Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Does anyone “recover” from autism?

Way 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 […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Andrew Wakefield hits up his supporters for cash

Any regular reader of this blog knows who Andrew Wakefield is. He’s the British gastroenterologist who almost singlehandedly ignited a panic about the MMR vaccine (well, not quite single-handedly; the sensationalistic British press helped a lot) with his shoddy, fraudulent research linking the MMR vaccine to “autistic enterocolitis” and then later to autism itself. Ultimately, […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Thanks, antivaccinationists. Thanks again for the measles.

Thanks again, antivaccine activists. Thanks for the measles. Again: Last year was the worst year for measles in the U.S. in 15 years, health officials said Thursday. There were 222 cases of measles, a large jump from the 60 or so seen in a typical year. Most of the cases last year were imported — […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The annals of “I’m not anti-vaccine,” part 10: Titanic, Oklahoma City, or the Holocaust?

It’s not infrequent that I come under fire from antivaccinationists for, ironically enough, calling them antivaccinationists. “Oh, no,” they protest, “I’m not antivaccine. How dare you call me that? I’m actually a vaccine safety advocate.” Of course, when you probe more closely and ask a few questions, almost inevitably you’ll find that in reality they […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

“Outing” anonymous bloggers: A favorite technique of antivaccine cranks

A reader of this blog was outed by a moron posting as “Mark” on the Age of Autism blog. I will not link to the outing, nor will I link to Age of Autism. I have, however, kept a nice screen shot of the page, just in case someone over there has an attack of […]