Introduction

Medical science reduces things to their constituent parts and focuses on the problems, finding it more difficult to join disparate pieces of knowledge and understanding together. Although this has been useful, the treatments which have arisen from this way of thought tend to be aimed at the constituent conditions (the bits that make up the problem, such as obsessive or compulsive behaviour, anxiety etc) or the co-morbid conditions. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the author's experiences and thinking developed in years of coaching people with Asperger's syndrome. Coaching is a solution that brings people closer into the mainstream: unlike current services, coaching is accessible, flexible, and affordable. It also offers some aspects that most support currently misses, and so it can in some ways be considered to be somewhat of a "barefoot" approach.