Autism researchers are ableist.

The other manipulation of significant is a misuse of the concept of “statistical significance.” When a study looks at an intervention’s outcomes and find that those outcomes are “statistically significant” it simply means that it is more likely that the outcomes are a result of the intervention than that they were the result of chance. So if a study had a statistically significant finding that people using some weight loss method lost 3% of their body weight, that would mean that it was more likely that the small amount of weight loss was due to the weight loss method than that it was by chance. However, if the study conclusion were to say that people lost a “significant amount of weight” when what they meant was that the weight loss was statistically significant, they might mislead people into thinking that “significant” in this case meant “a lot of” weight.

The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.

I’ll often say something like the way Zoloft works, is, it increases the level of serotonin in your brain (or synapses, neurons) and, presumably, the reason you’re depressed or anxious is that you have some sort of a deficiency. And I say that [chuckles] not because I really believe it, because I know the evidence really isn’t there for us to understand the mechanism—I think I say that because patients want to know something. And they want to know that we as physicians have some basic understanding of what we’re doing when we’re prescribing medications. They certainly don’t want to know that a psychiatrist essentially has no idea how these medications work

Smith and I found that, of the nearly 1,800 articles published across the four editions of the encyclopedia, only 13 addressed racism in a substantive way.

Part 3 of 3