autism
oracknows | March 28, 2013"Common sense" is not so common. Actually, that's not exactly right. What I meant was that what most people think of as "common sense" has little or nothing to do with what science concludes. Evidence talks, "common sense" walks. I saw a fantastic example to illustrate this point on a certain blog that I've found nearly as useful as a target topic to blog about as the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism (AoA). I'm referring, of course, to The Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR), an antivaccine crank blog almost as cranky as (and sometimes even more cranky than) AoA., and the post that drew my…
oracknows | March 21, 2013I don't always blog about stories or studies that interest me right away. Part of the reason is something I've learned over the last eight years of blogging, namely that, while it's great to be the firstest with the mostest, I'd rather be the blogger with the mostest than the firstest. I've learned this from occasionally painful experience, although I'd be lying if I didn't admit that in part this is a rationalization for the fact that I have a demanding day job that keeps me from jumping all over stories and studies of interest in the way that some bloggers can. There's also the simple fact…
oracknows | March 17, 2013I know I dump on a website known as The Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR), but I do so with good reason. Given what a wretched hive of antivaccine scum and quackery that website is, rivaling or surpassing any antivaccine website I can think of, even the blog equivalent of the great granddaddies of wretched hives of antivaccine scum and quackery, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), and, of course, Age of Autism. As a result, increasingly I've been taking more and more notice of this (not so) Thinking Mom's Devolution. As a result, I became aware of a particularly egregious piece of…
oracknows | March 4, 2013I'm running out of popcorn again.
I know I've been writing a lot about the latest internecine war among cranks. It's a battle royale whose first shot occurred when everybody's favorite Boy Wonder "reporter" betrayed his mentors with a missive published on a hive of scum and quackery even more wretched that the hive of scum and quackery at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, namely The Bolen Report. He even went so far as to publish private e-mails of prominent members of the antivaccine group SafeMinds. It didn't take long for SafeMinds to unleash a counterattack, joined by Dan Olmsted…
oracknows | February 25, 2013It's been well over two weeks since I urged everyone to get out the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the internecine war going on over in the antivaccine movement. The reason for my chuckling was the way that everyone's favorite Boy Wonder Reporter Propagandist for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Jake Crosby, had apparently turned on his masters because he was ticked off at a perceived betrayal of purity in their antivaccine beliefs, so much so that he actually posted a screed against the other wretched hive of scum and quackery besides AoA or The Huffington Post, namely the…
oracknows | February 24, 2013That the myth that vaccines cause autism is indeed nothing more than a myth, a phantom, a delusion unsupported by science is no longer in doubt. In fact, it's been many years now since it was last taken seriously by real scientists and physicians, as opposed to crank scientists and physicians, who are still selling the myth. Thanks to them, and a dedicated cadre of antivaccine activists, the myth is like Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger at the end of one of their slasher flicks. The slasher or monster appears to be dead, but we know that he isn't because we know that he'll…
oracknows | February 21, 2013Is it just me, or are medical propaganda films becoming the preferred media for "brave maverick doctors, dubious doctors, and quacks to promote their wares? I just pointed out how everybody's favorite "brave maverick doctor," he of the therapy for cancer for which there is no compelling evidence but that he keeps administering anyway, using the clinical trial process to avoid pesky rules about administering unapproved drugs and that is nothing more at its core than an orphan drug without compelling evidence for efficacy and of the "personalized gene-targeted therapy for dummies" based on…
oracknows | February 13, 2013Yesterday, I wrote about how "they" view "us," the "they" being believers in dubious medicine, pseudoscience, and outright quackery. As examples, I used believers in the unsupported claims of "brave maverick" cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski and antivaccine activists who are utterly convinced, against all science and evidence, that vaccines caused their children's autism. I pointed out at the time that many of these people really, really do believe that "we" (i.e., skeptics and supporters of science-based medicine who criticize the various modalities they passionately believe in) are not…
oracknows | February 11, 2013Those of us who dedicate considerable time and effort to combatting quackery generally do it because we think we're doing good. Certainly, I wouldn't spend so much time nearly every evening blogging the way I do if I didn't think so. It's true that I also enjoy it, but if I were doing this just for enjoyment I'm sure I could manage to find other topics that I could write about. In actuality, way back in deepest darkest beginnings of this blog, I did write about a lot of other things. My skeptical topics were more general in nature, encompassing not just medicine but evolution versus "…
oracknows | February 2, 2013It's good to see that the organizers of the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation finally realized its mistake:
Actress Jenny McCarthy has been dumped again. McCarthy won't be in Ottawa for Bust A Move.
The Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation reacted today to a public backlash in signing the anti-vaccine campaigner to the Ottawa breast health fundraiser.
As I said before when I first noted the extreme idiocy of their decision to feature an anti-science twit like Jenny McCarthy, whose antivaccine activism directly endangers cancer patients, I can't figure out what the organizers were thinking. I…
oracknows | January 25, 2013Three years ago, the influenza season was a really big deal. The reason, of course, is that the 2009-2010 flu season was dominated by fears of the H1N1 strain, so much so that it was a rare flu season that there were two recommended vaccines, one for the originally expected strains of flu and one for the H1N1 strain. Fortunately for all of us, the H1N1 fear mostly fizzled, but public health officials were in a bad place. Under-react, and if the pandemic turned out to be as bad as the worst case scenarios predicted before the pandemic, and they'd be crucified for not having done everything…
oracknows | January 24, 2013The last couple of days have been very busy, as you might have guessed from my brief (for me) post on Tuesday and my—shall we say?—appropriation of a post to use for yesterday. Today's going to be the same, but for more pleasant reasons than having had to go out to dinner with a visiting professor and being out until 10:30 PM and slaving away at grant applications. Last night an unexpected surprise arrived. Well, it wasn't a surprise that it arrived; it was a surprise that it arrived yesterday, as I hadn't expected it until today, and a couple of weeks ago I hadn't expected it before the end…
oracknows | January 22, 2013Way back in the day, when I was a newbie at countering the mass of hysterical pseudoscience that is the antivaccine movement, particularly the myth that vaccines cause autism, a blogger by the 'nym of Prometheus taught me that autism and autism spectrum disorders (particularly by antivaccinationists and believers in the quackery known as "autism biomed") are conditions of developmental delay, not developmental stasis. Autistic children can and do exhibit improvement in their symptoms simply through growth and development. However, parents who subject their children to "autism biomed" quackery…
oracknows | January 17, 2013I sense another disturbance in the antivaccine Force.
Yes, I realize that it was just a couple of days ago that I sensed a previous disturbance rippling through the antivaccine Force. That's when antivaccinationists brought David Kirby out of mothballs from whatever journalistic slime pit he's currently residing in to use every trick at his disposal to convince you that somehow the government has compensated two families of children for vaccine-induced autism when in fact he's playing the same game he's always played: Claiming that if any child who's ever been compensated by the National…
oracknows | January 14, 2013I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine Force, which is, of course, by definition the Dark Side.
Whenever I sense such a disturbance, there are a number of possible reactions that it provokes in me. One such reaction is alarm, as when antivaccine activists say something that is just clever enough to sound plausible enough that it might cause trouble. It never is, of course, but it often takes a close reading and some research to figure out what the game is and deconstruct the nonsense. Sometimes, my reaction is amusement, as when an antivaccine activist says something that is so hilariously…
oracknows | December 26, 2012I hope that you and yours are having a fantastic holiday season thus far. Yesterday, we had a great family gathering, after which I settled down to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special; all in all, a most excellent Christmas Day. Unfortunately, towards the later part of the day, someone out there sent me an e-mail and, fool that I was, I actually read it. (Who is sending e-mails about bad science to random bloggers on Christmas evening, I ask?) So when I woke up this morning, fool again that I am, I actually read the danged thing.
Of course, I should have known that this was going to be…
oracknows | December 24, 2012I certainly don't even try to keep secret my opinion of Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who is almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the measles back to the UK, thanks to his bad science, for which he was well-paid by trial lawyers and his falsification of data and scientific fraud. Since 1998, when Wakefield first published his fraudulent (and now retracted) little case series in The Lancet, his work and his personality have dominated the antivaccine movement in the UK. After he moved to Texas to ply his antivaccine quackery here in the US, he soon became a…
sastyk | December 21, 2012How about we honor two wonderful, autistic children who died by NOT speculating that Adam Lanza had autism (which has never been confirmed, so maybe we should wait and see whether it is actually true or not) and NOT assuming that people with autism are dangerous? The only people with KNOWN autism in that school were the victims.
Joey was autistic and severely apraxic. She could not speak, yet she touched the lives of so many around her: teachers, therapists, friends, neighbors, all loved and cherished her. Joey was social and affectionate; she smiled, she loved hugs, and she even had a…
oracknows | December 7, 2012The false idea that vaccines somehow cause or contribute to autism has been a common theme on this blog, and I've spent considerable verbiage discussing why anyone would think that vaccines are in any way associated with autism when the science is quite clear that they are not. If there's one thing I've been consistent in saying is that it's not because antivaccinationists are stupid (well, at least not most of them; some are spectacularly stupid). It's because they suffer from the same cognitive biases that all humans suffer from that lead us to confuse correlation with causation, jump to…
oracknows | December 3, 2012Last Wednesday, I took note of an "old friend" and (thankfully) soon-to-be ex-Representative from Indiana's 5th Congressional District, organized quackery's best friend in the U.S. House of Representatives, Dan Burton. Specifically, I noted that Rep. Burton appeared to be having his one last antivaccine hurrah in the form of a hearing about the "autism epidemic" in which it was clear that vaccines were going to feature prominently. Fortunately, this quackfest took place a mere five weeks before his long and dismal tenure in Congress. I also noted how antivaccine groups, in particular the…