is an FC supporter is Randi's November 9th item, and the source ataraktos cites is Jeff Wagg's January 8 item. So the support for this belief seems to go in circles.
I did one more search: a generalized Google search of
"facilitated communication" "Sanjay Gupta". That comes up with 291 hits, more than I intend to wade through, but the first two are the already-checked HuffPost, the next two are randi.org (Randi's Swift commentary, and this thread!), and a check of half a dozen more of the first page hits turned up lots of confident rhetoric but not much else.
Edited to add: okay, I did finally find something!
1. From
Hellboundallee, May 2006:
On Feb. 25, 2005, CNN aired a segment about FC reported by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Gupta asks an FC detractor, "There are some extraordinary examples of people who seem to have benefited tremendously from facilitated communication. How do you explain that?"
The so-called expert responded, "No, I can’t explain that."
2. From the
Autism in New Brunswick blog:
Many parents of children diagnosed with Autism Disorder were surprised that Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and CNN, chose Amanda Baggs to feature as an example of the life of a "low functioning" autistic person. Ms Baggs has spent her life on the internet detailing her childhood and teen years which she spent, by her words, diagnosed with schizophrenia (about which she often lectured via internet news groups with the certainty that she now expresses about autism), attended school for gifted students, started college, conversed orally with educators and medical personnel, and had at least one boy friend. She is a very capable writer with an excellent command of language and a very sharp intellect. Few parents of severely autistic or low functioning autistic children would recognize their children, or their children's autism, in the life of Ms Baggs.
Then, with millions of autistic persons in the world, some of whom live their lives in the residential and institutional care of others, some with little or no ability to communicate, orally, by means of technology, or otherwise, Dr Gupta and CNN decided to further illustrate the world of autism by interviewing ... yup ... Amanda Baggs. At that point many parents struggling to achieve a better life for their autistic children simply wrote off Dr. Gupta as a credible reporter on the realities of autism.
3. Most directly to the point, from Gupta's own blog, is an entry from October 2007, "
Giving autism a voice". Here's a relevant excerpt:
... It's called facilitated communication and it's been used for some people with autism since the early 1990s. The method involves a facilitator who sits with a person with autism and holds his or her hand, wrist, arm or even simply touches a shoulder in order to help them type with a single digit. The theory is that the presence of a facilitator can help the person focus and target his or her neuromuscular abilities to type on the keyboard. It's controversial because critics say that the facilitator can be the one manipulating the typing rather than the autistic person.
I just returned from the "Autism National Committee" annual meeting in Edmonton, Canada. I saw many people using facilitated communication, or FC, effectively in various ways. In some cases, I was a bit more skeptical. For sure, it is amazing to hear the thoughts of people whose outward appearance (including no eye contact, repetitive words and physical movement) can seem vacant or nonsensical to most of society. But FC was just one part of the conference. People who fall into all categories of the autism spectrum disorders arrived from all over North America to listen and learn from other people with autism. I followed up with an autistic woman named Amanda Baggs, whom we profiled earlier this year. Amanda communicates with a keyboard without a facilitator...
From what I can see, the rap on Gupta isn't really that he's a full-fledged supporter of facilitated communication, as various blog commenters seem to be claiming; it's that he hasn't been a strong enough opponent of it. Given how hard it is to get skepticism a fair hearing on almost any tv program, I don't think that's a particularly strong criticism. Unless people can come up with stronger examples of Gupta supporting FC, I'm inclined to consider that praise by faint damnation.
