The claim is often made that early diagnosis and treatment/intervention will lead to better outcomes, and dire warnings are given that this is a limited window of opportunity that will close forever if you wait too long.

But there is a "how-to-lie-with-statistics hall-of-shame" aspect to this. The more that the pool of autism-diagnosees is diluted with kids who are not really autistic, the more successful their treatment/intervention will appear to be, because a larger proportion of them will appear to have been "cured" of a condition that they didn't have in the first place.