My parents have somewhat of a psuedo-scientific streak and now I'm worried

[CynicalIdealist]

Apparently I didn't get certain vaccinations because they were under the category of "newer ones that we weren't sure about at the time."

Does this fall under the category of new age bullshit, or healthy skepticism?

Seriously, I'm worried that I may not have gotten certain important injections as a result of this. My parents, despite not being religious, have a certain spiritual streak sometimes and believe that studies debunking acupuncture and homeopathy are just "funded by the evil pharmaceutical companies who want to suppress alternative medicine."

How can I, first of all, make sure that I got the right injections, and second of all debunk their garbage beyond simply saying "alternative that works is called medicine?"

[Le Rouge]

Aren't you supposed to have an injection file? Where i live we have those.

[RevSpetsnaz]

Well theyre finding out some of those inoculations are causing complications with health years later. As far as pharmaceutical companies suppressing alternative medicine, yes, its in their financial interest to suppress competition.

[¿Que?]

Ooh, I smell a shitstorm a brewin'

No but seriously, this is a very difficult subject. On the one hand, you have a bunch of unreproducible claims about health benefits of this or that eastern on new age technique or diet etc etc, while on the other hand you have a medical establishment which is deeply entrenched in the ideology and practices of capital and capitalism. The only thing I can say is try to do your research. Note who funds what is being cited in articles from both sides. Try to get at the truth through all the bullshit.

[Susurrus]

RfdZTZQvuCo

Although they're right-wingers, I think Penn and Teller sum up the arguments pretty well here.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Well theyre finding out some of those inoculations are causing complications with health years later. As far as pharmaceutical companies suppressing alternative medicine, yes, its in their financial interest to suppress competition.

Oh, no, I hope this isn't that autism conspiracy nonsense that's been popular with lunatics the last couple of years. There have been some that have had side effects but... often times those are a lot less serious than the diseases they thwarted... and alternative medicine is a load of quack, simply by virtue of being "alternative" it is not recognised by science. There are some "natural" treatments, as you might call them, that have effects, but those are not "alternative" as long as they are scientifically recognised. By the very definition "alternative medicine" is unrecognised quackery that lunatics cling to without any evidence; things like homoeopathy, energy and hand healing and other bizarre and nonsensical practices. Often there is no difference in the exploitation of people needing health care between pharmacological companies and the so called "alternative medicine", at that; they're both out to profit.

[RevSpetsnaz]

Oh, no, I hope this isn't that autism conspiracy nonsense that's been popular with lunatics the last couple of years. There have been some that have had side effects but... often times those are a lot less serious than the diseases they thwarted... and alternative medicine is a load of quack, simply by virtue of being "alternative" it is not recognised by science. There are some "natural" treatments, as you might call them, that have effects, but those are not "alternative" as long as they are scientifically recognised. By the very definition "alternative medicine" is unrecognised quackery that lunatics cling to without any evidence; things like homoeopathy, energy and hand healing and other bizarre and nonsensical practices. Often there is no difference in the exploitation of people needing health care between pharmacological companies and the so called "alternative medicine", at that; they're both out to profit.

Why dont you keep your attitude to yourself?

[Zav]

Aren't one in 100 people born somewhere on the autistic spectrum anyway? It would seem in that case that the vaccination reduces the odds.

¿Que? and Takayuki right. These waters are very murky due to quackery and profit, and are muddled further by improperly understood semantics.

As for my own opinion, I find that aromatherapy, energy working, and the like are useful when the ailing person believes they will work and the ailment can be eased by using said methods to ignore the pain, say for an upset stomach or a headache. Why not utilize the placebo effect? It works the same way meditation reduces stress. I must add that nothing is more annoying that someone using 'energy' to cure a cancer or something else serious.

[Ostrinski]

Why dont you keep you attitude to yourself?Why don't you go fuck yourself? Everything that Takayuki said was on point.

[RevSpetsnaz]

Why don't you go fuck yourself? Everything that Takayuki said was on point.

This is what i was waiting for, the attitude and then the backlash when i express disdain for the attitude.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

This is what i was waiting for, the attitude and then the backlash when i express disdain for the attitude.

Why do you even open your mouth at all, yourself? Why don't you sod off with your own bloody attitude and go back to admiring Winston Churchill while enjoying quack practices masquerading as medical care that leaves your illness untreated while they still empty your coffers all the same?

[¿Que?]

I think we shouldn't overlook certain things, like to what extent can we trust the medical establishment. It really is miraculous the way it exerts its power and control over our body and mental state, whilst claiming it is for our own good. It pushes certain ideologies of health and body image, and it is entirely colluded with the overall system of exploitation. It's now common for diseases to be managed as opposed to cured, because a cured customer no longer needs your medications. We also know the system of academic publishing is strictly controlled by an intelligentsia defined largely along the lines of race and class (obtaining licenses and degrees as forms of status).

This complicates the picture a bit, I think.

[RevSpetsnaz]

Why do you even open your mouth at all, yourself? Why don't you sod off with your own bloody attitude and go back to admiring Winston Churchill while enjoying quack practices masquerading as medical care that leaves your illness untreated while they still empty your coffers all the same?

I should ask you the same question. If you bothered to read my post before going on your childish rant you would have noticed i never said anything about believing in or supporting the claims made about inoculations causing autism or the effectiveness of alternative medicine.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

I should ask you the same question. If you bothered to read my post before going on your childish rant you would have noticed i never said anything about believing in or supporting the claims made about inoculations causing autism or the effectiveness of alternative medicine.

Then you did not read my post. I said, "I hope this isn't about...", and from this went on to criticise alternative medicine, a term which you used as though it had any sort of credibility in your post. You spoke of that the pharmaceutical companies would suppress "alternative medicine" for reasons of profits, in the manner that many do, almost as if being suppressed by one profit-hungry conglomerate would make the other credible (not literally what you said, but nevertheless a position held by an unfortunate amount of people on the left, especially on the soft- social-democratic and "hippie"-left; that, because the alternative "medicine" field is smaller and disadvantaged, it is somehow more pure and "honest".) But the fact is that there is no scientific evidence of most of it, and some of it, like homoeopathy, is wholly discredited by scientific studies. You then spoke of an "attitude", even though most of the post was about alternative medicine in general and not your personal opinions thereof - ergo, the "I hope not".

Then you proceeded to respond in such a manner as to make it seem exactly like what you were doing was defending the reprehensible alties.

The fact that pharmaceutical companies will cynically use people who need their services and set up their things in manners which benefit them is not something that means that they control the medical field of science. Take for example the H1N1 outbreak 2008-2009, where when faced with a potentially very serious infection that, at worst could kill hundreds of millions, the medical companies conspired to produce a functioning, but poorly tested and overly expensive vaccine, holding, as it were, the governments of the world ransom with their monopoly and control-- yet, it doesn't mean that their vaccine is ineffective. Certain alties and others have since then downplayed the seriousness of the situation to claim that the WHO was wrong to caution against the pandemic and order vaccinations; but this is equally cynical, because it is not possible in advance to know how bad it will be, and we don't know what the situation would have looked like had the mass-vaccination programme not been carried out. There is no time, if a threatening pandemic comes, to sit back and watch for the development; if you do, chances are that things will become very bad and millions will die that could have been saved.

[Ocean Seal]

Apparently I didn't get certain vaccinations because they were under the category of "newer ones that we weren't sure about at the time."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. People get too many useless vaccinations as is. I agree that the whole vaccinations = autism thing isn't too scientific, but seriously you don't need vaccinations for a rare disease in the jungles of South America.



Does this fall under the category of new age bullshit, or healthy skepticism?

Eh difficult to say.



Seriously, I'm worried that I may not have gotten certain important injections as a result of this.

Chill bro, as I said before, you probably didn't need those vaccinations.



My parents, despite not being religious, have a certain spiritual streak sometimes and believe that studies debunking acupuncture and homeopathy are just "funded by the evil pharmaceutical companies who want to suppress alternative medicine."

Your parents make a good point. Big pharma is in fact out to crush alternative medicine just out of profit motive. That however, does not mean that alternative medicine works should be your next point, and the scientific peer reviewed articles cannot conform to the whim of big pharma. Sure big pharma might sponsor these studies, but they can't control what the scientists get as results. The scientific process is actually pretty good with this, fraud is usually caught.



How can I, first of all, make sure that I got the right injections,
You'll be okay


and second of all debunk their garbage beyond simply saying "alternative that works is called medicine?"
Eh let them continue so long as they actually use real medicine.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. People get too many useless vaccinations as is. I agree that the whole vaccinations = autism thing isn't too scientific, but seriously you don't need vaccinations for a rare disease in the jungles of South America.


I do not believe he would have been recommended such a vaccination unless he was going to travel to South American jungles. Ergo, there is the very real concern that he was not vaccinated against some disease that might be a very real threat. Look at the recent epidemic of measles in Europe in the last year, which is the first time it has increased for a very long time - why? Because less and less people are being vaccinated against it, for the first time it has fallen below 90%. This means that many children risk getting measles and complications from it. And the reason is the nonsense tripe about the triple vaccine causing autism. Vaccinations are the most effecitive the larger the cover is, so when you have a lot of people not getting it, it poses a significant risk. If this sort of mentality had been prevalent in the 60's and 70's, small pox would still be going about.


Your parents make a good point. Big pharma is in fact out to crush alternative medicine just out of profit motive. That however, does not mean that alternative medicine works should be your next point, and the scientific peer reviewed articles cannot conform to the whim of big pharma. Sure big pharma might sponsor these studies, but they can't control what the scientists get as results. The scientific process is actually pretty good with this, fraud is usually caught.There's no point is using the conspiracy-idiots term of "Big pharma", because all pharmaceutical industry, big and small, and equally the alties, are all capitalists out for profits. There is no reason to differentiate between them in that manner. Neither of them are trustworthy on their own - but despite all their influence and power, they have a limited ability to affect scientific results, as you thankfully admit. Alties, on their own, fund even more flawed studies to support their nonsense (never using scientific method, of course), but people are somehow more liable to believe them because they are "the underdog", despite being, like the large recognised medical companies, also out to essentially fuck over the people who need medical care and treatment, except they even more often offer treatments that have no effects beyond a limited psychological one.

[dodger]

Apparently I didn't get certain vaccinations because they were under the category of "newer ones that we weren't sure about at the time."

Does this fall under the category of new age bullshit, or healthy skepticism?

Seriously, I'm worried that I may not have gotten certain important injections as a result of this. My parents, despite not being religious, have a certain spiritual streak sometimes and believe that studies debunking acupuncture and homeopathy are just "funded by the evil pharmaceutical companies who want to suppress alternative medicine."

How can I, first of all, make sure that I got the right injections, and second of all debunk their garbage beyond simply saying "alternative that works is called medicine?"

Get all your jabs sorted, soon as you can. If you intend travel, info on further jabs and health advice readily available. Prevention or cure, your choice. In tropical areas particularly important. Have you heard of the whiteman's graveyard? CynicalIdealist.? The Autism Saga, left many unprotected, tragic consequences. Herd mentality v rational debate. As ever your choice. Me I have seen a 9yr old lass succumb to rabies, mercifully, it did not take long for the toxins to reach the brain in such a tiny body. Not good.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

Apparently I didn't get certain vaccinations because they were under the category of "newer ones that we weren't sure about at the time."

Does this fall under the category of new age bullshit, or healthy skepticism?

Seriously, I'm worried that I may not have gotten certain important injections as a result of this. My parents, despite not being religious, have a certain spiritual streak sometimes and believe that studies debunking acupuncture and homeopathy are just "funded by the evil pharmaceutical companies who want to suppress alternative medicine."

How can I, first of all, make sure that I got the right injections, and second of all debunk their garbage beyond simply saying "alternative that works is called medicine?"
If you're in the US, go to the local board of health and they should have vaccination records.

The only vaccine I can think of that has been linked to ANYTHING significant is the flu vaccine. It's been linked to CIDP, a neurological autoimmune disease that's essentially the opposite of MS - demyelination of the peripheral nervous system instead of the central like with MS. So it's not deadly, just diminished quality of life and extreme weakness.

But it's an extremely rare complication. The only reason I know about it is because I know someone that it happened to - and his neurologist confirmed what I just said about the flu shot. And he emphasized that it's so fucking rare that most doctors haven't heard of it and that everyone should definitely still get the flu shot.

[Prometeo liberado]

Apparently I didn't get certain vaccinations because they were under the category of "newer ones that we weren't sure about at the time."

Does this fall under the category of new age bullshit, or healthy skepticism?

Seriously, I'm worried that I may not have gotten certain important injections as a result of this. My parents, despite not being religious, have a certain spiritual streak sometimes and believe that studies debunking acupuncture and homeopathy are just "funded by the evil pharmaceutical companies who want to suppress alternative medicine."

How can I, first of all, make sure that I got the right injections, and second of all debunk their garbage beyond simply saying "alternative that works is called medicine?"

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but these people may not be your parents. I'll bet my roomates left ear that your mom had a different name before she got married? Right? As far back as you can remember were your "parents" trying to teach you a language? What did they think you were speaking before? Huh! Think about it. At night do they go into a room by themselves? I saw all this on cable last night! When you start to resemble a young hitler then all of your questions will start having answers. Pharmaceuticals are the least of your problems. Pretty sure.

[Renegade Saint]

Force them to read the book "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre. That should solve all your problems on this front.

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Science-Quacks-Pharma-Flacks/dp/0865479186/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327735764&sr=8-1

(but try your local library first-no sense making more capitalists richer if you can get it for free)

[dodger]

Force them to read the book "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre. That should solve all your problems on this front.

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Science-Quacks-Pharma-Flacks/dp/0865479186/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327735764&sr=8-1

(but try your local library first-no sense making more capitalists richer if you can get it for free)

Well said.....Saint....in a nutshell!!

Now why did I not think of that?

Hope the review below is of use I found it a useful antidote to Quackery, both in uk and here.

Ben Goldacre is a doctor who writes a weekly column in the Guardian exposing bad medicine. He writes, "The hole in our culture is gaping: evidence-based medicine, the ultimate applied science, contains some of the cleverest ideas from the past two centuries, it has saved millions of lives, but there has never once been a single exhibit on the subject in London's Science Museum."

He attacks the idea that social and political problems can be solved by pills, even Patrick Holford's Optimal Nutrition pills, or those of the TV 'nutritionist' Gillian McKeith, with her PhD from a non-accredited correspondence course 'college' in the USA. Their advice is just 'a manifesto of right-wing individualism', blaming people's ill-health on their food choices, not on the social inequality that drives health inequality.

Dr Goldacre writes, "All too often this spurious privatisation of common sense is happening in areas where we could be taking control, doing it ourselves, feeling our own potency and our ability to make sensible decisions; instead we are fostering our dependence on expensive outside systems and people."

He praises the brilliant Cochrane reviews of medical literature. He notes that to say that giving placebos in trials of treatments is unethical is to assume that the treatment is better, which is to assume what is being tested. We don't know the result of the trial before we do it - that is why we do trials.

For example, trials have proven that the painkiller Vioxx caused 80,000-139,000 heart attacks, a third probably fatal, during its five years on the market. Trials have also discredited antioxidants, hormone replacement therapy and calcium supplements.

Dr Goldacre notes that anti-arrhythmia drugs when given to all heart attack patients, not just to those with arrhythmic heartbeats, increased their risk of dying. He reminds us that Benjamin Spock's well-meant but wrong advice - that babies should sleep on their tummies - led to tens of thousands of cot deaths. What counts is the effect, not the intent.

He recounts the media's disgraceful nine-year campaign against the Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine. The campaign caused an epidemic of mumps in Britain, with 5,000 cases in January 2005, and 2008 saw the highest number of measles cases since 1995. Nearly half of all homoeopaths irresponsibly advised against taking the vaccine, as did almost a fifth of chiropractors. Only a few homeopaths and just a quarter of the chiropractors acted professionally and recommended it. ..........William Podmore Amazon uk review.

[Comrade J]

Show your parents this, it is Richard Dawkins explaining homeopathic dilution. I'd be amazed if anyone can watch this and still believe there is some merit to this quackery.

eN6U6cpGzss

[dodger]

Show your parents this, it is Richard Dawkins explaining homeopathic dilution. I'd be amazed if anyone can watch this and still believe there is some merit to this quackery.

eN6U6cpGzss

Prince Charles is a big fan, of Homeopathy Comrade J, I could go on and explain his views.

SHALL SPARE YOU ALL.....

ragamuffins chasing after his coach screaming "Your Royal Highness, is Bonkers" Offering critique of his book, tells us all we need to know.

[Blake's Baby]

If Ben Goldacre and Richard Dawkins (and the fact that Prince Charles doesn't believe it*) don't do it for you, there's always Tim Minchin, the little barefoot Aussie scamp, with his "Storm", the story of meeting a pretty but vacuous pseudo-science exponent at a party.

Can't do embeddy things but here's the link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U

PS it actually includes the lines... "By definition 'alternative medicine' is either medicine that hasn't been proved to work, or medicine that has been proved not to work. Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that has been proved to work? 'Medicine'."


*OK, alternative/conspiracy theory people... I wonder how many believe that alternative medicine is real and that Prince Charles is a Jewish Lizard Mason Banker who eats babies and believes in alternative medicine?

[dodger]

Thoroughly enjoyed the link you provided us. BLAKE. New to me, must catch up on his other work. Certainly rang true to life, sad to say. Yes that was fun!:laugh:

[RevSpetsnaz]

Then you did not read my post. I said, "I hope this isn't about...", and from this went on to criticise alternative medicine, a term which you used as though it had any sort of credibility in your post. You spoke of that the pharmaceutical companies would suppress "alternative medicine" for reasons of profits, in the manner that many do, almost as if being suppressed by one profit-hungry conglomerate would make the other credible (not literally what you said, but nevertheless a position held by an unfortunate amount of people on the left, especially on the soft- social-democratic and "hippie"-left; that, because the alternative "medicine" field is smaller and disadvantaged, it is somehow more pure and "honest".) But the fact is that there is no scientific evidence of most of it, and some of it, like homoeopathy, is wholly discredited by scientific studies. You then spoke of an "attitude", even though most of the post was about alternative medicine in general and not your personal opinions thereof - ergo, the "I hope not".

Then you proceeded to respond in such a manner as to make it seem exactly like what you were doing was defending the reprehensible alties.

The fact that pharmaceutical companies will cynically use people who need their services and set up their things in manners which benefit them is not something that means that they control the medical field of science. Take for example the H1N1 outbreak 2008-2009, where when faced with a potentially very serious infection that, at worst could kill hundreds of millions, the medical companies conspired to produce a functioning, but poorly tested and overly expensive vaccine, holding, as it were, the governments of the world ransom with their monopoly and control-- yet, it doesn't mean that their vaccine is ineffective. Certain alties and others have since then downplayed the seriousness of the situation to claim that the WHO was wrong to caution against the pandemic and order vaccinations; but this is equally cynical, because it is not possible in advance to know how bad it will be, and we don't know what the situation would have looked like had the mass-vaccination programme not been carried out. There is no time, if a threatening pandemic comes, to sit back and watch for the development; if you do, chances are that things will become very bad and millions will die that could have been saved.

It was the manner in which you wrote your response. Whether you meant to or not it implied that i was part of your believed conspiracy, if you werenty implying that then i have no issue with your response. I take medical science claims with a pinch of salt, im not the doctor researching the particular subject for years so all i can do is take their claims and attempt to decipher what seems possible and what doesnt.

[ColonelCossack]

If you haven't had some form of innoculation against mumps... GET IT NOW. srsly. Mumps is not good. Especially if you're male.

No, I'm not advertising for pharmaceutical companies... :laugh:

[Rafiq]

Kind of disgusting, the amount of power parents have over the health issues of their kids, don't you think?

[PC LOAD LETTER]

Kind of disgusting, the amount of power parents have over the health issues of their kids, don't you think?
The support the anti-science movement has in the US is terrifying ...

[blake 3:17]

To the OP -- go talk to a doctor and see what your options are.

There is a very broad consensus that Andrew Wakefield's study linking MMR vaccination to autism was a hoax. For several years the theory seemed legitimate until it was uncovered as a fraud.

I know several parents who didn't have their children vaccinated due to very genuine fears based on this creep's lies.


"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May. "Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession," BMJ states in an editorial accompanying the work.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/05/autism.vaccines/index.html

From the Guardian last year:
"Just hours ago," announced CNN's Anderson Cooper from New York last Wednesday, "the British Medical Journal – BMJ – did something extremely rare for a scientific journal. It accused a researcher, Andrew Wakefield, of outright fraud."

The occasion for this judgment was a BMJ editorial, backing the first report in a series by me. Following some two dozen of my MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine stories in the Sunday Times – dating as far back as February 2004 – I'd brought the evidence together in a 16,000-word epic for the journal, plus 10,000 more in references and footnotes. It laid out the full gory detail behind the flaws in Wakefield's original Lancet paper that kicked off the scandal over MMR and its supposed link to autism, leading to a significant drop in uptake of the vaccine.

This followed earlier revelations that he had been hired by a firm of lawyers to make a case against the three-in-one shot, that he had been paid £435,643, plus expenses, and that families were recruited for the study through anti-vaccine groups, rather than being a random sample.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/jan/12/andrew-wakefield-fraud-mmr-autism

[praxis1966]

Thank shit there are other people who recognize that the autism - MMR link is complete bunk. I just unintentionally had an argument with 3 people yesterday who shrieked like harpies at me for daring to suggest that there was no such link (a process I describe here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/something-small-annoys-t164847/index.html?p=2353357#post2353357))...

Incidentally, the original conversation was about the recent outbreak of Tourette's-like symptoms amongst that group of girls in Le Roy, New York. Somebody was asking about whether there could be a link between that and some flu vaccines the girls had supposedly all gotten. I claimed it was probably a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy to assume a link without some kind of evidence and drew an analogy to the (false) autism - MMR link because I assumed I was dealing with rational people, not a pit of vipers. Silly me. :rolleyes:

[28350]

Kind of disgusting, the amount of power parents have over the health issues of their kids, don't you think?

My parents had my genitals mutilated when I was a newborn.