Tag: autism
Book Review: Don’t Be Such A Scientist
Preamble I’ll never forget the day when I argued for protecting parents against misleading and false information about the treatment of autism. I was working at a large consumer health organization whose mission was to “empower patients with accurate information” so that they could take control of their health. My opposition was himself a physician who requested that our organization publish an...
Vaccines and the Media: No Room for Balance
© 2009 msnbc.com Matt Lauer and NBC have continued the ignominious media tradition of feigning to bring “balance” to the issue of vaccine safety. In the Dateline episode A Dose of Controversy, which aired on Sunday night, Matt Lauer interviewed Andrew Wakefield, the originator of the MMR-causes-autism myth, and highlighted his work at Thoughtful House, the autism treatment center he created in Texas after...
Vaccines and Autism: A Deadly Manufactroversy
I was recently asked to write about vaccines and autism for Skeptic magazine. I approached the project with trepidation. So much has been written, from Paul Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets to a veritable flood of blogorrhea on the Internet. I didn’t have anything new to add, and I couldn’t hope to cover all aspects of the subject. After some thought, I...
Will The Real, Silent Majority Please Stand Up – To Oprah and Jenny McCarthy?
Much to my surprise and delight, my recent blog post about Jenny McCarthy’s “educational” video was picked up by several other blogs and websites, resulting in a small flood of emails applauding my efforts to expose dangerous pseudoscience. I had braced myself for what I assumed would be an onslaught of hate mail (what else would irrational folks do about a sensible...
Hostility Towards Scientists And Jenny McCarthy’s Latest Video
I’ve been fairly quiet about Jenny McCarthy’s campaign against childhood vaccinations, partly because Dr. David Gorski has covered the issue so thoroughly already, and partly because of my “do not engage” policy relating to the deeply irrational (i.e. there’s no winning an argument with “crazy.”) But this week I was filled with a renewed sense of urgency regarding the anti-vaccinationist movement for...
Georgia on my mind
My inaugural post was about vaccines, and I promised that I wouldn’t write exclusively on this topic. But something rotten is brewing in the state of Georgia and this story is just too important to ignore. The first successful challenge to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act (NCVICA) has taken place in Georgia, and we all should be just a little...
Antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield: Scientific fraud?
Pity poor Andrew Wakefield. Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity at all. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that...
The (Not-So-)Beautiful (Un)Truth about the Gerson protocol and cancer quackery
Note added by editor: The complete movie is now available on YouTube: Although this blog is about medicine, specifically the scientific basis of medicine and threats to the scientific basis of medicine regardless of the source, several of us also have an interest in other forms of pseudoscience and threats to other branches of science. One branch of science that is, not...
Dr. Jay Gordon and me: Random encounters with an apologist for the antivaccine movement
Although he doesn’t detest me nearly as much as antivaccine honcho and founder of Generation Rescue J. B. Handley does, Santa Monica celebrity pediatrician Dr. Jay Gordon doesn’t like me very much at all. Actually, I’m not sure whether that’s entirely true or not, but Dr. Gordon sure doesn’t like it when I criticize him for his antivaccine rhetoric. He affects an...
Autism’s false prophets revealed
Dr. Paul Offit has written a book about the false prophets of autism, those who promote the idea that vaccines cause autism and those who sell quackery to treat autism, which are often the same people. If you want a good history of how the "vaccines cause autism" myth started, this is a great primer.