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| Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren''t Your Best Source of Health Information
ISBN: 9780231546935
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Communication in public health; Communication in medicine; Health in mass media;
Physician and medical researcher Offit (Pandora's Lab), cocreator of a rotavirus vaccine, recounts the travails of educating the public about science and health issues in his enlightening treatise. Science provides a valuable "antidote to superstition," but because scientists often lack the polish to put across their ideas and "the scientific method doesn't allow for absolute certainty," people often can't sort out good from bad science; consequently, "fringe scientists with winning personalities" wreak havoc on truth. With disarming candor, the author shares his own mistakes from interviews, such as becoming flustered when Charlie Rose took umbrage at his assertion that Steve Jobs's pancreatic cancer could likely have been treated successfully. After each example, Offit provides a lesson learned (in the case of Rose: "Don't panic. The facts are your safety net"). His chapter on Andrew Wakefield, infamous for falsifying data that he argued linked autism to the MMR vaccine, is thorough, fascinating, and damning. His chapter on debating creationists, Holocaust deniers, homeopaths, and anti-vaxxers is invigorating. "Science is under siege," Offit states, but "science advocates are fighting back," and his own book provides a sterling example of this stand in the name of empirical truth. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Offit Paul :
Paul Offit is Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He holds a BS in Psychology from Tufts University (1973) and an MD from University of Maryland School of Medicine (1977). He is the author of Autism's False Prophets (CUP 2008) and, most recently, Pandora's Lab (Nat Geo 2017).Paul A. Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as well as the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an award-winning physician, coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and the author of several books on medical and scientific issues including, from Columbia University Press, Autism's False Prophets : Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (2007) and Vaccines and Your Child: Separating Fact from Fiction (2011, with Charlotte A. Moser). |
