Results for: vaccine
Conflict of Interest in Medical Research
The cornerstone of science-based medicine is, of course, scientific research. The integrity and quality of biomedical research is therefore of critical importance and to be thoughtfully and jealously guarded, if we care about maintaining an optimal standard of care. There are many threats and hazards to the institutions of medical research – mostly ideological. One that has not been discussed much on...
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...
Deception and Ethics in Sectarian Medicine
In January I had the pleasure of attending TAM 5.5 in Fort Lauderdale. On the last day of the conference the JREF had an open house where anyone interested could come see the inner workings at the JREF facility. Since I had a rental car I decided to go through the lobby to see if anyone needed a ride, and sure enough...
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...
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...