Also, how do these same parents feel about getting the proper injections for themselves and their kids before they trek off to China, Katmandu, Middle East, etc? They cause autism too, or do they think that it’s another foreign ploy to destroy America that they take seriously? Paranoia is really the only thing expected in the US anymore. Just scare them into the vaxes.
We need licenses to drive, have a business: let’s add one to raise kids.
As a needlephobe, I completely understand. However, as a needlephobe who had to endure eight years of IV drugs I know that it is possible to get over yourself and deal with it. I’ve nearly broken people’s hands while getting shots and IVs, but I knew I didn’t have a choice and I’d be better off in the long run. I’ve also learned the value of a well-timed distraction. Like James McAvoy walking in the room wearing nothing but a towel just as the needle’s about to go in (I wish ;)).
Having said that I agree that we need to get Star Trek hypospray technology working and widely available direct NOW.
Just by way of timely update. Just got notice of a case of whooping cough in my 8th grader’s school.
I’ve managed to avoid having to endure eight years of IV drugs, but in my considerably more limited experience, I find it’s very helpful to not look. (Which admittedly might not be practical if it’s an IV that they leave in for hours or weeks at a time.)
Hence the distraction. They switched me from a 4-hour IV to a 2-minute IV in Stage III testing because I was so freaked out. Had the best reaction to it out of all the people they were testing it on. In that case, my needlephobia was a benefit to science and all of the people who get that IV now.
Any article where Jenny McCarthy is taken seriously as a commentor on vaccines should run the following quote from her:
Toxins to prevent you from dropping dead from infectious diseases? EVIL.
Toxins to prevent you from looking your age? WONDERFUL.
She needs to shut up and then go away.
This is exactly the type of misinformation and scare mongering that leads people to believe these sorts of things, though. You hear that the vaccines contain (well…contained because they took it out) mercury, so you think “well, it’s reasonable to be cautious.” But once you look at the facts of the matter, it’s not reasonable.
The type of mercury that was in vaccinations was of a completely different type than the one that is regarded as being more harmful. Ethyl mercury is in thimerisol, and methyl mercury is the environmental kind that we are being warned about, because it’s harder for the body to rid itself of it, and has more damaging effects.
Not only that, but the amount of mercury that is in each vaccine is astonishingly low. Even if it was the more harmful kind, the amount an average American gets over the course of a *lifetime[i/] is quite small. Each vaccine has bout 0.25 micrograms of mercury per 0.5mL of vaccine (from here). You’ll get perhaps 22 vaccines in your life (from here.), so that’s 5.5 micrograms of mercury (keep in mind this IS the type that your body is able to remove, and does so in a few months at most…but we’re assuming hypotheticals here.)
So now you have the scary amount of 5.5 micrograms of mercury. A can of albacore tuna has about 0.353 PPM or mercury (parts per million.) Your average can of tuna is 85 grams, so that works out to 30 micrograms.
A single can of tuna has over five times the amount of mercury you’ll receive from all your vaccinations combined (oh, and the kind in tuna is methyl mercury, which your body can’t clear very well and continues to accumulate year after year.)
I don’t know if it will help you now, but the IV line that remains “in” you isn’t a needle, it’s a silicone catheter. They may use a needle to put it in, but what stays in you isn’t sharp or metal at all.
I haven’t needed any IVs in about ten years, so it’s all good. They suggested a port once. I think my passing out convinced them it wasn’t a good idea.
As a grad student in school psychology, autism is a frequent topic of discussion in class. One night, we were talking about the possible causes of the disorder. Things were brought up along the lines of genes, restricted airways during birth, poor prenatal nutrition, etc.
Allow me to digress by saying that all of my cohorts are intelligent reasonable people, except for one: Crazy Knee Jerk Overly Emotional Woman. Guess who this post is going to be about?
CKJOEW raises her hand and asks, “Well what about vaccines? My sister’s friend’s cousin’s son* got a MMR vaccine and 6 months later developed autism and I really think the two are linked.” Her voice started to break and her eyes welled up a bit. Cue eye rolling from the rest of the class.
The prof. answered back with a vague comment along the lines of " Some people would agree with you and others would not." You could tell the prof. was trying his best to tip toe around the issue because CKJOEW was clearly in an emotional state and he didn’t want to make it any worse. We then awkwardly moved on.
The point of the story is that, although absolutely ridiculous and very dangerous, this belief is pervasive enough to have infiltrated the ranks of the very people who are going to be diagnosing and working with these kids every day.
Your prof dropped the ball, big time.
We can’t afford to turn out professionals who base their actions on emotions and faulty intuition.
I mean it’s reasonable to feel cautious and be wary in the absence of absolute knowledge about a situation.
We have two extreme possible reactions to situations that require specialized knowledge:
Trust authority
Become the authority
Neither of these extreme choices is possible or even tenable"
Authority is demonstrably fallible, often dismissive or lazy, occasionally corrupted. Authority also often refers not to “who is knowledgeable” but to “who is in charge” which are not always selected by the same criteria. Also who is the authority is not always clear - is it the scientist, or the President, my doctor, my mother, or my priest?
It’s just not possible to become an authority on everything. There’s is a limited about of research one can do into every little issue that comes up in life. And even were one to put the effort into becoming the number one specialist in a particular issue or discipline even that doesn’t guarantee that you will have perfect knowledge about it.
So what is one to do? The best one can do as a non authority is keep questioning until the answers you have are satisfactory or plausible enough seeming.
The best thing you can do as an authority is to be a proper authority - do not do things which seem corrupt like accepting corporate funding that could bias your results, do not censor or edit your results based on political considerations, do not act dismissive towards people (“just trust me”) or act like any of their questions or stupid - rather encourage people to challenge you and educate themselves, and complement them when they ask obvious questions even if the answers turn out to be non obvious, point people towards original sources, etc.
Calling things “misinformation” and “scare mongering” is causing part of the problem you hope to solve. Instead of saying “people who think mercury in vaccines are stupid and misinformed” you should be saying “people who are concerned about mercury in vaccines” should be commended - mercury is an important health concern and it’s a very smart thing to be asking about this. It turns out though, that mercury comes in various compounds, some of which are detrimental and some of which are safe. Then you might go on to explain the concerns about the fact that mercury generally accumulates in the body and address the likelihood that the body can metabolize the compound into different forms.
While you might blame concerned parents for the problem, the truth is that scientists and doctors are just as much to blame. The dissemination of good knowledge depends on a healthy relationship between educator and student, and like any relationship, both partners must take an active and healthy role.
Another thing that damages the doctor patient relationship is that many doctors fall back on their working knowledge (protocol) and let their theoretical knowledge fall by the wayside (how things work). If you ask your dentist for non mercury fillings, they may insist that they are safe, but they won’t be able to the explain to you why. The truth is, they are lazy and used to doing things a certain way, and maybe the non mercury fillings are more expensive, and they are embarrassed that they don’t actually know the explanation for why they are safe. So they berate the patient for not trusting them. But the truth is, whatever the facts end up being about the particular issue, in terms of behavior the doctor’s actions are abhorrent and the patient’s are admirable. If the doctor isn’t able to answer the patient’s questions legitimately and not in a dismissive fashion of appeal to authority, then they can’t claim to be ‘right’ even if they happen to be on the ‘right side’.
This is an appeal to “reasonableness” that actually lacks reason.
Yes, we know that mercury is a toxin that is harmful. As you note, mercury, like all metals, requires accumulation in the body of particular amounts in order to actually become toxic. We do not need to be “authorities” to discover the levels that are required for toxic activity; they are routinely published in journals that are available to any person to read.
Then, when the mercury is removed from the vaccines and the cries against mercury poisoning continue, it makes rather more sense to indicate that the cries are those of scare mongering rather than reason and should not be approved as those cries are in opposition to public and individual health. When further studies are conducted that demonstrate that even the mercury containing vaccines do not show any correlation with the claims for ill effects and we find people continuing to rail against the (now mercury free) vaccines, it is entirely proper to dismiss them as scare mongerers who should be ridiculed as opponents of the common good.
People who take an active interest in supporting public immunization are not blaming “concerned parents”. As an example, pediatricians like DSeid (who’s posted in this thread) take a great deal of time and trouble to educate and lobby parents so that their kids will be protected. Parents who are concerned for their children and worry about this issue are not the problem.
The problem is pressure groups and their spokespeople who have heard all the good and accurate data vindicating vaccines, and continue to reject it and spread misinformation. They deserve the criticism they get, which overall is far less harsh and mean-spirited than the attacks they receive from antivaxers.
I can’t speak to any personal experience you may have had, but I doubt this is standard operating procedure in dentistry, for the same reason that pediatricians don’t harshly berate parents of their patients. There’s lots of good information, some of it from the American Dental Association, which dentists use to show patients that amalgam fillings are safe and that patients will not benefit from going to pro-quackery dentists to have all such fillings yanked out and replaced by fillings with no mercury content. Dentists can also point to the lack of studies showing they or their assistants are suffering health problems due to occupational mercury exposure.
I could not send my daughter to day care without proving she’d had her vaccinations. It was not presented as being an option; show us proof of vaccination or keep her home.
I don’t know if the public schools have a similar policy, but I sure hope so. I don’t want my kid going to school with kids who haven’t had proper vaccinations.
It depends. I live in Ohio, and I’m not sure whether this is a federal or state policy, but for public schools here, you are required to vaccinate your children before they start kindergarten. Except … if you have religious objections, you can write a letter to the school system and get an exemption. Some people really do have religious objections. Some people have no religious objections, but write the letter anyway. It’s a particular problem a little south of where we live.
Here’s a story about a recent outbreak of whooping cough. Besides the sick children, I believe there are currently more than 30 kids missing weeks of school because they aren’t vaccinated.
This dismissive attitude by people who claim to know what’s best is a major reason why laypeople in turn dismiss their advice.
LOL. You seriously expect your average layperson to be routinely spending hours in the library searching through science journals for which they may not even have the background to understand the articles? Even if this were feasible for this one issue of vaccines, it’s just not feasible for every single of the myriad issues that come up in life. And just because vaccines is your pet project doesn’t mean that everyone else is going to focus on it to the detriment of other important issues. You’re also ignoring the fact that having researched the issue yourself, you may now see it as cut and dried, but there is no way for the average layperson to know which issues have been reasonably resolved and are worth doing looking into and which are still mired by controversy and contradictory evidence even among the experts. Again, when people with particular knowledge assume that their knowledge is obvious they are committing a classic fallacy and come off as arrogant as well.
Your assertion is way too vague - where has the mercury been removed and there still been an organizational complaint that there is still mercury poisoning? And ‘scare mongering’ implies that there is some other secret agenda not related to actual concerns about health. What is this secret agenda?
It’s good to see you step up and say that. That’s not the impression I got from other posters though.
Doctors and dentists may have useful information available to them, but speaking anecdotally for my own experience and that of many others I’ve talked to, they don’t often make use of them. They’d rather say whatever they need to say to get the patient to do whatever they want them to do, finish up, and get to the next patient. There are of course better doctors who will answer questions that seem obvious to them and address concerns without being dismissive, but if the patient has had the other sort of doctor previously, there will have been a ‘chilling effect’ and they may be wary of trying to have a healthier relationship with their new doctor.
jackdavinci,
I am a layperson. I have no degrees in science nor do I have any medical training at all.
It does not require an advanced degree nor much of anything beyond common sense to understand why the anti-vaccine stance is both wrong and dangerous.
My personal understanding of that fact comes largely from reading history. At every turn someone’s dying of something we do not think about today. Queen Victoria herself lost her third child at thirty-five to diphtheria after Alice tried to nurse her children through an outbreak of the illness.
Her eldest child, Vicky, Empress of Germany, lost a son to the same illness.
You really don’t have to do much reading at all on this subject to understand it. Common sense dictates that we no longer see smallpox or find people dying from polio. Common sense would also dictate that someone old enough to give birth to understand that without having a doctor who has to hold their hand and scare off the bogeyman at every turn.
A doctor’s job is not done in a vacuum. Patients have to assume some responsibility as well. Part of that responsibility lies in doing just a bit of homework on this subject during the nine months it takes to gestate a baby. And realizing that Jenny “Silicone Boobs and Botox in My Face” isn’t exactly a credible source on this subject.
So you won’t read the research yourself, but you won’t believe the people who have read it. You’ll just believe what you think is right despite people telling you over and over again that you’re wrong.