Sounds like science:

The tricky thing about unproven treatments is that they sound scientific.

Take, for example, single-photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT. For around $3,500, Amen Clinics — brain health centers named for founder and doctor Daniel G. Amen — will scan a child’s brain to deliver an autism diagnosis and create targeted treatments. “We use brain SPECT scans plus clinical data to make diagnoses,” says Amen, adding that the clinics have scanned more than 1,000 people with autism.

Autism experts interviewed for this story say these scans are far from — and may never be — ready for use to diagnose autism. Some say it’s pretty much hocus-pocus. “These extremely expensive ‘evaluations,’ which are almost never covered by insurance, are best described as a scam perpetrated on families who are being preyed upon by false hopes,” says Columbia’s Veenstra-VanderWeele. Brain scans can’t reveal autism, because researchers haven’t yet definitively identified autism-specific brain activity patterns or structures. And scans certainly can’t indicate which treatment would work.

For most parents, who have little understanding of how science is done, wading through claims made about alternative treatments can be befuddling. Even when someone knows to search PubMed, an online database of journal abstracts, she might not understand that obscure journals tend not to be taken seriously, and might not pick up on the difference between types of studies. A case report about a single child may be of purely scientific interest as an avenue for further investigation, for instance, whereas results from a rigorous randomized controlled clinical trial with a large number of participants can provide solid information on whether a treatment works.

What’s more, media outlets often exaggerate the significance of findings. Take secretin, a peptide hormone that stimulates the secretion of digestive fluids from the pancreas. In the late 1990s, three children with autism were reported to improve dramatically after taking secretin. Word spread, parents heard about it on the news, and demand for secretin skyrocketed. But more than a dozen subsequent double-blind studies — in which neither the families nor the researchers knew which participants were in the placebo arm — found no evidence of effectiveness.

“As a scientist, you can end up on the front page of the science section of The New York Times with a new link to autism, but not really know if it’s causal,” says Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist who heads the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. In other words, just because researchers find a connection between autism and a gene or some other factor does not mean that it causes the condition — or that blocking it can reverse the effects of autism. “I think it’s probably very confusing for parents. So when someone says, ‘I can take what that scientist said and make it meaningful for you right now,’ that’s incredibly appealing.”

At the AutismOne conference in Chicago this year, more than 150 practitioners and company representatives pitched therapies to hundreds of attendees in talks modeled on scientific presentations. Several presentations focused on the gut microbiome, reflecting findings suggesting that disturbances to gut microorganisms cause the GI problems that plague many children with autism. At last year’s conference, a physician called Zach Bush explained, using slides of the gut viewed through a microscope as visual aids, how his plant-derived mineral supplement, RESTORE ($49.95 for a one-month supply), strengthens cell membranes in the gut to keep toxins from leaking out. Bush told the parents in the audience that he was “excited to just be a piece of your puzzle” in the parents’ quest to “rebirth that child into a state of health.” The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The microbiome connection is in fact under investigation by multiple respected research groups. One hypothesis being explored is that disruption to gut microorganisms causes a ‘leaky gut’ that allows bacteria to escape into the body, altering brain function and contributing to autism behaviors.

But promises such as Bush’s are way ahead of the research, says Ruth Ann Luna, director of medical metagenomics at the Texas Children’s Microbiome Center in Houston. “Right now, we’re trying to characterize the gut biome in kids with autism who have significant GI problems,” she says. Doing so could help pave the way for treating people who have both autism and gut issues. This is an intriguing avenue of investigation, but RESTORE and probiotic drinks marketed as autism treatments aren’t yet backed up by research.

An even more aggressive approach, says Luna, is parents doing fecal microbiota transplants at home — although the transplants are worth investigating in clinical trials, she says. These parents mix a stool sample from a neurotypical family member with saline, strain the concoction, and then give the resulting liquid via enema to a child with autism. Instructions are readily available on YouTube. “It’s very experimental and certainly risky to do without the oversight of a physician,” she says.

When unproven treatments target the same links to autism being explored in serious research, it’s that much more difficult for parents to evaluate the claims. “These so-called ‘experts’ are so confident, and they sound so convincing,” says Zurcher.

Someone searching for information on, say, toxins that might have a link to autism could come across the “IonCleanse by AMD for ASD” Facebook group, where more than 3,300 members exchange information about a footbath made by a company called AMD. “As children’s bodies begin to detox, the systems that were energetically blocked or shut down can start to function normally again,” the AMD website says.

“We don’t claim to treat autism,” says owner Neill Moroney, who estimates 1,000 to 1,100 people with autism have used the $1,995 footbath. Moroney says he would like to conduct a blinded trial with 30 children over 90 days to determine whether the gadget truly alleviates symptoms of autism. But he says the funding is difficult to find. “What I’m looking for is someone with the resources to give it the shot it deserves,” he says.