Category: Science and the Media

Nine differences between “us and them,” nine straw men burning

I’ll start this post by admitting right up front: I blatantly stole the idea for the title of this post from Mark Crislip’s most excellently infamous post Nine questions, nine answers. Why? Because I really liked that post and felt like it. Also, there seems to be something about the number nine among anti-vaccine zealots: Nine “questions.” Nine circles of hell. Nine...

/ May 31, 2010

The Vaccine War

On Tuesday night PBS FRONTLINE aired an episode about the anti-vaccine movement entitled The Vaccine War (which, by the time you read this, should be available for online viewing in case you missed it). When I first heard that this show was going to air, I was a bit concerned. My concern, of course is what I’m always concerned about when journalists...

/ April 29, 2010

Steven Higgs: Another antivaccine reporter like Dan Olmsted in the making?

April is National Autism Awareness Month, and as of today April is nearly half over. Do you notice anything different compared to the last couple of years? I do. Can you guess what it is? The anti-vaccine movement’s usual suspects haven’t been all over the mainstream media, as they usually are this time every year, often as early as April 1 or...

/ April 12, 2010

Vaccinations and autism: are we number 1?

It has been alleged by Great Minds such as Jenny McCarthy that the US recommends far more vaccinations than other countries.  Her precise statement was, “How come many other countries give their kids one-third as many shots as we do?” She put this into the context of wondering if our current vaccine schedule should be less rigid.  The entire piece was filled...

/ March 25, 2010

J.B. Handley and the anti-vaccine movement: Gloating over the decline in confidence in vaccines among parents

UPDATE, 4/25/2011: I can’t resist pointing you to a hilariously misguided attack against me that proves once again that, for the anti-vaccine activists, it’s all about the ad hominem. Clifford Miller, a.k.a. ChildHealthSafety, was unhappy that I showed up in the comments of Seth Mnookin’s post complaining about J.B. Handley’s attacking him solely based on his having once been a heroin addict,...

/ March 22, 2010

Mainstream Media’s Sub-Par Health Coverage, Part 2

I recently wrote about an experience that I had with a reporter (Erica Mitrano) who interviewed me about energy healing at Calvert Memorial Hospital in southern Maryland. Erica was very friendly and inquisitive, and we had a nice conversation about the lack of scientific evidence supporting any energy healing modality. I thought it would be fun to post what we had discussed at SBM,...

/ March 18, 2010

Is there a role for speculative journals like Medical Hypotheses in the scientific literature?

The core information supporting science-based medicine resides in the scientific literature. There, scientists and physicians publish the results of experiments and clinical trials that seek to understand the biological mechanisms by which the human body functions and through which disease forms and to apply this understanding to test new treatments for diease. Consequently, the quality and integrity of the biomedical literature are...

/ March 15, 2010

The 2nd Yale Research Symposium on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. Part II

The Main Event: Novella vs. Katz The remainder of the Symposium comprised two panels. The first was what I had come to see: a Moderated Discussion on Evidence and Plausibility in the Context of CAM Research and Clinical Practice, featuring our Founder, Steve Novella, who is also Assistant Professor of Neurology at Yale; and David Katz, the speaker who had borne the...

/ March 9, 2010

Why You Can’t Depend On The Press For Science Reporting

I admit that the title of this post is a little inflammatory, but it’s frustrating when reporters call for input and then proceed to write unbalanced accounts of pseudoscientific practices. A case in point – my last post described a conversation I had with a reporter about energy medicine. My interviewee was very nice and seemed to “track” with me on what...

/ February 25, 2010

The Winkler County nurse case and the problem of physician accountability

A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE THAT HAD A (SORT OF) HAPPY ENDING Back in September and then again last week, I wrote briefly (for me) about an incident that I considered to be a true miscarriage of justice, namely the prosecution of two nurses for having reported the dubious and substandard medical practices of a physician on the staff of Winkler County Hospital...

/ February 15, 2010