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AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS

Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure

 

Paul Offit, MD
Columbia University Press
September 5, 2008
Genre: Non-Fiction/Medicine
Format: Hardcover

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 AUSTIM'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.

 

"It is a tale about bad science, worse journalism, unscrupulous political populism, and profiteering litigation lawyers.  Offit’s book raises questions much broader than his ostensibly limited subject matter would suggest. Autism’s False Prophets gives no easy answers, but it does provide a rich source of material for political philosophers and even epistemologists." -Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of CITY JOURNAL and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

"As a clinician who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases and as a vaccinologist, Offit strongly and effectively advocates for vaccines and successfully dispels the myth that vaccines cause autism."- Kathryn Edwards, NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE

"An invaluable chronicle that relates some of the many ways in which the vulnerabilities of anxious parents have been exploited." - THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"The book is an examination of science and society that's enlightening, highly readable and--given the recent news about the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases as a result of parents' refusal to vaccinate their children--timely.

"Offit effectively pulls back the curtain on the anti-vaccine movement to reveal a crusade grounded less in fact and more in greed and opportunism, as the book's title subtly but aptly suggests. For that reason, it is sure to inflame anti-vaccine crusaders. But this isn't a book written for them. Rather, it speaks to parents and others who are unclear, unsure or concerned about taking their children to see their pediatrician, and it offers them reassurance about vaccines and the doctors who give them." Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., SALON.COM
 

British Rights:Columbia University Press
Translation Rights:The Zack Company, Inc.
Audio Rights:The Zack Company, Inc.
Film & TV Rights:The Zack Company, Inc.
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