Nothing beats the anti-vaccine guru that was on television yesterday
"Children have the right to be exposed to diseases".
Instead of "diseases" you can just mentally insert anything you like to get a sense of the crazy.
"Children have a right to be exposed to gun violence"
"Children have a right to be exposed to racism"
"Children have a right to be exposed to war"
"Children have a right to be exposed to radiation"
"Children have a right to be exposed to the vacuum of space"
This is the level of stupid you're fighting against.
So we have to expose children to diseases so their body has some experience with coping with them.....alright, let's grant that premise. We don't want to start out with super ebola, right? We want something a bit less horrible as a starting point. In fact, if we could intentionally get some weak ass disease and maybe make it even less effective somehow that'd just be ideal, wouldn't it?
But what do we call our "wuss disease that we've intentionally crippled before exposing children to with the intention of training their immune system to handle worse versions of the disease"?
Wait, this reminds me of something....could it be we're reinventing the vaccine here?
Logic and scientific thought aren't exactly the strong point for the anti-vaccination crowd. Arguments based on reality aren't likely to work.
Honestly, I'd expect just about the only thing to turn most of them around to be a massive outbreak of a disease, and the ensuing piles of corpses. I don't believe that they should be coddled until such a thing happens, no matter how much mandated vaccinations hurt their feelings. Hurt feelings are much better than deaths as a result of policy.
Logic and scientific thought aren't exactly the strong point for the anti-vaccination crowd. Arguments based on reality aren't likely to work.
Honestly, I'd expect just about the only thing to turn most of them around to be a massive outbreak of a disease, and the ensuing piles of corpses. I don't believe that they should be coddled until such a thing happens, no matter how much mandated vaccinations hurt their feelings. Hurt feelings are much better than deaths as a result of policy.
Honestly, I already see some progress being made by watching my social media. A year ago, an anti-vaccination mother would have gotten a sympathetic and interested hearing among groups of moms. Today, I'm seeing post after pst about how they should keep their disease children away from others.
This is primarily a phenomenon of upper middle class mothers who have embraced one of the countless parenting fads. There are hardcore true believers, but I think a lot of the trendier moms who glommed onto this are not going to want to be the pariahs at their book clubs.
There's some evidence that over sanitizing could produce stronger versions of some viruses and bacteria but that doesn't really apply to people's immune systems
there's also some evidence that overuse of antibiotics fucks up your body's natural flora and throws your immune system out of whack but thats also different.
They're combining a few unrelated but similar sounding ideas into a new completely nonsensical one.
Experiencing one makes it significantly more likely that a child will experience more of them, especially when sick. You can tell a parent that they aren't harmful all you want. No one wants their child to have a seizure. This is a place where rational fear isn't really the best way to judge imo if you are trying to understand motivation. That doesn't excuse not vaccinating, of course, its just unfair to say that the fear has no merit imo. That is really the point I have been trying to make for a lot of this thread. All children should be vaccinated, but the parents who choose not to vaccinate or who choose to delay are not crazy religious fundamentalists foaming at the mouth or something for the most part. They are concerned parents who want what is best for their children and who don't really know who to trust when they hear conflicting things, and while doctors should be viewed as authorities on these subjects, if doctors aren't empathetic and kind to their patients and do things like saying that you must have your child cry it out then I think it is understandable why parents would not listen to them.
Parents want what is best for their children. Parents do not know what is best for their children. When they are presented with conflicting information, many parents trust their own judgement over the judgement of educated professionals. That is a problem.
I disagree with you. Their fear does not have any merit because it is a fear that results from nonsense, and is not quashed by reason. A concerned silly goose is still a silly goose. There is no reason to engage in silly goose apologetics.
There is no good reason to not get one's child vaccinated.
If you know that some percentage of the things your doctor will tell you are wrong, then how can you know which are the things he is right about? This is the problem with doctors making proclamations about things like sleep methods as if they are facts in the same way that "you should get your child vaccinated" is a fact. I have a friend who was literally told by her doctor that if she ever lets her son come into her bed for a nap then he will never sleep well for the rest of her life. That is clearly absurd, but she actually listened and has lamented the fact that she never got to have her son nap on her when he was little. She later realized this advice was absurd, and has subsequently come to doubt her pediatrician. My son was just sick and our doctor said to only give advil if he seems upset, not just because he has a mild fever. My wife told the friend this and she replied that she just gives advil when she thinks her son needs it and wouldn't listen to a doctor on that because they don't really know. This is precisely the problem that I think needs to be addressed.
You problem in both those situations is a single doctor getting something wrong. However people using that to justify ignoring doctors whenever they don't like what the doctor says or opting to ignore huge swaths of science achieves nothing useful.
If you don't follow a doctor's orders because you know they're objectively wrong about something that's one thing. If you don't follow a doctor's orders because you don't like their answer then there was never any appeasing you in the first place.
How is a layperson supposed to know? They don't, so they trust the doctor. Doctor's advice is later proven to be wrong, so then what? Seems like the only answer is to be a smart person before you even have kids. Implement mandatory 6 month classes and standardized testing before you get your breeding license. Of course it would be managed at the state level, and then watch conservatives block gays and minorities from having children.
Seriously, how is someone who is smart enough to know that they do not know supposed to make good parenting decisions? They have to follow their instinct. And quacks, scam artist, and snake oil salesmen are great at tricking peoples instinct. How do you feasibly increase the number of needed vaccinations without breaking down doors, and charging in with guns and needles? I truly do not know.
Experiencing one makes it significantly more likely that a child will experience more of them, especially when sick. You can tell a parent that they aren't harmful all you want. No one wants their child to have a seizure. This is a place where rational fear isn't really the best way to judge imo if you are trying to understand motivation. That doesn't excuse not vaccinating, of course, its just unfair to say that the fear has no merit imo. That is really the point I have been trying to make for a lot of this thread. All children should be vaccinated, but the parents who choose not to vaccinate or who choose to delay are not crazy religious fundamentalists foaming at the mouth or something for the most part. They are concerned parents who want what is best for their children and who don't really know who to trust when they hear conflicting things, and while doctors should be viewed as authorities on these subjects, if doctors aren't empathetic and kind to their patients and do things like saying that you must have your child cry it out then I think it is understandable why parents would not listen to them.
Parents want what is best for their children. Parents do not know what is best for their children. When they are presented with conflicting information, many parents trust their own judgement over the judgement of educated professionals. That is a problem.
I disagree with you. Their fear does not have any merit because it is a fear that results from nonsense, and is not quashed by reason. A concerned silly goose is still a silly goose. There is no reason to engage in silly goose apologetics.
There is no good reason to not get one's child vaccinated.
If you know that some percentage of the things your doctor will tell you are wrong, then how can you know which are the things he is right about? This is the problem with doctors making proclamations about things like sleep methods as if they are facts in the same way that "you should get your child vaccinated" is a fact. I have a friend who was literally told by her doctor that if she ever lets her son come into her bed for a nap then he will never sleep well for the rest of her life. That is clearly absurd, but she actually listened and has lamented the fact that she never got to have her son nap on her when he was little. She later realized this advice was absurd, and has subsequently come to doubt her pediatrician. My son was just sick and our doctor said to only give advil if he seems upset, not just because he has a mild fever. My wife told the friend this and she replied that she just gives advil when she thinks her son needs it and wouldn't listen to a doctor on that because they don't really know. This is precisely the problem that I think needs to be addressed.
You problem in both those situations is a single doctor getting something wrong. However people using that to justify ignoring doctors whenever they don't like what the doctor says or opting to ignore huge swaths of science achieves nothing useful.
If you don't follow a doctor's orders because you know they're objectively wrong about something that's one thing. If you don't follow a doctor's orders because you don't like their answer then there was never any appeasing you in the first place.
How is a layperson supposed to know? They don't, so they trust the doctor. Doctor's advice is later proven to be wrong, so then what?
Sometimes doctors are wrong. Or it's a subject that doesn't have much evidence supporting one way or another is best in all cases. Doctors are fallible. It's okay to go get a second opinion.
Seems like the only answer is to be a smart person before you even have kids. Implement mandatory 6 month classes and standardized testing before you get your breeding license. Of course it would be managed at the state level, and then watch conservatives block gays and minorities from having children.
Yes that is indeed a terrible idea that is terrible.
Kids have a right to be exposed to diseases. So I have a plan!
Kids are going to be exposed, but we want to make sure nobody gets seriously ill. So instead we will expose the kids to a weakened or even dead form of the disease. That way they can build immunity without getting deathly ill.
Now we just need to make sure those kids get exposed at an early age in a safe way. Maybe we could just administer it in the form of a shot or something
I think part of it, maybe it would be nice to just sort of have the wherewithal to spot things that are kinda obviously not going to be well backed up and are outside a doctor's field, as opposed to things that are testable bits of the science of medicine.
Like, skfm's various sources of parenting advice.
Notice how most of the terrible advice related largely to long term behavioral issues?
Don't sleep with your kids and instantly response respond to their cries cause then they won't sleep well every. Hey, that would require a serious longitudinal study of behavioral health, with a huge group of carefully monitored patients, because controls are nearly impossible.
Seems like it isn't medical science.
Seems like it is next to impossible to confirm.
Seems like it should be strongly questioned if not dismissed out of hand.
Maybe, for a lot of things this rubric may be applicable by lay people, at least enough for them to know when to question doctors.
If you think something your doc is saying is fishy, ask them to explain and provide proof in a way you can understand. Keep your brain on when they're talking to you.
If they are too busy to explain find another doc. No reason to give insurance reimbursements to a person that has too many patients to handle.
"Keep your brain on" is good advice for this crowd, but for the average person, it's not good enough. What about teen mothers? They may barely be able to pass world history, how are they gonna suss out the good from the bad from what their doc tells them? They have to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have, and that means going on instinct sometimes. It's easy to trick people. "Keep your brain on" could concievably be flipped around and said by some anti-vaxer huckster trying to sell a book.
The discussion here should be about how you get enough people to vaccinate to get herd immunity, not pointing and laughing at how dumb/irresponsible/evil anti-vaxers are. Note this last part is not directed at you, it's a comment on the overall tone this thread takes sometimes.
The discussion here should be about how you get enough people to vaccinate to get herd immunity, not pointing and laughing at how dumb/irresponsible/evil anti-vaxers are. Note this last part is not directed at you, it's a comment on the overall tone this thread takes sometimes.
The problem is we had done that and then something changed. Mocking and deriding the thing behind that change that has such obvious and tragic consequences is a pretty natural response.
there's also some evidence that overuse of antibiotics fucks up your body's natural flora and throws your immune system out of whack but thats also different.
Interestingly (and grossly) it's being found that introducing 'normal' healthy flora into a person can be more effective than antibiotics for certain infections.
The shitty part is that the idea of not overmedicating/sanitizing yourself is legit. People scrambling for antibiotics for everything is half the reason we have diseases getting immunity to then. Same with the obsessive hand washing. After a certain point all you're doing is fucking up your own immune system and making it so that when you do get sick it floors you even harder. After all, you build immunity via exposure (which is the entire god damn point of vaccines). But that doesn't mean you don't get fucking vaccinated or avoid medicine entirely. That's just god damn crazy. I generally avoid meds for most things but you can bet your ass I still go see a doc if something serious is going on. Get a cold? Meh, whatever. Get a sinus infection that's making me want to take a power drill to my face? Yeah, it's clinic time.
Also, this thread has reminded me to check if I'm due for a tetanus booster. >_>
If you think something your doc is saying is fishy, ask them to explain and provide proof in a way you can understand. Keep your brain on when they're talking to you.
If they are too busy to explain find another doc. No reason to give insurance reimbursements to a person that has too many patients to handle.
"Keep your brain on" is good advice for this crowd, but for the average person, it's not good enough. What about teen mothers? They may barely be able to pass world history, how are they gonna suss out the good from the bad from what their doc tells them? They have to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have, and that means going on instinct sometimes. It's easy to trick people. "Keep your brain on" could concievably be flipped around and said by some anti-vaxer huckster trying to sell a book.
The discussion here should be about how you get enough people to vaccinate to get herd immunity, not pointing and laughing at how dumb/irresponsible/evil anti-vaxers are. Note this last part is not directed at you, it's a comment on the overall tone this thread takes sometimes.
The thing is the issue isn't teen moms. It's not the unwashed masses.
Some parents forgo shots altogether. Others split vaccine doses or stretch out their timeline, worried about somehow overwhelming their children’s immune system. Kelly McMenimen, a Lagunitas parent, said she “meditated on it a lot” before deciding not to vaccinate her son Tobias, 8, against even “deadly or deforming diseases.” She said she did not want “so many toxins” entering the slender body of a bright-eyed boy who loves math and geography.
Tobias has endured chickenpox and whooping cough, though Ms. McMenimen said the latter seemed more like a common cold. She considered a tetanus shot after he cut himself on a wire fence but decided against it: “He has such a strong immune system.”
San Geronimo, where Lagunitas Elementary is located has a median home price of $585k. Other anti-vaxx parents interviewed, were from such trail-park communities as Palm Springs and Beverly Hills. This isn't your run of the mill ignorance, it is willful.
If you think something your doc is saying is fishy, ask them to explain and provide proof in a way you can understand. Keep your brain on when they're talking to you.
If they are too busy to explain find another doc. No reason to give insurance reimbursements to a person that has too many patients to handle.
"Keep your brain on" is good advice for this crowd, but for the average person, it's not good enough. What about teen mothers? They may barely be able to pass world history, how are they gonna suss out the good from the bad from what their doc tells them? They have to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have, and that means going on instinct sometimes. It's easy to trick people. "Keep your brain on" could concievably be flipped around and said by some anti-vaxer huckster trying to sell a book.
The discussion here should be about how you get enough people to vaccinate to get herd immunity, not pointing and laughing at how dumb/irresponsible/evil anti-vaxers are. Note this last part is not directed at you, it's a comment on the overall tone this thread takes sometimes.
What do you suggest?
Let's agree that pointing and laughing at objectively dumb people is not productive. Ok. Then what? If a teenage mother, for example, is so obstinately stupid that she can not effectively employ birth control, or achieve a basic level of education, what are we to do? The standard method for encouraging individuals to vaccinate their children is based on spreading information through education, and the person in your example is fundamentally anti-education.
How do we inform people who refuse to be informed? Short of rounding them all up and forcing vaccinations upon the braying masses, there seems to be no way to rationally convince irrational people to vaccinate their children.
When you are presented with, "Children have the right to be exposed to diseases", how do you proceed? My response is to mock the person, since there is obviously no foothold for reason in their world view.
Kids have a right to be exposed to diseases. So I have a plan!
Kids are going to be exposed, but we want to make sure nobody gets seriously ill. So instead we will expose the kids to a weakened or even dead form of the disease. That way they can build immunity without getting deathly ill.
Now we just need to make sure those kids get exposed at an early age in a safe way. Maybe we could just administer it in the form of a shot or something
I dunno man. Once, I had a migraine, and the doctor seeing me didn't think it was a migraine.
I think mocking is actually the correct response. Not because it will change their minds, because NOTHING will change their minds.
You mock it on a broad national scale. HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THESE IDIOTS!, because that let's everyone know that these people are to be derided and not take seriously. Treat them like 'Truthers' or birthers, or people who say we didn't land on the moon.
The shitty part is that the idea of not overmedicating/sanitizing yourself is legit. People scrambling for antibiotics for everything is half the reason we have diseases getting immunity to then. Same with the obsessive hand washing. After a certain point all you're doing is fucking up your own immune system and making it so that when you do get sick it floors you even harder. After all, you build immunity via exposure (which is the entire god damn point of vaccines). But that doesn't mean you don't get fucking vaccinated or avoid medicine entirely. That's just god damn crazy. I generally avoid meds for most things but you can bet your ass I still go see a doc if something serious is going on. Get a cold? Meh, whatever. Get a sinus infection that's making me want to take a power drill to my face? Yeah, it's clinic time.
Also, this thread has reminded me to check if I'm due for a tetanus booster. >_>
The shitty part is that the idea of not overmedicating/sanitizing yourself is legit. People scrambling for antibiotics for everything is half the reason we have diseases getting immunity to then. Same with the obsessive hand washing. After a certain point all you're doing is fucking up your own immune system and making it so that when you do get sick it floors you even harder. After all, you build immunity via exposure (which is the entire god damn point of vaccines). But that doesn't mean you don't get fucking vaccinated or avoid medicine entirely. That's just god damn crazy. I generally avoid meds for most things but you can bet your ass I still go see a doc if something serious is going on. Get a cold? Meh, whatever. Get a sinus infection that's making me want to take a power drill to my face? Yeah, it's clinic time.
Also, this thread has reminded me to check if I'm due for a tetanus booster. >_>
So for the record, it's not irrational fear of disease that's driving antibiotic resistant bacteria, it's greed.
From what I understand with the cattle thing it's not even the fighting off of pathogens to keep them healthy that makes farmers want them on the antibiotics. No, it's because cattle kept on antibiotics put on weight faster and thus can be sold for more.
I think mocking is actually the correct response. Not because it will change their minds, because NOTHING will change their minds.
You mock it on a broad national scale. HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THESE IDIOTS!, because that let's everyone know that these people are to be derided and not take seriously. Treat them like 'Truthers' or birthers, or people who say we didn't land on the moon.
To be honest, the final question to pose to someone who otherwise refuses to listen really is "So autism is a fate worse than death?" Because those are pretty much the root extreme results proposed, even though the former is not actually a possibility.
To be honest, the final question to pose to someone who otherwise refuses to listen really is "So autism is a fate worse than death?" Because those are pretty much the root extreme results proposed, even though the former is not actually a possibility.
Huh. New way to frame this.
Random google says 1/68 US children have something on the autism spectrum. That's about a 1.5% incidence rate.
So a 1.5% chance at some form of autism wagered against death, disability or just a whole lot of pain and suffering.
Hmm, needs some work and doubtful it'd be persuasive, just makes them look like some exceptional assholes.
To be honest, the final question to pose to someone who otherwise refuses to listen really is "So autism is a fate worse than death?" Because those are pretty much the root extreme results proposed, even though the former is not actually a possibility.
Huh. New way to frame this.
Random google says 1/68 US children have something on the autism spectrum. That's about a 1.5% incidence rate.
So a 1.5% chance at some form of autism wagered against death, disability or just a whole lot of pain and suffering.
Hmm, needs some work and doubtful it'd be persuasive, just makes them look like some exceptional assholes.
It gets a little more interesting when you consider not all autism cases are caused by the same source, so you'd have to burrow down and determine your hypothetical rate caused by vaccine exposure which would shift the odds a bit closer still.
I dislike that because it validates the idea that vaccines cause autism.
The actual question is "So your pride is more important than your child's life?"
True enough. My point was more about how even if their bullshit fairyland were true I'm not sure I wouldn't trade 1.5% chance at some spectrum placement for the benefits of vaccination.
Out of morbid curiousity, how the fuck do the anti-vaxxers address the massive difference in genders wrt Autism?
To be honest, the final question to pose to someone who otherwise refuses to listen really is "So autism is a fate worse than death?" Because those are pretty much the root extreme results proposed, even though the former is not actually a possibility.
Huh. New way to frame this.
Random google says 1/68 US children have something on the autism spectrum. That's about a 1.5% incidence rate.
So a 1.5% chance at some form of autism wagered against death, disability or just a whole lot of pain and suffering.
Hmm, needs some work and doubtful it'd be persuasive, just makes them look like some exceptional assholes.
It gets a little more interesting when you consider not all autism cases are caused by the same source, so you'd have to burrow down and determine your hypothetical rate caused by vaccine exposure which would shift the odds a bit closer still.
Like I said it read like a pop psychology fad. First piece of advice a responsible doctor should give is to tell his patients not to listen to random strangers on the internet/media about medical matters. Second piece would be should be don't follow pop psychology fads.
The fact that he was adamant against it is a pretty big warning sign. Wouldn't it have been better to ask why he was so against it? After all one person in that conversation had experience with hundreds of children and a medical degree specializing in them, the other was a couple of complete rookie newbies.
As for the co-sleeping... you are aware that even suggesting that it can be made sort of safe opens a doctor up to a malpractice suit if shit goes wrong right? The only completely safe advice(for child and doctor) is don't. Even opening the door with "occasionally, if you do it this way, even though I don't recommend it " leaves you open to malpractice.
And this is why it's so frustrating to talk with doctors. There is no completely safe advice, and I don't know any doctor who has raised a dozen children, never mind hundreds. None of them are doing 15yr long studies of kids to see if attachment parenting is better than "the regular way", whatever the fuck that is. They don't know how to raise your kids... they barely know how to treat the sniffles. Just in the last few years we've changed the instructions for giving cough medicine and pain reliever to almost completely different ones from what we were told by every doctor 13 years ago. Were they all completely wrong back then? Apparently not, because my kids are fine with us doing things the old way.
Attachment parenting is not pop psychology, and doctors pretty much never know best when it comes to parenting questions, as opposed to medical ones, because they don't know your kids or the literature.
As if you could ever have a conversation with your doctor that did more than scratch the surface of a problem anyway. When was the last time you talked with one for longer than 15 minutes at a stretch?
my last dr appt! and the one before that.
man I hate anecdotal doctor hate, though I understand not everyone has had good experiences with them.
I mean I get they aren't the place to get all parental advice but saying they only scratch the surface of problems is p weird to me.
Outside of medical issues? Seems normal.
And I guess you can call it anecdotes, but Belasco has a chronic illness and I've been taking the kids to the doctor for 20 years now... just back-of-the-envelope, I'm gonna say I've been to see a doctor or been in a hospital talking with a doctor maybe 550-600 times since the mid 90s. Only a handful of those lasted longer than 15 minutes in a single session. Most of them I can remember! They were related to surgery or initial diagnoses, or actual birth, or end-of-life for other family members. None of the routine (i.e. illness) visits were.
It's good that you have a doctor who will sit around for a half an hour or whatever talking about your non-medical problems though!
If you think something your doc is saying is fishy, ask them to explain and provide proof in a way you can understand. Keep your brain on when they're talking to you.
If they are too busy to explain find another doc. No reason to give insurance reimbursements to a person that has too many patients to handle.
"Keep your brain on" is good advice for this crowd, but for the average person, it's not good enough. What about teen mothers? They may barely be able to pass world history, how are they gonna suss out the good from the bad from what their doc tells them? They have to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have, and that means going on instinct sometimes. It's easy to trick people. "Keep your brain on" could concievably be flipped around and said by some anti-vaxer huckster trying to sell a book.
The discussion here should be about how you get enough people to vaccinate to get herd immunity, not pointing and laughing at how dumb/irresponsible/evil anti-vaxers are. Note this last part is not directed at you, it's a comment on the overall tone this thread takes sometimes.
What do you suggest?
Let's agree that pointing and laughing at objectively dumb people is not productive. Ok. Then what? If a teenage mother, for example, is so obstinately stupid that she can not effectively employ birth control, or achieve a basic level of education, what are we to do? The standard method for encouraging individuals to vaccinate their children is based on spreading information through education, and the person in your example is fundamentally anti-education.
How do we inform people who refuse to be informed? Short of rounding them all up and forcing vaccinations upon the braying masses, there seems to be no way to rationally convince irrational people to vaccinate their children.
When you are presented with, "Children have the right to be exposed to diseases", how do you proceed? My response is to mock the person, since there is obviously no foothold for reason in their world view.
I honestly don't have a suggestion. I was hoping someone here might know of some study or method or something that could be used to convince people. They can't be reasoned with, OK. Can they be convinced by some other method? What authority would they trust? Their church? It sometimes seems like the anti-vax "movement" won't die until a bunch of kids die. I can't express how sad and angry that makes me feel.
As for mocking them: I don't really care that they are being mocked. I loves me some schadenfreude as much as the next guy, and it's an entirely appropriate response to the emotions this issue brings up. What bothers me is the feeling (and this is probably just me) that making fun of them is implicitly giving up on helping the people who need it most.
I'm gonna say I've been to see a doctor or been in a hospital talking with a doctor maybe 550-600 times since the mid 90s.
Holy shit, dude.
You must be swimming in free steak knives.
3 kids and a wife with FM, that shit adds up. Two visits a month is the default, and that's just for immediate family. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Sometimes a week in the hospital, sometimes a few months with no visits at all!
The shitty part is that the idea of not overmedicating/sanitizing yourself is legit. People scrambling for antibiotics for everything is half the reason we have diseases getting immunity to then. Same with the obsessive hand washing. After a certain point all you're doing is fucking up your own immune system and making it so that when you do get sick it floors you even harder. After all, you build immunity via exposure (which is the entire god damn point of vaccines). But that doesn't mean you don't get fucking vaccinated or avoid medicine entirely. That's just god damn crazy. I generally avoid meds for most things but you can bet your ass I still go see a doc if something serious is going on. Get a cold? Meh, whatever. Get a sinus infection that's making me want to take a power drill to my face? Yeah, it's clinic time.
Also, this thread has reminded me to check if I'm due for a tetanus booster. >_>
So for the record, it's not irrational fear of disease that's driving antibiotic resistant bacteria, it's greed.
Forgot about the cattle thing. Both things play into it really. Shoving that shit into our food supply and people overdoing it and/or not finishing their prescriptions is not doing anyone any favors.
I think mocking is actually the correct response. Not because it will change their minds, because NOTHING will change their minds.
You mock it on a broad national scale. HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THESE IDIOTS!, because that let's everyone know that these people are to be derided and not take seriously. Treat them like 'Truthers' or birthers, or people who say we didn't land on the moon.
Making not vaccinating into something worthy of public shaming, essentially making it a social tabboo can work wonders. A lot of things in society basically work like that. As something becomes more or less accepted how much shame is associated with it alters as well. As more outbreaks happen anti-vaccers are going to come under that sort of social fire and the movement should lose steam. Prior to this nobody really cared about homeopaths because the only people they hurt were themselves. Start affecting other peoples kids, though, and you'd better buckle the fuck up because shit is about to get real.
Vaccines don't cause autism. The idea that it does is bullshit. And even if it did(which it doesn't), I'm glad to be autistic instead of dying of fucking whooping cough or some shit.
I swear, if someone ever tries their anti-vax bs with me, I'm going to argue that based on when my condition began to express itself and when I was vaccinated, the correlation is clear; Autism causes vaccinations.
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
- John Stuart Mill
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I dislike that because it validates the idea that vaccines cause autism.
The actual question is "So your pride is more important than your child's life?"
True enough. My point was more about how even if their bullshit fairyland were true I'm not sure I wouldn't trade 1.5% chance at some spectrum placement for the benefits of vaccination.
Out of morbid curiousity, how the fuck do the anti-vaxxers address the massive difference in genders wrt Autism?
I don't exactly understand what this is asking?
Gender differences are really common when it comes to diseases, and not in predictable ways. Estrogen causes strokes, but it also has a protective effect when you do have a stroke, for example. And things that cause stroke can interact differently based on the circulating levels.
Like I said it read like a pop psychology fad. First piece of advice a responsible doctor should give is to tell his patients not to listen to random strangers on the internet/media about medical matters. Second piece would be should be don't follow pop psychology fads.
The fact that he was adamant against it is a pretty big warning sign. Wouldn't it have been better to ask why he was so against it? After all one person in that conversation had experience with hundreds of children and a medical degree specializing in them, the other was a couple of complete rookie newbies.
As for the co-sleeping... you are aware that even suggesting that it can be made sort of safe opens a doctor up to a malpractice suit if shit goes wrong right? The only completely safe advice(for child and doctor) is don't. Even opening the door with "occasionally, if you do it this way, even though I don't recommend it " leaves you open to malpractice.
And this is why it's so frustrating to talk with doctors. There is no completely safe advice, and I don't know any doctor who has raised a dozen children, never mind hundreds. None of them are doing 15yr long studies of kids to see if attachment parenting is better than "the regular way", whatever the fuck that is. They don't know how to raise your kids... they barely know how to treat the sniffles. Just in the last few years we've changed the instructions for giving cough medicine and pain reliever to almost completely different ones from what we were told by every doctor 13 years ago. Were they all completely wrong back then? Apparently not, because my kids are fine with us doing things the old way.
Attachment parenting is not pop psychology, and doctors pretty much never know best when it comes to parenting questions, as opposed to medical ones, because they don't know your kids or the literature.
As if you could ever have a conversation with your doctor that did more than scratch the surface of a problem anyway. When was the last time you talked with one for longer than 15 minutes at a stretch?
my last dr appt! and the one before that.
man I hate anecdotal doctor hate, though I understand not everyone has had good experiences with them.
I mean I get they aren't the place to get all parental advice but saying they only scratch the surface of problems is p weird to me.
Outside of medical issues? Seems normal.
And I guess you can call it anecdotes, but Belasco has a chronic illness and I've been taking the kids to the doctor for 20 years now... just back-of-the-envelope, I'm gonna say I've been to see a doctor or been in a hospital talking with a doctor maybe 550-600 times since the mid 90s. Only a handful of those lasted longer than 15 minutes in a single session. Most of them I can remember! They were related to surgery or initial diagnoses, or actual birth, or end-of-life for other family members. None of the routine (i.e. illness) visits were.
It's good that you have a doctor who will sit around for a half an hour or whatever talking about your non-medical problems though!
No we talked about my health the whole time...not sure where you're getting that last part. Anyway I acknowledge the shortage of Doctor availability.
I dislike that because it validates the idea that vaccines cause autism.
The actual question is "So your pride is more important than your child's life?"
True enough. My point was more about how even if their bullshit fairyland were true I'm not sure I wouldn't trade 1.5% chance at some spectrum placement for the benefits of vaccination.
Out of morbid curiousity, how the fuck do the anti-vaxxers address the massive difference in genders wrt Autism?
I don't exactly understand what this is asking?
Gender differences are really common when it comes to diseases, and not in predictable ways. Estrogen causes strokes, but it also has a protective effect when you do have a stroke, for example. And things that cause stroke can interact differently based on the circulating levels.
More along the lines of "If vaccines cause autism, explain why there's a gender discrepancy in who they cause autism in."
If you think something your doc is saying is fishy, ask them to explain and provide proof in a way you can understand. Keep your brain on when they're talking to you.
If they are too busy to explain find another doc. No reason to give insurance reimbursements to a person that has too many patients to handle.
"Keep your brain on" is good advice for this crowd, but for the average person, it's not good enough. What about teen mothers? They may barely be able to pass world history, how are they gonna suss out the good from the bad from what their doc tells them? They have to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have, and that means going on instinct sometimes. It's easy to trick people. "Keep your brain on" could concievably be flipped around and said by some anti-vaxer huckster trying to sell a book.
The discussion here should be about how you get enough people to vaccinate to get herd immunity, not pointing and laughing at how dumb/irresponsible/evil anti-vaxers are. Note this last part is not directed at you, it's a comment on the overall tone this thread takes sometimes.
What do you suggest?
Let's agree that pointing and laughing at objectively dumb people is not productive. Ok. Then what? If a teenage mother, for example, is so obstinately stupid that she can not effectively employ birth control, or achieve a basic level of education, what are we to do? The standard method for encouraging individuals to vaccinate their children is based on spreading information through education, and the person in your example is fundamentally anti-education.
How do we inform people who refuse to be informed? Short of rounding them all up and forcing vaccinations upon the braying masses, there seems to be no way to rationally convince irrational people to vaccinate their children.
When you are presented with, "Children have the right to be exposed to diseases", how do you proceed? My response is to mock the person, since there is obviously no foothold for reason in their world view.
I honestly don't have a suggestion. I was hoping someone here might know of some study or method or something that could be used to convince people. They can't be reasoned with, OK. Can they be convinced by some other method? What authority would they trust? Their church? It sometimes seems like the anti-vax "movement" won't die until a bunch of kids die. I can't express how sad and angry that makes me feel.
As for mocking them: I don't really care that they are being mocked. I loves me some schadenfreude as much as the next guy, and it's an entirely appropriate response to the emotions this issue brings up. What bothers me is the feeling (and this is probably just me) that making fun of them is implicitly giving up on helping the people who need it most.
The anti-vax ,movement (and other conspiracy theories) depends on the fact that people like feeling smarter than everyone else. They like feeling that they're privy to knowledge that only they are smart enough to have.
9/11 Truthers like feeling that only they have the special knowledge that reveals the Real Facts of the Matter. Fox News viewers like thinking that only they have access to the Real News. Anti-vaxxers like feeling that they, with their good ol' American common sense, are smarter than the stupid doctors who spent 8 years in college.
It kind of has to do with parents wanting what's best for their child, but that's probably a very small part of it for most of these people. A rational person hears that 99% of doctors agree on a specific treatment, and they decide they should ignore the 1%. But the sort of person likely to be an anti-vaxxer is going to side with the 1%. And it's not because they think the 1% make a good point despite being in the minority. It's specifically because the 1% is in the minority that the anti-vaxxers side with them. Because it makes them feel smarter than all those fancy-pants intellectual elitist doctors and their fancy-pants educations.
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Instead of "diseases" you can just mentally insert anything you like to get a sense of the crazy.
"Children have a right to be exposed to gun violence"
"Children have a right to be exposed to racism"
"Children have a right to be exposed to war"
"Children have a right to be exposed to radiation"
"Children have a right to be exposed to the vacuum of space"
This is the level of stupid you're fighting against.
But what do we call our "wuss disease that we've intentionally crippled before exposing children to with the intention of training their immune system to handle worse versions of the disease"?
Wait, this reminds me of something....could it be we're reinventing the vaccine here?
GRAH!
Honestly, I'd expect just about the only thing to turn most of them around to be a massive outbreak of a disease, and the ensuing piles of corpses. I don't believe that they should be coddled until such a thing happens, no matter how much mandated vaccinations hurt their feelings. Hurt feelings are much better than deaths as a result of policy.
Honestly, I already see some progress being made by watching my social media. A year ago, an anti-vaccination mother would have gotten a sympathetic and interested hearing among groups of moms. Today, I'm seeing post after pst about how they should keep their disease children away from others.
This is primarily a phenomenon of upper middle class mothers who have embraced one of the countless parenting fads. There are hardcore true believers, but I think a lot of the trendier moms who glommed onto this are not going to want to be the pariahs at their book clubs.
there's also some evidence that overuse of antibiotics fucks up your body's natural flora and throws your immune system out of whack but thats also different.
They're combining a few unrelated but similar sounding ideas into a new completely nonsensical one.
How is a layperson supposed to know? They don't, so they trust the doctor. Doctor's advice is later proven to be wrong, so then what? Seems like the only answer is to be a smart person before you even have kids. Implement mandatory 6 month classes and standardized testing before you get your breeding license. Of course it would be managed at the state level, and then watch conservatives block gays and minorities from having children.
Seriously, how is someone who is smart enough to know that they do not know supposed to make good parenting decisions? They have to follow their instinct. And quacks, scam artist, and snake oil salesmen are great at tricking peoples instinct. How do you feasibly increase the number of needed vaccinations without breaking down doors, and charging in with guns and needles? I truly do not know.
Except for those with a book to sell who financially benefit while causing children to get sick.
Sometimes doctors are wrong. Or it's a subject that doesn't have much evidence supporting one way or another is best in all cases. Doctors are fallible. It's okay to go get a second opinion.
Yes that is indeed a terrible idea that is terrible.
Kids are going to be exposed, but we want to make sure nobody gets seriously ill. So instead we will expose the kids to a weakened or even dead form of the disease. That way they can build immunity without getting deathly ill.
Now we just need to make sure those kids get exposed at an early age in a safe way. Maybe we could just administer it in the form of a shot or something
Like, skfm's various sources of parenting advice.
Notice how most of the terrible advice related largely to long term behavioral issues?
Don't sleep with your kids and instantly response respond to their cries cause then they won't sleep well every. Hey, that would require a serious longitudinal study of behavioral health, with a huge group of carefully monitored patients, because controls are nearly impossible.
Seems like it isn't medical science.
Seems like it is next to impossible to confirm.
Seems like it should be strongly questioned if not dismissed out of hand.
Maybe, for a lot of things this rubric may be applicable by lay people, at least enough for them to know when to question doctors.
"Keep your brain on" is good advice for this crowd, but for the average person, it's not good enough. What about teen mothers? They may barely be able to pass world history, how are they gonna suss out the good from the bad from what their doc tells them? They have to make the best decisions they can with the knowledge they have, and that means going on instinct sometimes. It's easy to trick people. "Keep your brain on" could concievably be flipped around and said by some anti-vaxer huckster trying to sell a book.
The discussion here should be about how you get enough people to vaccinate to get herd immunity, not pointing and laughing at how dumb/irresponsible/evil anti-vaxers are. Note this last part is not directed at you, it's a comment on the overall tone this thread takes sometimes.
The problem is we had done that and then something changed. Mocking and deriding the thing behind that change that has such obvious and tragic consequences is a pretty natural response.
Interestingly (and grossly) it's being found that introducing 'normal' healthy flora into a person can be more effective than antibiotics for certain infections.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_bacteriotherapy
Also cheaper.
Also, this thread has reminded me to check if I'm due for a tetanus booster. >_>
The thing is the issue isn't teen moms. It's not the unwashed masses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/us/vaccine-critics-turn-defensive-over-measles.html?_r=0
Here's A GREAT quote
San Geronimo, where Lagunitas Elementary is located has a median home price of $585k. Other anti-vaxx parents interviewed, were from such trail-park communities as Palm Springs and Beverly Hills. This isn't your run of the mill ignorance, it is willful.
What do you suggest?
Let's agree that pointing and laughing at objectively dumb people is not productive. Ok. Then what? If a teenage mother, for example, is so obstinately stupid that she can not effectively employ birth control, or achieve a basic level of education, what are we to do? The standard method for encouraging individuals to vaccinate their children is based on spreading information through education, and the person in your example is fundamentally anti-education.
How do we inform people who refuse to be informed? Short of rounding them all up and forcing vaccinations upon the braying masses, there seems to be no way to rationally convince irrational people to vaccinate their children.
When you are presented with, "Children have the right to be exposed to diseases", how do you proceed? My response is to mock the person, since there is obviously no foothold for reason in their world view.
I dunno man. Once, I had a migraine, and the doctor seeing me didn't think it was a migraine.
Should prolly go with okinawan coral calcium.
You mock it on a broad national scale. HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THESE IDIOTS!, because that let's everyone know that these people are to be derided and not take seriously. Treat them like 'Truthers' or birthers, or people who say we didn't land on the moon.
Actually, livestock receive more antibiotics than humans do. (http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/07/what-usda-doesnt-want-you-know-about-antibiotics-and-factory-farms)
So for the record, it's not irrational fear of disease that's driving antibiotic resistant bacteria, it's greed.
From what I understand with the cattle thing it's not even the fighting off of pathogens to keep them healthy that makes farmers want them on the antibiotics. No, it's because cattle kept on antibiotics put on weight faster and thus can be sold for more.
Yeah science!
To be honest, the final question to pose to someone who otherwise refuses to listen really is "So autism is a fate worse than death?" Because those are pretty much the root extreme results proposed, even though the former is not actually a possibility.
Huh. New way to frame this.
Random google says 1/68 US children have something on the autism spectrum. That's about a 1.5% incidence rate.
So a 1.5% chance at some form of autism wagered against death, disability or just a whole lot of pain and suffering.
Hmm, needs some work and doubtful it'd be persuasive, just makes them look like some exceptional assholes.
The actual question is "So your pride is more important than your child's life?"
It gets a little more interesting when you consider not all autism cases are caused by the same source, so you'd have to burrow down and determine your hypothetical rate caused by vaccine exposure which would shift the odds a bit closer still.
True enough. My point was more about how even if their bullshit fairyland were true I'm not sure I wouldn't trade 1.5% chance at some spectrum placement for the benefits of vaccination.
Out of morbid curiousity, how the fuck do the anti-vaxxers address the massive difference in genders wrt Autism?
It shifts it to zero, incidentally.
Outside of medical issues? Seems normal.
And I guess you can call it anecdotes, but Belasco has a chronic illness and I've been taking the kids to the doctor for 20 years now... just back-of-the-envelope, I'm gonna say I've been to see a doctor or been in a hospital talking with a doctor maybe 550-600 times since the mid 90s. Only a handful of those lasted longer than 15 minutes in a single session. Most of them I can remember! They were related to surgery or initial diagnoses, or actual birth, or end-of-life for other family members. None of the routine (i.e. illness) visits were.
It's good that you have a doctor who will sit around for a half an hour or whatever talking about your non-medical problems though!
Holy shit, dude.
You must be swimming in free steak knives.
I honestly don't have a suggestion. I was hoping someone here might know of some study or method or something that could be used to convince people. They can't be reasoned with, OK. Can they be convinced by some other method? What authority would they trust? Their church? It sometimes seems like the anti-vax "movement" won't die until a bunch of kids die. I can't express how sad and angry that makes me feel.
As for mocking them: I don't really care that they are being mocked. I loves me some schadenfreude as much as the next guy, and it's an entirely appropriate response to the emotions this issue brings up. What bothers me is the feeling (and this is probably just me) that making fun of them is implicitly giving up on helping the people who need it most.
3 kids and a wife with FM, that shit adds up. Two visits a month is the default, and that's just for immediate family. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Sometimes a week in the hospital, sometimes a few months with no visits at all!
Yeah... that's once every other week for 20 years!
Forgot about the cattle thing. Both things play into it really. Shoving that shit into our food supply and people overdoing it and/or not finishing their prescriptions is not doing anyone any favors.
Making not vaccinating into something worthy of public shaming, essentially making it a social tabboo can work wonders. A lot of things in society basically work like that. As something becomes more or less accepted how much shame is associated with it alters as well. As more outbreaks happen anti-vaccers are going to come under that sort of social fire and the movement should lose steam. Prior to this nobody really cared about homeopaths because the only people they hurt were themselves. Start affecting other peoples kids, though, and you'd better buckle the fuck up because shit is about to get real.
I swear, if someone ever tries their anti-vax bs with me, I'm going to argue that based on when my condition began to express itself and when I was vaccinated, the correlation is clear; Autism causes vaccinations.
- John Stuart Mill
I don't exactly understand what this is asking?
Gender differences are really common when it comes to diseases, and not in predictable ways. Estrogen causes strokes, but it also has a protective effect when you do have a stroke, for example. And things that cause stroke can interact differently based on the circulating levels.
No we talked about my health the whole time...not sure where you're getting that last part. Anyway I acknowledge the shortage of Doctor availability.
More along the lines of "If vaccines cause autism, explain why there's a gender discrepancy in who they cause autism in."
- John Stuart Mill
The anti-vax ,movement (and other conspiracy theories) depends on the fact that people like feeling smarter than everyone else. They like feeling that they're privy to knowledge that only they are smart enough to have.
9/11 Truthers like feeling that only they have the special knowledge that reveals the Real Facts of the Matter. Fox News viewers like thinking that only they have access to the Real News. Anti-vaxxers like feeling that they, with their good ol' American common sense, are smarter than the stupid doctors who spent 8 years in college.
It kind of has to do with parents wanting what's best for their child, but that's probably a very small part of it for most of these people. A rational person hears that 99% of doctors agree on a specific treatment, and they decide they should ignore the 1%. But the sort of person likely to be an anti-vaxxer is going to side with the 1%. And it's not because they think the 1% make a good point despite being in the minority. It's specifically because the 1% is in the minority that the anti-vaxxers side with them. Because it makes them feel smarter than all those fancy-pants intellectual elitist doctors and their fancy-pants educations.