Also the child may have deficiencies in many other areas. A child that shows severe characteristics of autism often may be non verbal, non-ambulatory, and shows little to no responses to sound, smell, people or events. It takes three people, in the medical field to diagnose a child, as having autism. A speech pathologist, a physician, and a psychologist use specialized tests that rate children in fourteen categories to determine whether or not they are autistic. If the child rates high in seven of the fourteen catogories, they are labeled autistic.
Autism exists in many facets of being.
To one extreme are the children with non verbal and non-ambulatory tendencies. The child that is non verbal with autism is one that might cause problems at first with the care giver. Because the child is non verbal, the parent would not have any verbal cues that the child is in pain, is hungry. A source close to the author gave an example of this. When he was a child, he couldn't tell anyone that cold drinks hurt his teeth.