Book Review
Thursday, May 29, 2008 (16:42:40)

Posted by lightfoot

'AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS:Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure'
by Paul Offit, MD
Columbia University Press
To be released September 2008

reviewed by writerdd


AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS will show the reader the incredible history of how greedy lawyers, doctors, and unknowing parents have helped prevent the search for the real cause of autism.

As these forces conspire to blame vaccines or the preservatives used in vaccines for causing autism, the search for a real cure is hampered while millions of dollars go chasing after the wrong causes or, worse, to support misguided legal actions. Children are dying because of quack treatments that desperate parents agree to have inflicted on their children. How on earth did we get here?

In AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS, Dr. Offit carefully outlines the faulty science that allowed one British doctor to turn the world of autism on its head and allowed the return of diseases that had rarely been seen in Britain and the United States for decades. He also tells the story of perhaps the greatest fraud on the autism community: facilitated communication. By reviewing the history of how the vaccines-cause-autism movement began, Dr. Offit skewers the logic and the science of those associated with the vaccines-cause-autism front and demonstrates how, all too often, greed was the motivating factor behind scientific conclusions.

skepchick.org/blog