The plural of anecdote is not data

I’ve been following this discussion in Orac’s comments for a few days now. Dr. Jay Gordon, a AP-friendly Santa Monica pediatrician whose website flirts with anti-vaccinationism, herbal medicine for HIV, and other such woo, and who is a supporter of folks like Jenny Mcarthy and her “Green our Vaccines” campaign, is debating Orac’s commenters in [...]

But it happened to my cousin’s best friend’s grandmother! Really!

Science can disprove the link between autism and vaccines or reiki and healing, but there will still be people who believe that vaccines cause autism or in the healing powers of reiki. Why? Because they know, or more commonly, know of, someone to whom it happened.

Is this what empowerment is supposed to look like?

Because it seems to me that being a PITA to the medical staff , quibbling over consent forms about medical interventions and needling nurses about tests about which one clearly is ignorant all when one’s baby and one’s self are in mortal danger, is just plain idiotic, not to mention rude.
But hey, she sure [...]

How to woo away from woo?

It’s another head-meet-desk week over at the clinic.

The big SIDS coverup

Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly turned into a conspiracy theorist . I’m talking about a new systematic review which appeared in the May issue of Archives of Disease in Childhood. It identifies head-covering during sleep as a major risk factor for SIDS.

Beware ‘Big Vitamin’

Dr. Harriet Hall of Science-Based Medicine has an excellent post about whether people should routinely take vitamins.

An interesting safe sleep resource

Cribs for Kids, brought to the public by SIDS of Pennsylvania.

A fair and square PEG

Anti-vaxers like to get all heated up over the notion that there is antifreeze in vaccines. Actually, this is not true: there is a precipitating agent in many vaccines called polyethylene glycol (PEG), which only bears a passing resemblance to ethylene glycol, aka antifreeze. PEG can be found in a variety of household and medicinal [...]

Veronika meets her match…

From Little Britain:

Like Monty Python, finally a bit of Brit humor even Americans can ‘get’ .
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Evolution is not an excuse

One of the more pervasive errors of thought among the AP/NPers that I see is the assumption that since humans evolved in a certain way, the solution produced by evolutionary forces therefore must be perfect in every humanly possible situation. “Babies have evolved to cosleep”, Tells us James Mckenna, the anthropologist whose studies on sleep [...]