Monday, January 7, 2008

Frequently Repeated Misunderstandings

We read the earlier posting on this website about our recent article, Blood levels of mercury are related to diagnosis of autism: A reanalysis of an important data set. The posting on this website linked to a on-line critique of our article. We think readers might be interested to know we have had to address a number of questions that have arisen about the mistake we found in the Ip et al (2004) paper and the subsequent erratum that was published by the journal in November 2007. We appreciate that our research has garnered so much attention, but have become increasingly aware that a great amount of misunderstanding exists and much misinformation is being repeated. For example, one blog site has stated that we did not do analyses which we clearly did do, and made it appear that the only problem with the retracted Ip 2004 article was that a one-tailed test should have been used. Unfortunately, this is the very site that was mentioned on this blogsite. We are troubled that this information about what we wrote is being repeated, since it is not accurate on several counts. It is our sincere hope that interested parties will try to keep an open mind and carefully read our article for what it says -- and what it does not say.
http://www.uni.edu/desoto/desoto_hitlan_autism.html
Catherine DeSoto and Robert Hitlan

No comments: