My pet project is taking shape! Presenting The Pairadocs Podcast with Andrew and Derek! Andrew and Derek talk academics/medicine. This week, "What is a Scientist?" Also, cats, porridge, and broken beer bottles. MailBag listener questions about radio waves and birds, "The Crud", and placebo medications! It's not boring, trust us!
Website for streaming/download: http://pairadocs.podomatic.com/
RSS feed for subscription: http://pairadocs.podomatic.com/rss2.xml
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThePairadocs
1 comment:
Found your podcast and thought it would be interesting, as a grad student (immunology)/med student myself. Totally support what you guys are doing and enjoyed the discussion from what I listed to for the most part.
However, I heard a really troubling comment at around 41 minutes into your first episode. In a good layman's definition of how vaccines work and adaptive immunity, one of you mentioned, "and that's essentially where the autism comes from." Not sure if it was a joke, but there were no context clues to indicate that it wasn't a serious comment. If you were being serious and are under the assumptions that vaccines cause autism, i'd point you toward the mountain of reviews and primary data in pubmed that support no causal link between vaccines and autism. Also, the resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases directly linked to public mistrust and miseducation on the issue.
I don't typically comment on message boards or internet forums, but this bothered me enough to make an exception. I think that podcasts like yours have the capacity to (even if only in a small way) increase general public scientific literacy, but grossly inaccurate and potentially dangerous comments like "vaccines cause autism" complete undue any sort of positive that comes along with. Particularly when discussing issues with social/political undertones and where missinformation runs high, i'd urge you to be evidence-based and thoughtful in how you approach the discussion.
I hope it was just a misspeak or aside comment that came out not as intended, but again i'd urge you to be more thoughtful when bringing up topics like vaccines, global warming, complementary and alternative medicine, evolution, abortion, etc. that people have strong and possibly misinformed views about.
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