Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure

Attempting to answer the enormous frustration and unhappiness of parents ""tired of watching their autistic children improve at rates so slow it's hard to tell if they are improving at all,"" pediatrics professor and vaccine researcher Offit explores purported causes and cures. Examining false approaches like facilitated communication (""a massive, nationwide delusion"") and secretin injections (""no better than salt water""), and mistaken theories of origin (the MMR vaccine, thimerosol), Offit pleads with journalists to resist the lure of ""dramatic headlines, advertising dollars, and ratings"" rather than report an unconfirmed or untrustworthy study. The only worthwhile studies, Offit purports, are those meeting three criteria: ""transparency of the funding source, internal consistency of the data, and reproducibility of the findings."" Overall, Offit's text seems unbalanced: though he takes on the ""$40-billion-a-year"" alternative medicine industry, he's largely silent on the much larger pharmaceutical industry; and after 10 chapters of debunking the ""false prophets,"" there's just one brief chapter on what is known about autism causes and cures. A thorough and convincing debunker, however, Offit will likely leave parents still hunting for information, albeit better armed to find it.