Results for: Andrew Wakefield
Just the Facts
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. —Mark Twain There is an educational approach to becoming a doctor. It involves learning massive amounts of basic science, followed by massive amounts of pathophysiology, which barely prepares you for the clinical years of the last half of medical school and subsequent residency, with the massive knowledge...
Autism Onset and the Vaccine Schedule – Revisited
This week on Science-Based Medicine I wrote an article about a new study looking at the onset of autism symptoms, showing that most children who will later be diagnosed with autism will show clear signs of autism at 12 months of age, but not 6 months. This is an interesting study that sheds light on the natural course of autism. I also...
The Early Course of Autism
Understanding the natural history of a disease is an important framework to have. It not only is critical for prognosis, but also informs us about diagnostic and screening strategies, is important to assessing interventions, and provides clues to causation. There has been much debate about the early course of autism, specifically the earliest age at which autism may be detected. At present...
Measles
It looks like the H1N1 pandemic is fading fast. I am amazed at how lucky we were, at least in the hospitals where I work. A month ago all the ICU beds were full, most of the ventilators were in use and we were wondering how we were going to triage the next batch of patients who needed advanced life support and...
Yet another nail in the coffin of the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism
Another study, another refutation of the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism. The same as it ever was. Antivaccine activists won't listen. Also the same as it ever was.
Naturopaths and the anti-vaccine movement: Hijacking the law in service of pseudoscience
Time and time again, we’ve seen it. When pseudoscientists and quacks can’t persuade the scientific and medical community of the validity of their claims, they go to the law to try to gain the legitimacy that their claims can’t garner through proving themselves by the scientific method. True, purveyors of pseudoscience and unscientifically-derived medical practices do crave the respectability of science. That’s...
The autism “biomed” movement: Uncontrolled and unethical experimentation on autistic children
Ever since I first discovered the anti-vaccine movement, first on Usenet, specifically on a Usenet newsgroup devoted to discussing alternative medicine (misc.health.alternative, or m.h.a. for short) and then later on web and on blogs, there have been two things that have horrified me. First, there are the claims that children suffer all sorts of harm from vaccines, be it being made autistic...
Conflicts of interest in science-based medicine
Science-based medicine is not perfect. Financial interests, conflicts of interest (COIs), and the pride of individual practitioners can at times undermine it. But it's so much better than any alternative we have tried before. It works, and, although it does so in fits and starts, sometimes all too slowly, it's getting better all the time. Dealing more effectively with COIs will only...
Pseudo-expertise versus science-based medicine
I am a skeptic. My support for science-based medicine, as important as it is and as much time, sweat, and treasure I spend supporting it, is not the be-all and end-all of my skepticism, which derives from a scientific world view. That’s why, every so often, I like to step back from medicine a bit and look at the broader picture. It’s...