Michael Fitzpatrick
Trustee
Michael Fitzpatrick has been a general practitioner in East London for 25 years, after training at Oxford and the Middlesex. He writes on a wide range of medical and political subjects, including Aids, addictions and health scares for both medical publications and the mainstream media. He has written columns in The Lancet and the British Journal of General Practice, reviews for the British Medical Journal, Nature and Community Care, articles for the Times andthe Guardian, and is a regular contributor to the on-line magazine, Spiked. His book The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle, published by Routledge in 2001, exposed the intrusive and authoritarian character of the ‘new public health’.
Michael has two teenage sons, one of whom is autistic. As a doctor who is also the parent of a son with autism, he has been actively involved in the controversy over alleged links between vaccines and autism, challenging the pseudoscience underlying these theories. His book MMR and Autism: What Parents Need To Know (2004) put forward a comprehensive appraisal of vaccine-autism theories. This was followed in 2009 by Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion, a critique of influential but scientifically unsubstantiated ‘unorthodox biomedical’ interventions in autism.
