Medical expert Paul A. Offit, M.D., offers a scathing exposé of the alternative medicine industry, revealing how even though some popular therapies are remarkably helpful due to the placebo response, many of them are ineffective, expensive, and even deadly.

In 2014, California suffered the largest and deadliest outbreak of pertussis, also known as "whooping cough," in more than fifty years. This tragedy was avoidable. An effective vaccine has been available since the 1940s. In recent years other diseases, like measles and mumps, have also made a comeback. The reason for these epidemics can be traced to a group whose vocal proponents insist, despite evidence to the contrary, that vaccines are poison....

Vaccines have saved more lives than any other single medical advance. Yet today only four companies make vaccines, and there is a growing crisis in vaccine availability. Why has this happened? This remarkable book recounts for the first time a devastating episode in 1955 at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, that has led many pharmaceutical companies to abandon vaccine manufacture. Drawing on interviews with public health officials, pharmaceutical...

Vaccines save millions of lives every year, and one man, Maurice Hilleman, was responsible for nine of the big fourteen. Paul Offit recounts his story and the story of vaccines Maurice Hilleman discovered nine vaccines that practically every child gets, rendering formerly dread diseases-including often devastating ones such as mumps and rubella-practically forgotten. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine researcher himself, befriended Hilleman and, during the...

Diseases that were largely eradicated in the U.S. a generation ago - including whooping cough, measles, mumps - are returning, in part because nervous parents are skipping their children's shots. This takes viewers around the world to track epidemics, explore the science behind vaccinations, and shed light on the risks of opting out. The vast majority of Americans - more than 90% - vaccinate their children. Yet many people have questions about the...