The most prominent spectrum these days is the gender spectrum, but the absolute absurdity of the idea of a gender spectrum pushed in medical fields should make us question the validity of a medical “spectrum,” particularly with Autism.
I genuinely think that Autism is rampantly over-diagnosed, and has created a paranoia within the population of whether they are “normal” based on very loose parameters.
If gender spectrum is seen as a joke, why do we still place the concept of the Autism spectrum on relatively a higher pedestal?
Anything can be a spectrum, depending on how retarded and meaningless you want to make something!
Gender is the perfect example. If there are eight billion genders...congrats, there's no point in even paying any attention to them, much less making it your core identity point.
So, it's not that there aren't "spectrums," it's just that treating something with very clear borders as a spectrum causes confusion, loss of meaning, and makes it so you can't apply basic knowledge. Conflating sex and gender, and then exploding gender, means you lose major effectiveness on treating sex-differentiated diseases or conditions, for example.
I think this can be said about a lot of conditions; mental, physical, chemical, etc.
A lot of it comes down to greed and institutional capture, too. The pharmaceutical and healthcare industries - and the corrupt politicians in on the grift - are making purely astonishing and incomprehensible levels of money off everything from what they're claiming is autism, to what they're claiming is cancer. Not to mention depression, ADD/ADHD, etc. Or all the diet-related and easily curable "diseases" causes by, among other things, corrupt government food pyramids.
It's ridiculous, and it's totally - pardon the pun - sickening.
Almost a million people die a year in the US just from heart-related diseases, most of them curable or avoidable. Another half a million die from cancer, and TPTB have done everything they can to stop a "cure." Another quarter to a half a million people die from medical errors. Then you have strokes, respiratory, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and the like.
Many of those could have much better treatment or avoidance, if the government hadn't gone out of their way to protect pharma/healthcare. They're killing millions of people every year.