Meg, what (if any) is the science on "sensory issues" or "sensory processing disorder"? This is another area where there are ostensible disorders diagnosed only by the people who claim to be able to cure them, and peer-reviewed literature seems rather scarce.
Hi DeeDee,
Argh. This label seemed to appear out of nowhere a while back. I've been ignoring it and hoping it would go away, or at least get clarified. But because you asked, I went and did a search on it.
It turns out to be a term invented by occupational therapists, and mostly promulagated by OTs and other paraprofessionals (i.e. not medical doctors or academic researchers). The PsycINFO database has 42 articles. (Which is really really few. To put it in perspective, the search term "autism" turns up 18
thousand articles.) Of those 42, there are:
- 11 books, book chapters, or book reviews (not peer reviewed)
- 6 dissertation abstracts (not peer reviewed)
- 4 articles actually about something else (e.g. schizophrenia, deafness)
- 3 case studies (not generalizable)
- 3 opinion pieces
- 2 articles about the use of terminology by professionals
- 2 duplicate entries in the database
- 1 publication in a vanity journal (authors pay to be published)
and finally,
- 10 peer reviewed journal articles about actual research
Of those 10:
-
All are in obscure specialty journals, mostly in applied fields (e.g. OT, nursing), rather than venues where "basic" scientific research is published
- 2 assume the existence of SID and look for a relationship between it and something else (temperament, family environment)
- 5 look at how tests for disorders or subsets of disorders cluster together
- 3 look at treatment outcomes. One found no effect. The other two did not use appropriate control conditions.
-
NONE looked at underlying causes, brain organization, or even whether this is an independent syndrome that can't be accounted for by other disorders.
Hope this helps! Cheers,
Meg
