Let’s say you’ve heard reports (from reliable medical sources like Oprah) that childhood vaccines are responsible for autism.
The science you learn from watching Dr. Oprah et al sounds confusing. You decide to do a bit of research yourself. You even track down a convincing scientific paper that supports this theory, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. This paper concludes that “mercury doses in thimerosal added to childhood vaccines increases the likelihood that mercury is one of the main factors leading to the large increase in the rate of autism”. Wow! Dr. Oprah is right!
Sounds pretty authoritative, unless you already know that the officious-sounding Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by an organization that Dr. David Gorski describes as “steeped in an utterly toxic brew of bad science and extreme ideology”. (In fact, their journal is not even listed among the 13,410 legitimate scientific journals indexed by PubMed, accessing the MEDLINE database of 18 million citations, abstracts and articles on life sciences and biomedical topics). Dr. Gorski describes this vaccine-autism journal article:
“The paper was so ludicrously, execrably bad in design, execution and analysis that I had a hard time believing that any self-respecting journal would publish such tripe.”
