Dialogues with Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 3

This is a little switch from the prior entries in the series, but still fitting in the theme.  My previous two episodes involved religion and religious beliefs as the core topics of discussion.  This one is more on the alt-med end of the spectrum, mainly regarding anti-vaccine and autism-related nuttery.  Nonetheless, I'm still dealing with a hopeless delusional idiot here.  Let that be a reminder that idiocy of this scale is not limited to religion alone, and that this blog is about all kinds of stupidity.  It's things like this that make it bear mentioning that the moniker of "grumpy anti-theist" isn't enough by itself.  I'm "anti-" all kinds of insufferable stupidity.

There are several sub-movements within the set of alternative "medicine" believers, with a relatively minor amount of crossover between them.  It's not necessarily the case that someone who is anti-vaccine is also a believer in Ayurveda, or that someone who buys into homeopathy is also a reiki healing fanatic.  That's not to say, though, that such people don't exist.  In this case, I'm dealing with one such person.  It is pretty clear as things carry on that this person wasn't drawn to alternative "medicine" (read : quackery) because he really found them believable on their own terms, but because he was so staunchly opposed to real medicine that anything that was different was inherently better.

This conversation was taking place on an online forum for a site that is ostensibly about video games (one for which I was formerly a contributing editor for their press outlet back when I was still working in the games industry), but like many forums, they have sections dedicated to "off-topic" or "general" discussion, and topics like politics, current events, "new cool stuff" was always going around.  While I'm no longer super-active with this forum or the site that owns it, I still appear now and then.  This one started with a guy who was posting a lot of anti-medicine nonsense shortly after Steve Jobs died...  I ignored it for a while, and the thread carried on, but after a few posts in, it also started including some anti-vaccine and all the vaccines-cause-autism bullcrap that rested on the outlandish idea that a former Playboy bunny knows more about human biochemistry than all medical doctors in the world combined.

Autism is NOT an epidemic

ARRRGGHHHH... There are relatively few things outside of religion which get on my nerves more than the anti-vaccine movement.  The fallacies abound in this crowd where the entirety of the beliefs are based on logical failures and incomplete information.

One major aspect that comes up in the argument is that the rate of autism is many times higher now than before.  Even around the time I was born, the rate of autism diagnoses was something like 1 in 8,000, and now it's 1 in 110 or so.  What happened?  It must either be a new epidemic of some sort or something has poisoned the well.  It's 'dem dere evil pharmaceutical companies!!!

The key word nobody notices here is that it's the rate of diagnoses which has increased.  Not the rate of incidence.

Ars reported on a recent paper in the Archives of General Psychiatry which tried to collect data on the epidemiology of autism spectrum disorders.  Till date, there has been no such collection of data.  The basic approach of the study was to take the current established rate of diagnoses for children and compare it to a sampling of the current adult population where they attempted a diagnosis according to the same criteria used in modern conditions.  Result?  Roughly the same rate of diagnosis.  Yes, I know it's only a preliminary study, and it has a fairly small sample size which makes the confidence interval really wide (funny, though, how the sample size of 12 in Wakefield's paper is considered conclusive proof for anti-vaxxers, but real science considers a sample size of 850 too small to make final conclusions).

Well, the main point is that it strongly indicates that there is no epidemic.  We're just being more proactive in diagnosing it.  Also, there's the fact that back when the rate of diagnosis was around 1 in 8,000, there were a variety of conditions all considered disparate...  now, some 20 or 30 previously different conditions are all categorized under the umbrella of "autism spectrum disorders."  It gets from the very extreme "Rain Man"-esque kinds of autism to the extremely mild higher functioning forms like Asperger's Syndrome, which is pretty much the level of the weird kid in class who keeps to himself (it's generally nowhere near the severity portrayed in My Name is Khan).

We're just better at finding it...  as well as a having a certain increased chance of finding it when it isn't actually there.  But then, if you, the reader are not an anti-vaxxer, I don't expect you to have any real doubts on that...  and if you are, well, then...  get your damn facts straight, already.