Wednesday, February 4, 2015

dichotomies and spectra

There's been a LOT of discussion about anti-vaxers recently....  As with so many problematic issues, we're called upon to commit to a SIDE -- either you're with us or against us, and you must choose!

What do fundamentalist Christians and scientists have in common?  If you're not in lockstep with them, or on your knees at THEIR altar, you're the enemy.  There's no grey area:  you're either a vaxer or an anti-vaxer.

They don't want to hear that they're doing a bad job of living up to their own ideals.  The more true it is, the more they LALALA-I-CAN'T-HEAR-YOU-LALALA!

Many pharmaceutical products, including immunizing ones, are fabulously helpful, but only if they're used RIGHT -- in a timely fashion on the appropriate patient.  A shitload of doctors use them sloppily (e.g., statins, antibiotics and psych-meds), encouraged by a pharmaceutical industry which is more interested in profit than health-promotion.  If there's only ONE opportunity to vaccinate children, as in the old medical-missionary style, perhaps there's an excuse to go ahead and give them a year's worth of doses in one day.  Nowadays, when parents run their children to the pediatrician's office every time they sneeze, following that pattern is just plain idiotic.

Not all babies and children seem to need ALL the prophylactic shots being given them (hepB, for example).  And considering what kinds of toxic ingredients are IN some of those preparations, broadcasting them out as the medical profession does is analogous to feeding antibiotics to animals to make them grow fatter, faster.  The law of unintended consequences WILL bite you in the ass if at all possible.

A SPECTRUM is a wonderful thing.  So is a bell-curve.  You find people falling in a wide swath of normalcy, with pathological extremes -- same goes for most kinds of human activity.

Excepting pregnancy, of course -- a simple positive or negative tends to apply there.  ;-)

4 comments:

  1. A minefield of do we or don't we?
    We never really agree 100%. Yes I'm going to, or no perhaps I'm not.
    Is it every parents'nightmare' to choose what they think is best?
    You hear good - you hear bad. What are you to do?

    Yes, it is up to each parent to decide?

    Who said parenting or choice was easy?

    All the best Jan

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. :-) No kidding! Parents who want their kids to have what they felt deprived of, themselves, so often only manage to create brats who think they're the center of the universe; parents who want to raise them to be safe create helpless, dependent ones; parents who try to teach their kids to be self-reliant and assertive raise bullies.... Parenthood is the hardest job there is, and there's no reliable set of instructions!

      Delete
  2. While it is great to be protected by vaccination against very dangerous deceases, it is unclear what is the limit for immunization shots. Is it the more the better? Usually it is not the case when it comes to health. I wish the discussion would be not about does some vaccine causes autism, but about more flexible approach to whole issue. BTW, the nasty flu which was caught by many this year, didn't spare many of the people I know who had the immunization shot. When the most promoted and frequent vaccination is so ineffective, it is hard for the public to take the rest seriously.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So true! Even with something like the measles/mumps/rubella shot, which has been around a long time and has a good track record, all it takes is one bad batch not caught by the quality-control lab to wreak inestimable damage. If this recent "supplement scandal" shows us anything, it's that purveyors of medicaments don't have enough professionalism to provide what they promise, and the FDA doesn't give a damn. The latter is NOT doing its job for the American people -- it's a tool of Big Food and Big Pharma.

      Delete