A few of you (if you’re a Brit like me) may remember after the MMR debacle that articles in the Sunday Times and presented in a Channel 4 ‘Dispatches’ programme followed investigative journalist Brian Deer’s progress as he totally debunked Andrew Wakefields science to the point where the GMC (General Medical Council) will be investigating Wakefields fitness to practice medicine.
I came across this new entry on Brian Deer’s own site about Andrew Wakefield.
In it Mr Deer discusses the strange case of some disappearing pages from Thoughtful Houses’ (very prosaic) website. These pages related to biographies and speaking dates for two key board members Arthur Krigsman and Bryan Jepson – these two being essential components in Wakefield’s operation in both a medical and financial sense:
This looked like good business, but recent developments suggest that something in Austin has changed. In the middle of August 2005, the Thoughtful House website underwent dramatic reconfiguration. The “Mount Rushmore†line-up of Wakefield, Krigsman, Jepson and Granpeesheh, vanished from the welcome page. And previously extensive details of the Wakefield operation’s clinical services were replaced with: “This page is under constructionâ€.
Why is the disappearance of these two such an issue? Well because without them Wakefield can’t treat all the kids he insists come to him rather than get treated locally:
In short, it appears that Thoughtful House clinical services are on hold, with its advertised clinicians off the scene. What this means for parents, and more importantly, their children, will be reported as soon as we know.
The whole Thoughtful House venture seems somewhat off-course. Could it be that these two essential cogs in Wakefields scheme realised the ‘bullshit factor’ of what they’d signed up for?
aims to unravel what the Thoughtful House website described as Wakefield’s “discovery of autistic enterocolitisâ€. This discovery – an alleged gut inflammation distinctive to autism – has yet to be substantiated by any other group, despite parents widely believing that it has. Specialists in this field deny that any such distinctive condition exists, with even the influential paediatric endoscopist Dr Tim Buie of Harvard University, who treads the same conference circuit boards as Wakefield, saying that he has seen nothing specific to autistic children.
Go have a read of the whole thing. Its an absorbing piece.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Recent Comments