I’m sure by now that we’re all aware of the actress and “activist” Jenny McCarthy and her crusade against the medical and biomedical research community. Her unfounded and dangerous belief that vaccines increase the frequency of autism has been making a splash in the easily convinced minds of many parents who are desperate to help or protect their children. However, when parents do not listen to scientists and doctors (the ones with the education to understand the situation, and not just go off what google searches suggest) and choose to not get their children vaccinated or treated properly, death and sickness ensues.
Recently McCarthy went on the front line again and went on public television to say that a recently published scientific study was wrong. Why do you say? Does she have another study to cite or some sort of evidence or empirical/quantitative support for her claim? Nope, she has “anecdotal evidence.” The study, which was published in Pediatrics (click to view the original article), concludes that “No significant associations were found between autism case status and overall incidence of gastrointestinal symptoms or any other gastrointestinal symptom category.” However, McCarthy and others would argue that this is, to their non-scientifically trained opinions, false and that special diets aid with autism symptoms (she has personally removed wheat and dairy from her child’s diet). Instead of blaming medicine, maybe they should consider pollution caused by ourselves as a cause.
The video pictured above from ABC news (click to view) contains one of the more ridiculous quotes I’ve ever heard come directly out of her mouth:
“We’re the ones seeing the real results, and until doctors start listening to our anecdotal evidence, which is ‘this is working’ it’s going to take so many more years for these kids to get better.”
Oh. Really? Your “anecdotal evidence” which has no controls, miniscule sample sizes, and no true methods of analysis has more weight than a refereed scientific study?
How do we stop the madness?
Related posts:
One Comment
You Tube has a cool video that talks about the autism spectrum being out of control. I think that’s the title: autism spectrum seems out of control and then there’s another one on same site that talks about cases of fraud and people using the label for personal gain , cases misdiagnosed, and so on. Only video I see that really talks about this I think people are scared to challenge others when they either claim to be autistic or say their kid is autistic because of the sensitive nature of the word autistic so some manipulative persons take advantage of this to the detriment of the real autistic folks out there, man it just ain’t right
One Trackback
[...] for parents, children, doctors, researchers, and anyone else who doesn’t buy in to the unsubstantiated, illogical, and downright dangerous surge against vaccinations, the editors of The Lancet and the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel [...]