Tag: autism

MyMedLab Offers Expensive, Useless, Nonstandard Lab Tests

Direct to consumer lab testing is good marketing but not good medicine. For instance, there is no reason to spend $199 to measure glyphosate levels in your blood.

/ February 6, 2018
Kelly Brogan, MD

SXSW Wellness Expo and Goop: Accepting HIV/AIDS denialism and antivaccine pseudoscience by embracing Dr. Kelly Brogan

Dr. Kelly Brogan is doing well these days. Invited to be a headliner at Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Summit and to be on the advisory board of the 2018 SXSW Wellness Expo, she's riding high. Unfortunately Goop and SXSW appear not to care about her being an HIV/AIDS denialist, antivaxer, and all around quack.

/ December 11, 2017
Aluminum in cells

Move over, Christopher Shaw, there’s a new antivaccine scientist in town

Move over, Christopher Shaw, there's a new antivaccine scientist dedicated to demonizing aluminum adjuvants in town. His name is Christopher Exley. He's got a fluorescence microscope, and he's not afraid to use it.

/ December 4, 2017

Torturing mice, data, and figures in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience

In September, antivaccine "researchers" Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic published a study claiming to link aluminum adjuvants in vaccines to neuroinflammation and autism. Naturally, the antivaccine movement pointed to it as slam dunk evidence that vaccines cause autism. It's not. In fact, not only is it bad science, but it might well be fraudulent.

/ October 30, 2017

Preying on the Vulnerable: Electrodiagnostics, Bach Flower Remedies, and Sound Therapy for Autism, ADHD, and Learning Problems

Karyne Jeanne Richardson offers a ridiculous program of electrodiagnosis, flower remedies, and fractal sound to treat autism and other disorders. There are science-based autism programs that work; it is unfortunate when parents subject their autistic children to onerous, expensive, time-consuming, useless treatments based on pseudoscientific claims and false promises.

/ October 10, 2017

The Pathological Optimist: More hagiography than documentary about Andrew Wakefield

The Pathological Optimist is a recently released documentary by Miranda Bailey about Andrew Wakefield that I got a chance to see. In interviews and in the film's promotional materials, Bailey takes great pains to emphasize that she "doesn't take a side" about Wakefield. Unfortunately, her film demonstrates that, when it comes to pseudoscience, "not taking a side" is taking a side, and...

/ October 9, 2017

Brain Wave Pseudoscience

iSynchrony has put together a plausible-sounding bit of bafflegab to justify what it sells. The reality of neurology is against their claims.

/ July 12, 2017

Two (now retracted) studies purporting to show that vaccinated children are sicker than unvaccinated children show nothing of the sort

Antivaccine websites have been touting two recently published studies as strong evidence that vaccinated children are less healthy than unvaccinated children. The studies are so flawed that they show nothing of the sort. Even more hilariously, the bottom-feeding predatory open access journal that published them appears to have retracted them.

/ May 11, 2017

Outbreaks among Somali immigrants in Minnesota: Thanks for the measles again, Andy

Andrew Wakefield's antivaccine propaganda film VAXXED claims that MMR vaccination causes autism in African American boys. Unfortunately, this is not the first time Wakefield has targeted people of color with antivaccine misinformation. Before there was VAXXED, Wakefield and antivaxers targeted Somali immigrants in Minnesota. Measles outbreaks have been the result.

/ April 24, 2017

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promotes an awful epidemiology study linking vaccines and neurological conditions from…Yale?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has never seen a lousy study linking vaccines to bad things that he didn't like. This is no exception. Oddly enough, this study was funded and carried out by a lawyer and an investment banker, with the help of an eminent Yale pediatrician. Of course, the study doesn't show what RFK Jr. thinks it shows.

/ February 12, 2017