Shelly Galli, the mother of Camille, is used to dismissive attitudes from doctors. There was a time when medical specialists told her to all but give up hope that Camille would ever be able to communicate. “When my daughter was diagnosed, they told me, if she doesn’t talk by 5 or 6, she probably won’t,” she recalls. Camille didn’t. But Galli refused to give up.

Camille spent years in applied behavior analysis, the intensive one-on-one behavior training technique recommended by the National Institute of Mental Health as a therapy of proven value in helping autistic children. She did speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy — plus a host of scientifically unproven, even highly controversial treatments, like chelation (intravenous infusions aimed at removing mercury and other heavy metals from her body). She now eats a special organic diet and every afternoon drinks small cups of acidophilus and vinegar to counter internal yeast. She spends 35 hours a week in a one-girl schoolroom that her parents have created for her in an unused portion of a local religious school, working with a former preschool teacher with expertise in special education. She works with an art teacher and does speech therapy twice a week, works out at a gym with trainers every day and goes to vision therapy twice a week at the Vision and Conceptual Development Center, where she does jumping jacks on a trampoline and animal walks, throws and catches a beanbag and “fixates” on pictures.

All this costs well over $100,000 a year. But now, at age 11, Camille is talking. “Talking more every day,” Galli says. And Camille is reading. “And I’m glad we didn’t listen to those people,” Galli adds. In addition to twice-weekly sessions at the vision center, Camille does follow-up exercises at home or in school. She also does additional computer exercises, which help her with “tracking” skills, according to her teacher, Colleen Bane, and also — according to the computer program’s Web site — help her develop eye-muscle strength and letter recognition and activate the visual processing center of her brain. On the day I came to see her in her classroom, she was doing a set of those exercises on her laptop computer. She kept looking away from the screen, where words flashed quickly, requiring her to track with her eyes and point with her finger. As the exercise changed to one that required her to quickly memorize a short stream of letters and type them on the keyboard, she closed her eyes entirely. She twisted around constantly, trying to get a good look at the wall clock, where the minute hand was ticking, ever so slowly, toward 3 o’clock and the release for home. This was new. In recent months, her teacher, Colleen Bane said proudly, Camille has made great progress in telling time.

Though Camille has been taking part in many types of therapy, Galli attributes much of Camille’s progress in reading, and conducting herself in the world generally, to vision therapy. The same is true for Francesca Dennis, Brian’s mother, even though during the time her son was doing vision therapy he also switched schools, a change that, Dennis told me, vastly improved his life. And Jack, the boy from Atlanta with the language disorder, began for the first time to receive speech therapy while he was doing vision therapy. When I asked Allred whether Jack’s progress might just as well have been because of his speech therapy, she said: “To be honest with you, I don’t think you can tell. From my perspective, I don’t care. Are you going to deny your kid a therapy just to see if another therapy works? I’m mostly going on my gut.”

Galli also said it was possible that Camille’s progress might be a result of her other, more proven therapies, but she added that it didn’t really matter: “We never know what it is that’s really helping. But we’re not going to take any chances. You just don’t want to lose time.”