The National Institutes of Health continues to platform facilitated communication

 Here is their summary of recent National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD) webinar, which was last updated on April 7th. Despite receiving evidence-backed criticism of their misrepresentation of non-speaking individuals with autism and their platforming of facilitated communication, they continue to:

1. Advocate for " engag[ing] non-speaking individuals... as collaborators at all research stages, including conceptualizing, planning, implementing, interpreting, and disseminating research."*
2. Link to a highly-flawed eye-tracking study that purports to show evidence of authorship in a variant of FC that is known as Spelling to Communicate and that has been used with the lead author's daughter.**
3. Link to a movie that platforms non-speaking individuals with autism who use FC and that was produced by the FC-promoting organization CommunicationFirst, whose executive director is the wife of the lead author of the eye-tracking study.

*Given that the receptive language skills of non-speakers with autism are highly limited (unless we expand "non-speaking" to include those who merely prefer not to speak), this pipedream could only be realized through the kind of pretend engagement made possible by facilitated communication.

**A quote from the lead author, Vikram Jaswal, appears in this excerpt from the above-linked Washington Post article:

"When Helen Keller first learned to communicate, no one believed her,” said Vikram Jaswal, a University of Virginia psychologist who has an elementary-aged daughter with autism who he said is learning to spell to communicate."

There appear to be some powerful people at the NIH with a vested interest in promoting facilitated communication at taxpayer expense--no matter the terrible costs to some of our most vulnerable citizens.