Have you heard of the ATEC (Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist)???

This checklist is used to determine the efficacy of a new treatment (it is not a diagnostic tool). Scores from this survey should be compared to each other over a relatively short period (weeks to months) of time to determine if a therapy is working or not.

We have now incorporated the ATEC into one of our surveys (5-10 minutes long). If you haven’t started using cannabis yet, and are going to start soon, we want your input. We want to see if we can document with the ATEC improvement (or not) after 30, 60 or 90 days of using cannabis.

For those who have not started cannabis yet and who want to use the ATEC to see if cannabis is working:

• For completing the INITIAL baseline survey, we will send you a code that gives you free access to become a WPA4A member for 3 months while you use cannabis for your child. This gives you access to all of our educational material, calculators, webinars, and occasional giveaways. Hopefully this helps you get started on the right foot! We are also working on a private forum for members only and even more awesome benefits 🙂
• You will receive an email immediately after each survey with your ATEC score. Please check your spam/junk email if you don’t see one. Instructions on how to enter the drawing and become a member will be in THIS email.
• 30 days after each completed survey you will receive an email reminder to take an additional survey from my email address a wpa4a.org email.
• If you finish all 4 surveys (initial, 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days) we will enter your name into a drawing for 2 – $50 Amazon gift cards. For your time, you will also receive a code for an additional 12 months of membership ($35 value).

For those that want to use the survey to do the ATEC but have already started cannabis, you are free to do so but will not be eligible for the free membership/drawing. You will also receive emails every 30 days to redo the ATEC and this can be used to help you track progress (or lack thereof).

ABOUT THE ATEC

About the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist: A major obstacle in autism research has been the lack of a valid means of measuring the effectiveness of various treatments. Over the years, researchers have published hundreds of studies attempting to evaluate different biomedical and psycho-educational interventions intended to benefit autistic children. Much of this research has produced inconclusive or, worse, misleading results, because there are no useful tests or scales designed to measure treatment effectiveness. Lacking such a scale, researchers have resorted to using scales such as the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS), the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale (GARS), or the Autism Behavior Checklist (ABC), all of which were designed to diagnose autism- to tell whether or not a child is autistic–and not to measure treatment effectiveness. T

The Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC) was developed by Bernard Rimland and Stephen M. Edelson of the Autism Research Institute, to fill this need.

The ATEC is a one-page form designed to be completed by parents, teachers, or caretakers. It consists of 4 subtests: I. Speech/Language Communication (14 items); II. Sociability (20 items); III. Sensory/ Cognitive Awareness (18 items); and IV. Health/Physical/Behavior (25 items).

The ATEC may be used only for non-commercial purposes.

The ATEC is not a diagnostic checklist. It basically provides several subscale scores as well as a total score to be used for comparison at a later date. Basically, the lower the score, the fewer the problems.

Thus, if a person scores a ’20’ on one day, and then a ’15’ two weeks later, then the individual showed improvement. In contrast, if the score was ’30’, then the individual’s behavior worsened.

Many parents and teachers use the ATEC to monitor how well the child is doing over time. In addition, researchers have used the ATEC to document improvement following an intervention by comparing the baseline ATEC scores with the post-treatment ATEC scores.