| Michael Fitzpatrick | |
| Occupation: | General practitioner |
| Known For: | Writing about autism therapies, MMR vaccine controversy, and promoting AIDs denialism |
| Spouse: | Mary Fitzpatrick |
| Children: | 1 |
Michael Fitzpatrick (born 1950) is a libertarian,[1] British general practitioner (GP) and author from London, United Kingdom. He was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.[2] Fitzpatrick is known for writing several books and newspaper articles about controversies in autism, from his perspective as someone who is both a GP and the parent of a son with autism. His book Defeating Autism: A Dangerous Delusion (2008) describes his views on the rising popularity of "biomedical" treatments for autism, as well as the MMR vaccine controversy.[3]
He has held a position as a contrarian on certain scientific issues, as he has disputed the health risks of secondhand smoke, and promoted AIDS denialism.[4] In The Truth About the AIDS Panic, Fitzpatrick and Don Milligan falsely claimed that there is "no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly among heterosexuals in the West".
Fitzpatrick's books have also focused on the pseudoscientific treatments for autism, such as Mark Geier's use of chelation therapy and Lupron as autism treatments, which Fitzpatrick has criticized as "dehumanising and dangerous."[5] He also condemned the use of secretin as an autism treatment in his 2004 book MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know, in which he wrote that "the secretin bubble burst" when a randomized controlled trial found that it was ineffective. In an interview with The Guardian, he proposed that special diets are appealing to parents of children with autism because so little is known about the cause or possible treatments for autism, "And then someone else comes along and says your doctor's useless, that they know what caused it, and that you can do something about it".[6]
Fitzpatrick has criticized NeuroTribes for generalizing about autistic people, saying that most low-functioning autistics need supervised living and experience challenging behavior.[7] He also was skeptical that Naoki Higashida, a non-speaking autistic individual, could have written the book The Reason I Jump because of the "scant explanation" of the process Higashida's mother used for helping him write using the character grid and expressed concern that the book "reinforces more myths than it challenges".[8]