It appears the spam has significantly been cut down, and I feel it is now safe to continue our regularly scheduled blogging. Plus, it is summer, and I now am generally free from responsibility.
Be advised that I am planning on making a trip to Amoeba Records sometime in the near future, and thus will have much more material to review.
Anyways, there's a situation that's been bugging be for some time now, and it recently came to my immediate attention a month ago.
I was listening to the radio, abnormally not NPR, and Dr. Oz was a guest on the DJ's morning show, offering listeners a chance to call in about their medical questions. A mother soon called in, and asked Dr. Oz whether she should vaccinate her children because of the "link" (emphasis added) between vaccines and autism. Dr. Oz responded that yes, it would be beneficial, and she shouldn't worry because the chances are very slim.
Now, while Dr. Oz was right about getting your children vaccinated, two details worried me. One, Dr. Oz is a heart surgeon, not an expert in vaccines, just a heart surgeon that has become a television personality. Two, there is no link at all between vaccines and autism. None whatsoever. This has been confirmed dozens of times by experts on vaccines, and is well known to the medical community. These present issues to the well-being and acceptance of scientific research in the medical community.
The first issue, that of the acceptance of claims coming from non-experts, is an easily solvable one, yet one whose solution continues to elude the general populace. We are so used to either denying everything scientists say, or believing it because it appears on the news, and therefore must be true to society. We fail to take into account that, for one, science is true whether you believe it or not, and two, scientists aren't specialists in everything. You can generally, if not always, hold an astrophysicist's conclusion about the movement of an specific asteroid to be true, just like you can trust that a neuroscientist's conclusion about the location of lobes in the brain to be true. However, you would not go to a foot doctor to get your ears checked. Why would you trust a heart surgeon to put out reliable information about vaccines, even if he's on TV? There is no logical answer to this question. Simply, instead of blindly taking in whatever Dr. Oz. or any other TV doctor says on TV, do some research. Find out what fields are highly specialized, if the one they are talking about is included among that set, and what the doctor in question is specialized in. If it isn't the field they are talking about, then you are probably better off with an expert from that field. Of course, this does not mean that everything doctors say about fields outside their specialty is wrong; rather, the general rule is to research the doctor's background, and use discretion when taking, or not taking, action pertaining to their answers.
The second issue is that of the link between autism and vaccines, and, while probably the most damaging case of scientific misconduct in recent history, can be shortly discredited. As the BBC reported three years ago, the General Medical Council, the organization in charge of medical conduct and accreditation in the United Kingdom, found that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the researcher centered around the misconduct and the originator of the paper that linked vaccines with autism, had violated several ethical guidelines, forged evidence, and had a severe conflict of interest within his studies, prompting the GMC to redact Dr. Wakefield's paper. [1] To clarify, there is no link between vaccines and autism, and any link put forward in fraudulent and scientifically inaccurate.
In short, Dr. Oz is not an expert on everything, as proven by his misinformation about vaccination, and people should do what I have constantly pushed for in this blog: do research, and think critically.
