No simple answers for autism or any condition with mental symptoms that shift over time?

I have observed that there are many families where different members have diagnoses varying from bi-polar disorder to chronic fatigue syndrome, or from Aspergers to rheumatoid arthritis, and that these change between the family generations. Also many of those given one diagnosis also have another (or even two or three) diagnoses - known as comorbidities.

I have seen a few instances of the medical profession beginning to admit that their diagnoses don't always fit neatly and therefore are not always helpful ways of ensuring the patient gets the most effective treatment. But today's opinion piece in Scientific American on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders by Steven E. Hyman, a top neurobiologist and international advisor on mental health conditions, absolutely lays bare the contradictions revealed by the advances of molecular scientific research.

"What the DSM treats as discrete disorders, categorically separate from health and from each other, are not, in fact, discrete.... I would hypothesize that what is shared within disorder families, such as the autism spectrum or the obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum, are abnormalities in neural circuits that underlie different aspects of brain function, from cognition to emotion to behavioral control, and that these circuit abnormalities do not respect the narrow symptoms checklists."

HOORAH! The beginnings of recognition of complexity in genetic effects and the stupidity of simplistic medical naming. Roll on the medical paradigm shift!

Our fossilized beauty

The recent unearthing of my childhood fossils and stones collection has resonated with my belief in the gradual structuring and reinvention of our human body over time.

I do not believe that we consist only of our isolated selves, our personal lifelong genes. We are not self-contained, pure and untainted within our skins; and current developments in microbiology and genetics give me encouragement in believing this.

What if each of us, when we were tapped with a little fossil hammer, broke open to reveal complex beauty? The beauty created by additional beings within us that have gifted their pattern to our make-up.

Maybe we have many quiet contributors within us that will not be revealed for a very long time, despite how clever we think we are in scientific terms. Until the relevant patch of earth cracks and crumbles, the true face of the stone will not be exposed to examination and awe.

What I am suggesting is that we are the sum of many people - past and present - and also many other things, so that our physiology and health may get a little improved, or a little worsened over a period of our lives; or maybe both of these possible actions, in one lifelong balancing act.

The possibility that some creature could slip a few genes in to another unrelated creature simply by living with them was once thought to be extremely rare. Recent studies on intracellular bacteria and their hosts seriously question this view

When I look at the magnificent tracery of ancient fossils within my stone collection I'm excited about what we can learn in the near future about the greater complexity of our human body - if we are prepared to think inside and outside ourselves.