We recently had a presentation here in Calgary entitled “Vaccine Clarity – get the facts”, given by some sort of “doctor”, and quite well attended. You can imagine what kind of “facts” were presented, and the net result is that no one who attended this event is going to get the H1N1 vaccine which has just become available here. (I did not go, just heard about it on the news after the fact)

With stuff like this going on, what is the average person to think??
Someone said on the radio that all the conflicting information is very confusing, but the real problem is all the misinformation! Plus the fact that so many people don’t trust the medical establishment, all very worrying………

I think those of us in the UK should be thankful our Kirby-tation was so low key. As a contrast, check out this thread, where a US law student blogger made some comments about Kirby being invited to appear at his (New York University) Law School later this month. All the anti-vaccine gang show up like a flock of vultures, including Clifford G. Miller, John Stone and American “daily chelation for everything!” uber-nutcase John Best Jr. The rabid-ness of this lot never ceases to amaze me. One of the minor delights of the thread, for seasoned anti-vaccine-loony watchers, is to see John Best Jr berating David Kirby for being a traitor to the anti-vaccine cause. Kirby’s crime was to defend Neurodiversity blogger Kathleen Seidel’s right to freedom of speech when Seidel was served with a nuisance subpoena by a notorious US anti-vaccine lawyer (more on the Seidel subpoena and its aftermath here).

I completely agree with Helen Parnell-Berry about the struggles health workers face in trying to deal with this stuff. One of the things you learn teaching in a medical school, and hanging around with people who work in healthcare, is just how much knowledge, experience and skill goes into giving people the key messages and important information in a comprehensible form. But peoples’ susceptibility to the “Aha! Here’s what the doctors aren’t telling you!” line is a real worry.

I was just talking about this earlier this week with an ex-PhD student of ours who is now a Principal Clinical Biochemist (complete with MRCPath) at a hospital in Northern Ireland. We were contrasting the information on NHS and charity health information sites with the “random internet trawl” stuff. The mainline website stuff often looks simple but in fact reflects production via tens to hundreds of person-hours of data synthesis, fact-chasing, writing, checking by groups of scrutineers and experts, re-writing, etc etc. …While the sort of info on sites produced by one-man conspiracy obsessives like the chap who runs whale.to looks full of fascinating detail, but in fact is garbled and misleading claptrap, often incorrect and almost always wholly out of context.

Complex does not mean “informed”, and simple does not mean “glossed over”. This comes back in a way to the “tacit knowledge” of experts that we talked about a few posts ago.

Finally, thanks to dvnutrix for passing on the Eric Fombonne story. It highlights once again how difficult it is to draw conclusions from anecdotes, especially in the case of things like child development where there is a vast variation in developmental rates in both normal and “abnormal” settings. The message once again: proper trials are the only way to tell whether interventions work, and if they don’t work in the proper trials, then anecdotes about secretin, chelation, methyl-B12, omega-3 fish oils and weird diets are just that – anecdotes.

Or to repeat (again) one of my favourite scientific maxims:

“The first principle [of scientific integrity] is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard P. Feynman

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