Re: One doesn't imply the other
but also what is not being said.
Absolutely.
I'm not a doctor. My professional diagnoses were purely limited to understanding and resolving blocks in kids' learning of basic skills and to some extent behaviour issues.
I'd have achieved a lot less if I'd just tried to work with what I was told, rather than trying to spot what I was not being told. And much of that was tangential to the reason for referral.
Some very simple examples from my earliest days.
I was told that an eleven year old girl was spelling randomly. Her reading was fine and her writing in general wasn't terrible.I looked at her spelling and it did seem very strange. But it didn't seem random. There was some sort of pattern within it. No one had mentioned that she was Portuguese - but she had an accent so I asked. And then I checked some examples of Portuguese speech patterns. And then went back to the writing samples. And of course you can guess the rest. I confirmed it with an adult native speaker of course.
In a number of other such cases - "random spelling" and the good old "they write their letters back to front, must be dyslexia" even though the kids weren't having any other problems with literacy- a quick look at how they formed their letters and a referral to the OT service resolved the issue, almost magically.
Diagnosis is so often about what isn't being said.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
