autism
oracknows | May 23, 2008I like my Folder of Woo.
Besides providing me endless fodder for this little weekly feature, my Folder of Woo also provides me nearly endless amusement. Sometimes, I'll just peruse it, looking at woo old and new, woo that's been featured in this little weekly exercise in diving into the belly of the beast, woo that has yet to be featured, and woo that will probably never be featured. Unless people suddenly discovery rationality and science, my Folder of Woo is likely to continue to exist. I suppose that could happen, but it's pretty unlikely, which means my Folder of Woo is likely to continue…
oracknows | May 22, 2008There's a new blog in town that I've been meaning to pimp. It's a blog by a retired epidemiologist who got things started looking at the role of diagnostic substitution in autism diagnoses and argued that the autism "epidemic" is an artifact of changing diagnostic criteria.
The blog is Epi Wonk, and it's a good one so far.
This week, I'm really glad Epi Wonk exists. The reason is that somehow, another Geier père et fils crapfest of dumpster-diving has somehow slimed its way into the medical literature, just in time to be used in the Autism Omnibus hearings no doubt. The "study" (if you can…
oracknows | May 20, 2008A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an amazingly ignorant antivaccination screed published in the Winona Daily News. In the comments, I was made aware of another antivaccination screed in the form of a letter to the editor to the Winona Post. (Unfortunately, I am unable to locate it online.) Now, today, I find that there are people in Winona who are trying to outdo Jim and Laurie Jenkinson (the authors of the first article) in serious stupidity in the form of a letter to the editor published in the Winona Daily News entitled It Is Important to Learn More About Vaccinations.
I'd normally agree…
oracknows | May 19, 2008I've written a lot about the legal thuggery perpetrated against autism blogger Kathleen Seidel by an unethical lawyer named Clifford Shoemaker, who issued a subpoena against her based on dubious conspiratorial thinking about her supposedly being a shill for big pharma. Shoemaker, in case you didn't know, is a lawyer who represents litigants suing vaccine manufacturers for "vaccine injury." In this case, he represented Reverend Lisa Sykes and her husband as they sued Bayer for alleged vaccine injury, and Kathleen Seidel had done a long post about Shoemaker's activities shortly before he issued…
oracknows | May 17, 2008Believe it or not, even I, Orac, sometimes get tired of blogging about antivaccination idiocy. Indeed, this week was just such a time. I hope you can't blame me. After all, the last few months have been so chock-full of some of the most bizarre and annoying antics of antivaccinationists at such a frequent clip that there was just no way I could even keep up with it, and trying was starting to burn me out. (I guess there's only so much that the stupid can burn before even Orac's nearly indestructible clear plastic case can handle before he needs a break.) Truth be told, not wanting Respectful…
oracknows | May 14, 2008...because the author of the book that fueled the rise of the mercury militia in 2005, that indefatigable purveyor of bad science, logical fallacies and bizarre speculations, that useful idiot that antivaccinationists all know and love, is coming to the U.K next month.
Yes, I'm talking about David Kirby. Credulous blogger Ginger of Adventures in Autism has informed me that, thanks to "support" from antivaccinationist groups Generation Rescue and the National Autism Association, Autism Research Institute, Coalition for SAFE MINDS, and Talk About Curing Autism, David Kirby will be traveling to…
oracknows | May 12, 2008And I thought, whatever his other faults and whatever my disagreements with his politics,, that Bill Clinton was incredibly smart. Apparently I was wrong:
"You do not want to bring your children into the world where we go on with the number of children who are born with autism tripling every 20 years, and nobody knows why," he said.
Even if the true prevalence of autism is increasing (which is highly debatable), it is not tripling every 20 years--nowhere near it. Again, the apparent increase in prevalence observed over the last two decades can be explained largely by increased awareness and…
oracknows | May 12, 2008Oh, no! Phil Plait did a great post on why vaccines do not cause autism. What's his reward?
To be invaded by antivaccinationists!
I think you all know what to do. Please, go lend Phil some tactical air support, and I'll be grateful.
oracknows | May 12, 2008Wow.
I just saw something that utterly stunned me over at that house organ of the mercury militia and antivaccinationists everywhere Age of Autism. It's an example of hypocrisy so blatant that it stuns even me, someone who's been following the whole pseudoscientific "vaccines cause autism" movement for over three years now. It started with this headline:
DR. OFFIT'S CONFLICT OF INTEREST SHOULD DISALLOW HIM FROM COMMENTING
Then, when The Probe quite reasonably points out in the comments:
Kim, since you are so concerned about conflicts of interest that you are willing to deny Dr. Offitt his…
oracknows | May 12, 2008"Detoxification."
Whenever I hear that term, I'm at least 90% certain that I'm dealing with seriously unscientific woo. The reason should be obvious to longtime readers of this blog or to anyone who has followed "alternative medicine" for a while, because "detoxification" is a mainstay of "alternative" treatments and quackery for such a wide variety of diseases and conditions. Of course, toxins are indeed a bad thing, and we close-minded reductionist "allopathic" physicians do indeed use detoxification when appropriate. What differentiates us from "alternative" medicine practitioners is that…
oracknows | May 7, 2008...because Dr. Roy Kerry, the negligent physician who killed an autistic child with chelation therapy and against whom criminal charges were dropped yesterday, wants to go back to work:
Dr. Roy Kerry, 70, of Sharpsville, read from a prepared statement today at the Butler offices of his attorney, Al Lindsay, but would not answer questions on the advice of his other lawyers. Kerry still faces a civil suit over the death of Abubaker Tariq Nadama, and a hearing on the future of his medical license.
"I plan to continue my life's work helping many patients with serious illnesses with the highest…
oracknows | May 7, 2008Longtime readers of this blog probably remember the tragic case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the five-year-old autistic boy who died as a result of being treated with chelation therapy three years ago by Dr. Roy Kerry, an otolaryngologist who had apparently had given up doing head and neck surgery in favor of the more lucrative pastures of woo. This case was about as clear as a case could get. A known potential complication of chelation therapy is a lowering of calcium levels in the blood, to the point that cardiac arrhythmias and cardiac arrest can occur. Moreover, children are more sensitive…
oracknows | May 2, 2008Good news!
In the wake of having his fishing expedition of a subpoena against autism blogger Kathleen Seidel quashed, it would appear that lawyer to the mercury militia Clifford Shoemaker and his clients Seth and Lisa Sykes have decided to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit against Bayer and no longer pursue it.
Of course, that brings up the question of just what the heck Shoemaker's attempts to dragoon unrelated parties such as Kathleen Seidel and Dr. Marie McCormick into the proceedings with dubious subpoenas was supposed to accomplish. Were such actions a sign of increasing desperation, a…
oracknows | May 2, 2008Over the last few years, depressingly, we've witnessed a rise in antivaccinationist activism. Beginning with the highly unethical activities of Andrew Wakefield and his bogus study in 1998 that set off a scare over the MMR vaccine supposedly causing autism that led to declining vaccination rates and skyrocketing measles and mumps rates in the U.K., it metastasized to the U.S. with hyped up concerns that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal used in most vaccines until 2001 was a cause of autism. Over the last year or so, it's been helped along by useful celebrity idiots like Jenny…
oracknows | May 1, 2008It's late, and I'm working on tomorrow's installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo; so I don't have the time to give this particularly dumb guest editorial Think twice before you vaccinate your child in the Winona Daily News, which is packed full of antivaccinationist lies and pseudoscience, a proper dose of the not-so-Respectful Insolence that it deserves. Suffice it to say that, while denying that they are antivaccination (as all antivaccinationists do), writers Jim and Laurie Jenkinson then go on to prove exactly the opposite by spewing an amazing collection of idiocy, including citing Robert…
oracknows | May 1, 2008Yet another dubious study has been making the rounds of mercury militia websites and discussion forums. The study is being played up and touted by certain very excitable and scientifically not-too-bright militia members and woo-meisters like Mike Adams as some sort of vindication of the scientifically discredited hypothesis that mercury in vaccines somehow causes autism.
It doesn't.
It is, however, somewhat interesting in that their embrace of this bit of questionable research shows how desperate the mercury militia is to grasp to any bit of peer-reviewed published research that they can spin…
oracknows | May 1, 2008...because Paul Offit's written a book:
AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS
Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
Paul Offit, MD
Columbia University Press
September 2008
Genre: Non-Fiction/Medicine
Format: Hardcover
AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS will show the reader the incredible history of how greedy lawyers, doctors, and unknowing parents have helped prevent the search for the real cause of autism. As these forces conspire to blame vaccines or the preservatives used in vaccines for causing autism, the search for a real cure is hampered while millions of dollars go chasing after the wrong…
oracknows | April 29, 2008One 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 same time, going too far in the other direction risks stifling innovation and the ability to individualize treatments to a patient's unique situation--or even to use treatments that have only scientific…
oracknows | April 28, 2008Over the weekend there was a very good article in the Concord Monitor about Kathleen Seidel and her legal battle with Clifford Shoemaker, whose intrusive "fishing expedition" subpoena recently drew condemnation even from prominent antivaccination activists such as David Kirby and Dan Olmsted and was ultimately quashed with the possibility of sanctions. What this article does a good job for those new to the debate is to put things in some perspective in a relatively brief treatment; I encourage you to read the whole thing, and I will focus mostly on a couple of interesting tidbits in the…
oracknows | April 26, 2008Ah, a lazy Saturday morning. So here I am in the late morning, perusing my e-mail (including e-mail notifications of blog posts) after purposely not having checked them at all last night (and, in fact, even having gone to see a movie for the first time in many months), and what should a reader send me but a bit of very good news:
RALEIGH --A panel of the N.C. Medical Board recommended Thursday that Huntersville's Dr. Rashid Buttar be prohibited from treating children or patients with cancer because his alternative medicine practice is below accepted medical standards in North Carolina.
The…