Blogger JQH has written about Doctor Myhill, including discussion of the vindictiveness of her supporters. There are currently four posts about the maverick doctor and her disciples.

Skepticat has an account of a GMC complaint about Myhill and the spurious and irrelevant complaints raised by her supporters.

The 21st Floor has this and this on Myhill.

Here are my four blog posts on Dr Sarah Myhill.

I am in full agreement with Shane Scott's comment, writing for the 21st Floor blog, that vulnerable people may access the information on Myhill’s website and be put at risk by following the advice therein.

Recently, I've written about the websites of two doctors and the claims they make. Dr Sarah Myhill has a website that contains some incorrect and misleading statements, while Dr Kaslow makes various assertions regarding a condition named 'histadelia' (a condition that may not even exist - there seems to be no evidence). Since I've written these posts, I've done a little more digging around and engaged in a bit of well-intentioned meddling.

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Lawyers acting for Associated Newspapers have apparently complained about a blogpost over at Angry Mob that said some rather unpleasant things about Paul Dacre. If saying unpleasant things about that wretched excuse for a human being is a crime, then I'm guilty.

Fortunately, it's not a crime. It's probably not even a dignitary tort. Abuse may be unpleasant (although not half as unpleasant as some of the vitriol that appears in the awful rag that Dacre edits) - but it isn't the same thing as defamation.

The post complained about has been pulled, but can be viewed here: cache.

It might be a bit late, but I've found out today that Andrew Wakefield has been invited to speak at Brandeis and have contacted them with my thoughts:

I was shocked to hear that the utterly discredited Dr Andrew Wakefield (struck off by the GMC, with his infamous paper fully retracted by the Lancet) was due to give a talk at Brandeis.

Measles is a serious disease (rubella and mumps are not to be taken lightly, either) and the purported link between vaccination and autism has long been debunked.

Around 1 in 100 cases of measles will result in hospitalisation. The complications of measles include diarrhoea, convulsion, encephalitis, and death.

Gerber and Offit: "Although no data supporting an association between MMR vaccine and autism existed and a plausible biological mechanism was lacking, several epidemiologic studies were performed to address parental fears created by the publication by Wakefield et al."

Ecological studies: in the UK, MMR vaccination rates of autistic children were similar to those of the entire study population. Also, investigators did not observe a clustering of autism diagnoses relative to the time that children received MMR vaccine. In California, the increase in the number of autism diagnoses did not correlate with MMR vaccination rates. In Canada, autism rates increased coincident with a decrease in MMR vaccination rates (i.e., as uptake of MMR vaccine went down, autism diagnoses continued to rise).

Retrospective studies: In Denmark, researchers determined vaccination status and autism diagnosis in 537,303 children. The authors observed no differences in the relative risk of autism between those who did and those who did not receive MMR vaccine. [source: Offit and Gerber, PMID: 19128068, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908388/?tool=pubmed]

This snippet of Red Dwarf reminds me of some conversations I've had on my main blog with advocates of homeopathy.

It usually goes something like this:

Homeopathy doesn't work.

It does - I've seen it with my own eyes.

Ah, but people aren't infallible - we can quite often be fooled. Mistaken connections are made all the time. This is why we do double-blind randomised placebo-controlled trials. RCTs (and systematic reviews of the highest-quality RCTs) show that the effects of homeopathy are consistent with placebo.

It can't be placebo. It works in children and animals and they aren't susceptible to the placebo effect.

Um, they are. See, for example, Greater Response to Placebo in Children Than in Adults and homeopathy for cows.

Well, anyway - your trials are wrong. Homeopathy can't be tested in trials as it's individualised.

Not only can individualised homeopathy be tested - it has been tested: Kleijnen et al, Linde and Melchart, see also Ben Goldacre's comments on individualised homeopathy in the Guardian.

I still say it works. After all, I've seen it with my own eyes. And it can't be placebo. It cured my cows and they don't understand the placebo effect.

The Express (a newspaper no longer bound by the PCC code) have an article up linking Gulf War Syndrome to nerve gas pills and exposure to pesticides:

A landmark study for the US Congress concluded in 2009 that the troops' sickness was caused by them being given nerve gas pills and exposed to pesticides during the war. (cached page on istyosty)

Back in 2009, an article in the Express claimed that Gulf War Syndrome was linked to squalene and claimed that squalene had been added to anthrax vaccines: squalene and Gulf War Syndrome. I wrote to them at the time and pointed out that this was untrue.

Despite being informed of their errors back in 2009, and despite apparently accepting the US study linking nerve gas pills and pesticides to GWS, they have not yet amended the article that contains errors regarding GWS and squalene.

I've long considered Daily Mail readers to have difficulty reasoning. This is a subjective view, based mainly on reading their online comments. Likewise, I have for some time thought that Mail readers appear to lack remorse, guilt or empathy...

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Recently, I wrote about a couple of Daily Mail articles on vaccination. The first article the Mail published can be viewed as a PDF here: linky. I thought I'd have a go at, er, rejigging it a bit.

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Recently, I wrote a post encouraging people to get vaccinated. I began with a link to a Youtube video telling the story of one infant who contracted pertussis, I quoted the HPA's summary of the pertussis outbreaks in the late 1970s / early 1980s, and went on to link to reports of the recent outbreak of whooping cough in California. I also referred to a measles outbreak in Duisburg.

In short, this post was low in evidence and high in anecdata. Following feedback, I added a link to a letter from Toni and David McCaffery telling their story, and added links to the CDC pink book PDFs on measles and pertussis at the bottom of the post under a heading of 'further reading'.

The reason my post was short on evidence and contained so much in the way of anecdotal reporting is that I wanted to try something a bit different. I thought that pointing people to these tragic stories might be more likely to influence some people than my endlessly repeating the statistics relating to complications of measles and pertussis (which I have done in the past).

If anyone has any comment on the approach I've taken in writing the post I link to above then I'd appreciate the feedback either here or on the main blog.

Recently, I wrote about anti-vaccine campaigners and vaccine scares.

I reported on the recent outbreak of whooping cough in California: As of June 15, California had 910 recorded cases of the highly contagious disease this year, and five babies – all under 3 months of age – had died.

Sadly, it’s now been reported that seven children have died from whooping cough in California:

Seven children across California, all less than 2 months old, have died from the disease so far this year.

Left Brain Right Brain has a post up commenting on the outbreak in California titled "An example of how alternate vaccine schedules endanger children". As LBRB says, some of the advice contained in alternate vaccine schedules is just plain dangerous. The particular schedule LBRB looks at is endorsed by Generation Rescue, who (along with AVN, VAN, and Jabs) featured in my blog post on anti-vaccine campaigners. These groups are not benign.

The "Find a Pox Party in Your Area" page on Facebook feature in this post on chicken pox.