Anecdotes
Medical Control ploys   Rationalization  [back] Medical study ploys

[Jan 2010 Update: Read Silenced Witnesses Volume II: The Parents' Story for some parent anecdotes that will tell you MMR causes autism and bowel disease.  Then you will know why 'anecdotes don't count.' Wink
    'Just an anecdote' is a classic medical industry Rationalization, unless it is one supporting their beliefs, beloved of pharma trolls. You can see how Pharma controlled Wikipedia downplays anecdotes in Vaccine Injury Anecdotes Are No Joke by Sandy Gottstein.  There must be thousands of parent 'anecdotes' linking MMR to autism (5,000 cases in the US Courts) yet the vaccinators say 'anecdotes don't count'.  To quote Mandy Rice Taylor "they would say that wouldn't they."  In a real world those experiences and observations would have caused the vaccine to be withdrawn years ago, and the victims compensated, but when you are in power you can make the rules, in this case: 'anecdotes don't count', and get everyone to believe it.  They are doing their best to suppress the truth (favourite method so far is submerging that with junk science in the form of Epidemiology studies.  Only a handful of scientists are studying the children and they have no connection to the government or medical industry.  The medical industry is never going to fund real studies, for obvious reasons, so thousands You can see the game by observing a very anonymous (he doesn't want identifying at all)  medical editor linking the  Logical Fallacy page [ref] to the Anecdote page.]

See: Analogy madness

[2013 April] Vaccine Injury Anecdotes Are No Joke by Sandy Gottstein

Cawadias (1953) has said that "the history of medicine has shown that, whenever medicine has strayed from clinical observation, the result has been chaos, stagnation, and disaster."--British Medical Journal, Oct 8th, 1955, p.867 (Quoted in Clinical Medical Discoveries by Beddow Bayly)

Doctors may notice that their patients don’t seem to fare as well with certain treatments as the literature would lead them to expect, but the field is appropriately conditioned to subjugate such anecdotal evidence to study findings. Yet much, perhaps even most, of what doctors do has never been formally put to the test in credible studies, given that the need to do so became obvious to the field only in the 1990s, leaving it playing catch-up with a century or more of non-evidence-based medicine, and contributing to Ioannidis’s shockingly high estimate of the degree to which medical knowledge is flawed. That we’re not routinely made seriously ill by this shortfall, he argues, is due largely to the fact that most medical interventions and advice don’t address life-and-death situations, but rather aim to leave us marginally healthier or less unhealthy, so we usually neither gain nor risk all that much. [2010 Nov] Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

I asked how he got involved. He told me his daughter got the MMR, came down immediately with a 103-degree fever and regressed forthwith into autism.
      "It's like someone took out her good brain and replaced it with a bad brain," he said. It was that immediate.
      I had another conversation with the mother of fraternal twins who told me this story: Both sons were scheduled to get two shots -- the MMR and another vaccination -- on the same day at the same office visit.
      But -- oops -- the healthcare worker gave the first child two MMR shots, not the MMR and the second vaccine. That child soon developed autism; the second one didn't.
      And I spoke recently with a Texas man whose son got the MMR in 1993; the injection site swelled up to the size of his father's fist; he had seizures at the dinner table that night, and within days was spinning, flapping, chewing wood and not talking ever again.
      You get the picture. "Anecdotal evidence." But you have to wonder how many of these stories -- one is tempted to say, bodies -- must pile up before the medical authorities go back and take a fresh look at the issue.
      This blithe disregard for case histories -- for what parents, the supposed bedrock of our "family-friendly" society, say -- is one of the most appalling features of the current climate surrounding autism research. In fact, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., has talked publicly of forcing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which sets the childhood immunization schedule and stoutly rejects a link with autism, to actually go out and interview some of these parents. http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/20060612-023341-6204r.htm

The Minnesota Somali Autism Study: That and a dollar will buy you a hot dog.  After the briefing I spoke with Judy Punyko about where the comment regarding 25% to 30% of educational diagnosis not qualifying for medical diagnosis came from.  As she had admitted that it was actually opinion, I asked her why the MDH gets to use anecdotal observation as a basis for denial of the actual increase in rates among Somali children.  I said when parents use observations of what happened to our children, like developing autism after vaccinations, we get attacked.  I explained it was inappropriate for the MDH to use those percentages from now on and urged her to discontinue its use.  She looked at me with the stone cold face equal only to a cat responding to an order to get off the kitchen counter.  It was like I never mentioned it at all.
     The simple fact that 1 in 41 nine year old boys in Minnesota have enough developmental deficits to qualify them for autism services should scare the hell out of everybody.

Examples
Oh, and some anecdotal data of my own. I also have mercury fillings, with no apparent health repercussions. My mother, however, had hers removed because she'd read they could result in symptoms of multiple sclerosis (which she has). No improvement resulted. So, score 1 for no harm from my fillings, and another for "mercury doesn't cause MS." Aren't anecdotes fun? : Tara C. Smith

"The plural of anecdote is not data."--Putz the pharma shill

"Case studies are anecdotes. Nice try.....These are anecdotes. DUH. Not data."--Putz the pharma shill

As far as I can ascertain there is no supported  research that proves mmr causes autism. All the people that supported the original research have retracted their support and the research has proved to be seriously flawed. Everything else is anecdotal.