Tuesday, October 14, 2014

#1179: Kenneth Paul Stoller


Honorable mention to John Stojanowski for his creative attempt to explain how the dinosaurs went extinct. A separate entry would be to exaggerate, and Stojanowski is in any case harmless. Kenneth P. Stoller is (arguably) not. Stoller is an anti-vaxx activist. Indeed, Stoller is quite unhinged, even by anti-vaccine standards, to the extent that he has been awarded with his very own whale.to page. And yes, Stoller is – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – completely convinced that vaccines cause autism. Of course, the fact that increases in autism disorders can largely be explained by changing diagnostic criteria doesn’t impress him, because – according to Stoller – this simply isn’t the case. It just isn’t. And that autism has, in part at least, a genetic component? Well, according to Stoller “there are no genetic epidemics”, so there’s that.

But he does have some ideas of how to cure autism – hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Evidence that it works? Stoller’s intuitions and anecdotes, the same mechanism that worked so well for him when he arrived at the conclusion that autism is caused by vaccines. Apparently hyperbaric oxygen therapy might help against other ailments caused by toxins (vaccines are apparently full of toxins), including aspartame as well.

Stoller is director of The World Association for Vaccine Education (WAVE), sharing the board with luminaries like Boyd Haley and HIV denialist Andrew Maniotis.

Diagnosis: Eternally locked in combat with reality and reason, Stoller does seem to have gained some influence through use of tropes and rhetorical techniques that apparently seem appealing to the reality-challenged. That makes him not negligibly dangerous. One to watch.

3 comments:

  1. After reading his senseless ramblings, the word "hyperbolic" should rather read "hyperbole".

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  2. Dear Lisa, It's hyperbaric, you idiot. From Greek "hyper" meaning more than average and "baros" meaning pressure or weight. There is no such thing as a hyperbolic chamber, unless that's what you call this site where you keep your unfounded opinions about public figures.

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  3. This man is a CON ARTIST. He lists that he went to medical school at "AUC, W.I., UK" which is American University of the Caribbean from 76-82, but they didn't open until 78. He spells out the name of his high schools(!), but uses abbreviations to cover up the fact that he went to a subpar Caribbean for-profit medical school that only became accredited in 2011.

    He claims to have done a residency in Pediatrics at UCLA, but he completed it in 1986 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center (also carefully abbreviated as CSMC), whose Pediatrics residency program only merged with UCLA in 2004.
    It is fraudulent for him to state that he "received his medical training at UCLA". Case in point: UCLA has no record of him attending.

    He worked at an Amen Clinic, which is a network of clinics notorious for scamming parents. They do an expensive ($4000+) SPECT scan and then tell every parent their child has ADHD and recommend supplements that are untested, unregulated and ineffective. SPECT scans are not capable of diagnosing or suggesting treatments for patients and he should not be injecting radioactivity into children for a test that is a scam. Even the clinics can give no evidence that their treatments provide any medical benefit - they merely state a statistic about what percentage of their patients are "satisfied" with their experience and reference it as a "clinical trial" that was published in a "medical journal" when actually it was a survey published in a non-peer-reviewed newsletter.

    Stoller has advised parents to use all kinds of untested, potentially dangerous treatments, essentially encouraging them to use their children as unconsenting medical test subjects. He promotes the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for conditions for which it is not approved. If it were safe and effective, the FDA would approve it for those conditions. As it stands, it has not been evaluated in clinical trials and has the potential for serious safety risks.

    He also worked for a chiropractic clinic called Azzolino. They list "integrative oncology" as something they practice, which means advising cancer patients to take unregulated, unproven, ineffective supplements. He is also opposed to vaccination, and still subscribes to the wacko idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism, despite it having been scientifically disproven. How many patients has he scared out of getting vaccines? Will he take responsibility, I wonder, when they die of encephalitis from a measles infection?

    AVOID THIS INCOMPETENT, DISHONEST MAN AT ALL COSTS!

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