Professor Sir Michael Rutter

Professor Sir Michael Rutter
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Psychiatrist Professor Sir Michael Rutter is a former (recent) Deputy Chairman of the immensely wealthy Wellcome Trust (founded by the Wellcome Foundation which is now Glaxo). He is also one of the expert witnesses for Glaxo in the MMR litigation (something he did not declare, for example, in the Honda/Rutter paper denying MMR has any association with autism, but I do not see him before the GMC over that)
    Professor Sir Michael Rutter along with a troupe of psychiatrists now or formerly associated with The Maudsley Hospital and The Institute of Psychiatry at Kings have been working hard at telling the public autism is solely genetic and denying there is a world autism pandemic. .....Genetics cannot account for the large rise we are seeing in autism since the mid 1980s. So instead what we see are efforts by Rutter and the King's Institute of Psychiatry other autism denialists to claim there is no real rise in the prevalence of autism. This claim is unscientific and runs counter to the facts documented in the formal literature.
    The Institute of Psychiatry has or is home to more than its fair share of doctors (psychiatrists mostly) who publish papers claiming autism is genetic and denying there is an autism epidemic (the correct word is pandemic - epidemics have far fewer victims). These doctors include Rutter, Eric Fombonne, (now expert witness in the US in the thiomersal/autism litigation when he had previously published nothing about it), Simon Baron Cohen. It is also home to controversial "Gulf War Syndrome" psychiatrist Simon Wessely, director of the Centre for Military Health Research at King's College London and who had been claiming ME/CFS is not a physical condition but a mental one contrary to the definition used around the world. Sophia Wilson is an example of an ME/CFS sufferer who died following this approach to diagnosis, albeit not so far as I am aware a patient of any of the psychiatrists or institutions I name here.
    Also associated with The Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley is Dr Ben Goldacre, who constantly attacks alternative medicine in The Guardian whilst writing the "Badscience" column - yet Goldacre has no scientific qualifications and does not tell everyone that he practises psychiatry - the least successful branch of medicine in history and which has difficulty finding two reliable pieces of science to rub together to support the wacky quacky theories some of its proponents put out.
    Rutter was also an expert witness in Malmo, Sweden in an MMR autism case where the key question was whether autism was solely genetic and not environmental. Rutter's expert evidence was that it was genetic. ----Professor Sir Michael Rutter & The Drug Industry Connections