Slide 3:
Steadman defines a disorder as a disturbance of function, structure, or
both resulting from a genetic or embryologic failure in development. This is an extremely
important point because when we, as doctors, think about a disorder, we’re saying
something is wrong. We can’t define it, we don’t know what it is but something
went wrong either before birth or in genetics and you have a fixed entity that’s not
a disease process.
Syndrome is merely a group of signs and symptoms. Obviously, disorders
as well as diseases can create symptom complexes that we call a syndrome. The trouble here
is that a lot of people are seeing autism when what they’re really looking at is a
different disease process.
