Category: Vaccines
The North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners, Dr. Rashid Buttar, and protecting the public from practitioners of non-science-based medicine
One of the most contentious and difficult aspects of trying to improve medical care in this country is enforcing a minimal “standard of care.” Optimally, this standard of care should be based on science- and evidence-based medicine and act swiftly when a practitioner practices medicine that doesn’t meet even a minimal requirement for scientific studies and clinical trials to support it. At...
The Increase in Autism Diagnoses: Two Hypotheses
A new study sheds more light on the question of what is causing the recent increase in the rate of diagnosis of autism. Professor Dorothy Bishop from the University of Oxford studied adults who were diagnosed in 1980 with a developmental language disorder. She asked the question – if these people were subjected to current diagnostic criteria for autism, how many of...
Where Are We Going?
Where is it all headed? Medicine on another threshold. Allow me to present several previously unconnected news articles that illuminate the serious problem we face in today’s increasingly scientifically rootless world. Who are scientific medicine’s friends; on whom can we rely for support of reason and common sense, unbiased approaches to funding, unbiased efficacy evaluation, fair law enforcement, and a return to...
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March 20, 2008
The Hannah Poling case and the rebranding of autism by antivaccinationists as a mitochondrial disorder
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I seem to have taken on the role of the primary vaccine blogger of this little group of bloggers trying desperately to hold the forces of pseudoscience and magical thinking at bay in the face of powerful forces trying to “integrate” prescientific belief systems with science- and evidence-based medicine, a process that would...
Toxic myths about vaccines
Antivaccine activists would have you believe that vaccines are loaded with "toxins" and are therefore dangerous. While there are some chemicals that sound scary in some vaccines, they dose makes the poison, and at the tiny amounts used in vaccines none of these "toxins" are harmful.
Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future–Part III
“Symptoms,” Continued Part II of this blog† introduced the homeopathic understanding of “symptoms” as they pertain both to “provings” in healthy subjects (now called “homeopathic pathogenic trials” or “HPTs”) and to histories elicited from patients. Hahnemann conflated “symptoms” and every random itch, ache, pain, sniffle, feeling, thought, dream, pimple or other sign, and anything else that might occur to a subject or...
Mercury in vaccines as a cause of autism and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs): A failed hypothesis
Mercury. It sounds very, very scary, particularly when you learn it was in some vaccines in the form of thimerosal. Fortunately, science tells us that thimerosal does not cause autism or neurologic injury, contrary to what antivaccinationists tell us.