GETTING IT RIGHT (OR NOT)
There are certain people I've gotten tired of hearing from in this ongoing autism debate. They're the people who are more interested in being heard and believed than they are in getting it right. Paul Offit is one of the people I'm tired of, despite all the great material he's given me through the years. Roy Grinker is another one of them.
Grinker is an anthropologist, who wrote Unstrange Minds, which was an instant hit with those who would deny the existence of the epidemic before their eyes. As Dan Olmsted recently wrote over at Age of Autism, though, Grinker made a surprising number of errors in his book. To be sure, not al of the errors can be considered critical to his basic thesis (that there is no epidemic). But the obviousness of the errors provides ample cause to question his attention to detail and his skills (or lack thereof) as a researcher.
One has to wonder if he's been this sloppy with any scholarly writings in the real field of his expertise.
Read Dan's report here.
Grinker is an anthropologist, who wrote Unstrange Minds, which was an instant hit with those who would deny the existence of the epidemic before their eyes. As Dan Olmsted recently wrote over at Age of Autism, though, Grinker made a surprising number of errors in his book. To be sure, not al of the errors can be considered critical to his basic thesis (that there is no epidemic). But the obviousness of the errors provides ample cause to question his attention to detail and his skills (or lack thereof) as a researcher.
One has to wonder if he's been this sloppy with any scholarly writings in the real field of his expertise.
Read Dan's report here.
posted by Wade Rankin at 7/29/2008 07:19:00 PM
1 Comments:
I was there during the first part of the bow wave, when there was no incentive for children to be diagnosed autistic. Autism was so rare that I had never heard of it until my late twenties. I was there when it was difficult to find a diagnosis. I was there when children such as my son had a state institution waiting for them and the state could afford it. I was there when the system became overwhelmed.
Up until February 2007, the CDC denied any epidemic. Now they don't. Still, denial of an epidemic is necessary. If there is an epidemic, it has to have a cause that meets the criteria of space and time. The vaccine industry has been impugned by that fit. It is in defense of vaccines that this denial occurs. If vaccines were not threatened by this I doubt there would be any denial.
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