One remark: Phoenix Rising (PR) is an organization running the PR website. ASFAIK Cort is one of the people speaking for PR. Furthermore PR offers a forum and the possibility to run a blog there. The link leads to one such blog post by one website user. Your statement is as wrong as “completely egregious post from WordPress” or “completely egregious post from Blogger” (if it were from a user of their services and not from the organization).

So “completely egregious post from someone blogging on Phoenix Rising” would be more to the point.

Just my $0.02.

“I in no way am accusing Mikovits of the kind of deliberate fraud, falsified results, and ethically egregious behavior that Wakefield displayed.”

That should change. I think the smoking gun is the XMRV plasmid. XMRV plasmid is an artificial entity. It doesn’t accidentally contaminates lab reagents. It certainly isn’t found in patients. Most certainly not. OK, so now you have the word of Silverman (“I found XMRV plasmid only in patients samples”) against the word of Mikovits (” “). Her disciple are casting it all in a “It was all Silvermans fault” frame – but then what the heck did Mikovits culture for over two years? And how is that Silvermans fault? And as you note, Mikovits was principal/lead of that study. The whole Mikovits/XMRV saga looks from day to day more and more like fraud to me – and I am having a hard time coming up with a scenario where Silverman did it all.

(As with regards to Wakefield: I might have to examine the evidence a bit closer, but to me it looks like he didn’t manufacture the data, but “simply” used data that does not really support his fearmongering claims. Either way he is a anti-scientific fearmongering scumbag, but I don’t see that he is a “fraud” – unlike Mikovits.)

One thing that you may encounter is something I encountered with the transport chair many times, and it will take a lot of patience on your part to deal with: people speak to the person who is pushing the person in the wheelchair, rather than to the person in the chair – cashiers, pharmacists, etc. It’s disturbing, and more than once, I had to catch their attention
when I was picking up a prescription that my mom had wheeled me
up to the counter to get. They’d look at her – even though I was
the one who had asked for it – and she hadn’t said a word. It
was as though being in a wheelchair robbed me of personhood.

Another thing is that when you want to speak to the person pushing you, it’s necessary to twist yourself around in the chair so they can hear you clearly – again, this is something I had to do a LOT. This can be quite painful if you have to do it a lot. If you can work it out beforehand with the person pushing you, try to agree that if you want to talk, have them stop the chair and come around the front of the chair to talk to you instead.

Hope some of this is helpful, and good luck with your new wheels! DO try and run some people over if they don’t hear the “excuse me, could you please move?”- it’s great fun! Or you could get one of those “AA-WOOOO-GAH!!!” horns. *evil grin*