I originally went to write this article looking at the “case” against Dr. Wakefield and the amusement I feel when the haters come out shouting down his theory.
Then I went looking at an interesting article and realized that this issue was actually far broader then just the reaction to Dr. Wakefield and so I decided to include a second doctor, Dr. De Soto.
What I have found when people attack these doctors work is that they don’t actually attack the important parts of the work. What they do is attack small issues within the work, or in the case of Dr. Wakefield certain collection methods that were of questionable ethics and use these details to call the entire study suspect when in fact they did nothing to detract from the main body of work.
Using Wakefield as the prime example, several things were done to discredit him. First they attacked the fact that he collected blood at a child’s party without the parents consent. Then they attacked the fact that he was not qualified to do this type of study. Then they attacked the size of his “study group”
The problem with these attacks are that they do not actually address his work. The closest they come is the fact that the size of his study group is small enough to potentially skew data. ok that is fact but the simple truth is that the results say that we now have to look at this study (replicate it better with a standard group size and look for potential truths)
De Soto’s issue arose from the fact that she found error’s in a piece of work that indicated there was no correlation between mercury and autism. She as base fact says that it is something that needs to be studied based on evidence but says there is not sufficient evidence to either prove or disprove it. The attacks she suffers are aimed at her personal life, her qualifications and even completely ignoring what she wrote and saying something different entirely. And all attacks unproven but being used as a method to damage her credibility (even though top journals listed her refute of the original study as extremely important and accurate.)
What is basically proven by these attacks are the simple fact that there is little base room to attack the actual body of work presented by these individuals or others looking into mercury/autism links and so every attack is done on the periphery in an attempt to discredit them to such a point that their work is ignored.
What this proves to me is that we now need to do a very large very comprehensive study across numerous generations (3 to 4 minimum I suspect) to look at the effects of environmental issues of all sorts on autism and also looking at the possibility that generations of build up could therefore take generations to reduce.
These tests need to be done to systematically prove or disprove the environmental factors aspect of the onset of autism for a definitive response so that we can move on to fixing the problem and getting decent therapies for those who have not had a chance at these and other potential new therapies as of yet.
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