Journal: study linking vaccine to autism was fraud

People fell for this because they wanted to fall for this. They wanted to believe that Autism had a "cause". If something causes Autism, and you avoid it, you can prevent your kid from being Autistic.

People want explanations. They want to know why things happen. They want nice cause-and-effect cycles that make sense.

I'm surprised that vaccinations didn't decline more than they actually have. I was expecting them to go down to 50% or lower.

edited 9th Apr '12 11:02:11 AM by ATC

Part of it is they wanted to believe autism has a cause, but another part of it is wanting to believe that vaccines are bad.

Herbal remedies are rubbish. Sure. So, stop taking aspirin. Or saint john's wort. The first of which has an active ingredient, salicylic acid which was defined and refined from a natural remedy, willow bark, which was used as a pain reliever for millenia, and the latter which has been used as a treatment for mild depression for roughly the same amount of time. Indeed, it is a common prescription drug in Germany used, for precisely that purpose.

Or if you want your malaria to kill you, stop taking that there new Chinese medicine, named Artemisinin as that comes from a herb, the Artemesia plant.

There's a difference between using aspirin, which has been heavily refined by the way, to cure a headache; and believing that non-herbal remedies are a conspiracy to poison Americans.

I got the impression that all herbal medicine = fraud from this thread. Homeopathy probably is a fraud, given that there is no active ingredients present in the "medicine" prescribed by a practitioner. And I feel strongly that those who evangelize homeopathic "medicines" as a treatment for serious conditions like terminal cancer instead of certified and peer-review tested real medicines and radio therapy should be put up against the nearest wall and shot.

Americans always believe in conspiracy theories. That is axiomatic, I am afraid. What few inside America understand that the exact same thing happens outside America. Indeed, we Europeans, who form the largest number of ancestors of modern North and South Americans outside of the First Nation community, taught people from there how to do it. We have had millenia of practice at it after all.

edited 9th Apr '12 12:16:31 PM by TamH70

The story of how homeopathy came to be always amuses me. A few hundred years ago, a guy called a doctor (whose name and actual profession I can never remember) was testing out this new hypothesis that was in vogue, that Like Cures Like. Basically, if you got a disease which caused a fever, you should take something which causes a fever to kill the disease (for instance). Well, he gave his patients poison. Not much. But then, he noticed that patients who received less poison got better FASTER! What a revelation, you know? But instead of having a control group to see if not doing anything cured people faster, he just did the homeopathy thing.

The guys name was Samuel Hahnemann, and unlike most modern practitioners was an actual physician.(from Germany, no less). He came up with what wikipedia calls "the law of similars". He also came up with the term "allopathic" medicine, mainly to describe the state-sanctioned butchery masquerading as conventional medicine at the time, the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century.

Given a choice between what "doctors" did back then, and homeopathy, I would have taken the latter choice in a heartbeat. Now, I tend to trust modern medicine. Go figure.

@ Tam: By herbal medicine, a lot of people refer to what's commonly sold in stores as herbal medicine. That is generally unregulated, and doesn't have standard dosing to it. Pills in the same bottle are often found to wildly vary in potency and it has no real quality control. The difference between herbal medicine and other medicine is that one of them is documented and precisely measured.

There are in fact a lot of docs who are leery of St. John's Wart, not because it can't work but because it's not sold in doses with standard potency which means that it's not a consistent treatment.

edited 9th Apr '12 12:41:57 PM by shimaspawn

Please refrain from this kind of hyperbole. Instead of (jokingly) advocating violence, why not be serious about it and advocate jail time instead? Wouldn't your comment have been much more appropriate and insightful if you had said "those who evangelise homeopathic "medicines" ... should be put on trial and sentenced to jail."

edited 9th Apr '12 1:30:50 PM by BestOf

I wasn't joking. At all. This is my serious face. Bullets are cheap. Jails are expensive. I should have put it a bit like about "and anyone convicted of causing death by said evangelizing should face trial and execution wherever the death penalty exists for murder" though. In order not to offend sensibilities if nothing else.

Not that I believe in that sort of thing, of course. One has to observe the social niceties even if one has no faith in them. Sometimes I forget that.

But isn't homeopathy based on the principle that the less of something you take, the more effective it is? So a more appropriate demonstration would be to grind a single pill to powder and swallow a few grains of it.

No but when you make your "medicine," you gotta take the appropriate amount of the active ingredient, then you put it in 10 parts of water and then you have to shake it: ten times horizontally, ten times vertically, and ten times back and forth. That'd take more effort than eating a package of pills if the box says "if you take an overdose, call the emergency number" and an overdose is defined as like 3 pills a day.

Still, you'd think, based on their premises, they would warn of underdose.

edited 9th Apr '12 2:54:11 PM by Karalora

You know how these woo woo* superstitions always have these rules and all this internal consistency to their system? Yeah, it always breaks down eventually, even if you never leave the initial framework. You don't need to bring anything from the outside, all of this stuff breaks down on its own if someone cares to question it on its own premises.

Of course, it's much nicer to compare it to a real, functional system based on reality 'cause then you already have something better to offer in the off chance that the other side actually gives in and stops believing their bullshit.

*James Randi's term. I love it.

Or you could always Take a Third Option; ask the kids and adults with the disorder? Lot more adults learning they have a form of Autism too, recently. I imagine most who managed to socialize into adulthood would say that they might not need medication or anything to treat a condition that can be lessened and made aware with hard work and self-advocacy.

I have Asperger's Syndrome too. Properly diagnosed as well. I am just beyond pissed that it took until I was thirty eight before I got that diagnosis. And I know how to make napalm and thermite. Ooops.

This being OTC, I want to point out that this isn't the thread to discuss the politics of autism. And thank God for that.

Actually, though I've enjoyed the opportunity to rail on fraud that this thread has given me, I don't actually know if we have anything more to say about the topic.

Maybe I should lock this...?

Well, before you do, does anyone else have a better link than the one in the OP? It's been taken down, and I want to see the explanation behind how it was forged/falsified.

I'm not in a hurry or anything. But I'll lock this if it goes off-topic for many pages or something like that. It hasn't yet, but that's one of the two possible futures of a thread where all that can be said of the topic has been said. (The other future is that people simply stop posting and it is buried in the forgotten pages of OTC threads.)

I thought autism was genetic and that if you had the collection of genes for it, you'd develop it regardless of whether or not you were vaccinated.

edited 9th Apr '12 8:08:46 PM by BlackElephant

Hence why this thread is entitled "Journal: study linking vaccine to autism was fraud", not "Vaccines cause autism, OMG".

@ 96 are you maybe thinking of Down Syndrome (trisomey 21)?

There is a genetic element to autistic spectrum disorder. Three male members of my family - me, my uncle and my cousin all have it or have had it. Probably more than that but only us three have had diagnoses as of yet. If there was no genetic component, then you would be able to win the jackpot in every casino in Nevada and Monaco with better odds than that being the case.

edited 10th Apr '12 1:24:26 PM by Yej