So, this was going around the Facebook. Here is some real information.
As you can see the poster relies on a complete lack of conception of the importance of dose and also relies on assuming a substance with an “icky” source or other associations (like being used in anti-freeze) automatically makes that substance bad for you. Classic B.S. really – run of the mill ridiculousness that has the power to lead to the suffering and death of children.
However much I would love to do some comparisons between the lead burden on your average Roman and the less than 25 micrograms (0.000025 grams) of mercury in the multiple dose N1H1 vaccine, a more interesting conversation was sparked in the comments of my friend’s facebook.
Emotional Ammo.
Here is one of my comments from that conversation.
What I’ve noticed is when [some parents] “think and look” they don’t go to pubMed – they go to Mr. Mercola or other quacks that don’t even know that most Amish communities vaccinate and push anecdote after anecdote of suffering and vague incendiary accusations against what THEY perceive as the monolith (which it is not) of BIG PHARMA. I have not seen those types of tactics from the pro-immunization crowd for the most part, about the only thing that annoys me is insults against Jenny McCarthy because of her Playboy past – though, I can imagine that they (as I have) are pulling their hair trying to figure out how you can possibly get your message across in all the noise.
See – I noticed something once my children had medical problems. I now had a extremely potent emotional weapon to use. I could use it against people, and it didn’t matter what I said – anyone standing against me immediately looks like a jerk. Many mothers [parents] are going to immediately side with me simply out of identifying with me and not whomever I am attacking.
I see this used as a weapon ALL THE TIME – and I’m sorry, but your personal experience, however real and meaningful to you – does not matter in whether or not I am going to make medical decisions for my own children.
I watched an interview with Jenny McCarthy where she was confronted with the criticism that her “green vaccines” campaign was causing people to not vaccinate their children and that because of that trend children were not being vaccinated AT ALL and more outbreaks were occurring because of that. (She did this after brushing off being told that information she was giving about “mercury in vaccines” was incorrect.) She said – she didn’t care. If that is what it took for *them* to listen – that was alright by her. SERIOUSLY. That is what she said – and she did this after trotting around her son’s medical problems as emotional ammunition for half an hour.
Do you think she could have gotten away with that if the people she was talking to were not immunologists – stuffy looking older white men – but, say, a mother whose baby died of a measles? Every time Ms. McCarthy said that her “child died in front of her” after taking the vaccine due to having autistic symptoms – the other mother could look at her and say, “According to your latest book that netted you a great deal of money, your son is doing really well. Mine is ACTUALLY dead.“
They are NOT playing the same game here.
Complete tangent. I seem to recall reading somewhere on the internet (it must be true, it’s on the internet) that Roman was so hard that calcium compounds deposited in the lead pipes, causing the dose of lead per liter of water to be medically insignificant.
If I was feeling better I might even go hunting for a source.
Yeah, I’m not putting much stake in anything that “Harris L. Coulter” says. I would bet $50 it was more than 25 micrograms though!
Hope you feel better soon!
Yes vaccines depend upon pseudoscience. It mirrors homeopathy in a way. The major difference it that these chemicals are being placed directly into your bloodstream so that your body’s immune and digestive system cannot adequately fight and neutralize these toxins, thus often resulting in long term damage to the body.
Have you actually seen children that have never received vaccines? I have, and they’re not only NOT suffering from disease, they don’t get the common allergies, colds, and other illnesses associated with childhood. Their immune systems are actually stronger. Hmm…
Since my blog is relatively new, I haven’t really had a chance to think about how I might deal with comments that give false medical information. I worry that I’ll be drawn into a long, painful, frustrating discussion with you about the subject. So, I’ll just be blunt: You are not going to change my mind.
That doesn’t mean that I’m “close-minded” or that I’ve been brainwashed by the establishment. It means that you’ve already destroyed your credibility by parroting anti-vaccination rhetoric that are not true. (That the human body cannot cleanse itself of injected toxins and that non-immunized children do not get childhood diseases.)
It is impossible for you to convince me of assertions that are demonstrably false.
1) Vaccines are not like homeopathy because vaccines have active ingredients.
2) Vaccines are not injected directly into your bloodstream. They are injected into muscle. (Just FYI.)
3) Different chemicals act differently in the body, and it can depend on how the chemical gets into your body and where. However, there are ways to figure out how quickly a substance exists your body and how. That information is used to estimate what your body’s “burden” is for that chemical. You may have heard that “mercury” builds up in the body and that the amount of “mercury” (that was once in several vaccines and now only in a very few) is a large amount. However, the “mercury” that was in vaccines is not elemental mercury, it breaks down into ethyl-mercury in the blood and the ethyl-mercury is filtered by your liver and goes out your feces. http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/mercury-levels-after-vaccines-thimerosal
4) If you have “seen” a group of non-immunized children that are unusually healthy, your sample size is very small. In other words, it is not reasonable to generalize that experience to the entire world’s population. For example, if you were to see a child (one of the many thousands) who die of measles every year in the world, would it be fair to conclude that measles is always fatal? Of course not. http://www.who.int/immunization_monitoring/diseases/measles/en/index.html
5) Non-immunized children do get childhood disease and they do become autistic. I suspect the reason that so many people who do not vaccinate believe that they don’t is because of the “availability heuristic” and well as reporting bias and confirmation bias. (I’m just going to give you the gist of it.) A “heuristic” is a way we process information around us. If more stories about something are “available” to us, we assume that something is more prevalent. (For example, if the news gives us stories about crime, we feel less safe, even if the crime rate is low.) Reporting bias is when we tend to talk about something more if everyone around us wants to hear it. Confirmation bias is when you tend to count the “hits” and not the “misses”. You are more likely to care about information that “confirms” what you think is true. So, when you hear other families on-line explaining how healthy their non-vaccinated children are (reporting bias), you will use this as evidence that you are right (confirmation bias), and assume that non-vaccinated children are almost always more healthy than vaccinated ones (availability heuristic). Especially if you interact with anti-vaccination groups online you are much more likely NOT to hear about children who have suffered from childhood disease or even died from preventable ones who are not vaccinated, or have autism, or hear about vaccinated children who are unusually healthy.
It is seldom that I meet someone who is anti-vaccination and anti-homeopathy. There is a great deal of overlap between the anti-vaccination groups and homeopathic practitioners. I would be interested to know where you are getting your information, if it is not from a source that also supports homeopathy.
“Vaccines are not injected directly into your bloodstream. They are injected into muscle. (Just FYI.)”
>>Vaccines produce the same effect without making the patient suffer through the disease. By introducing a disease into the bloodstream, B-cells are stimulated into action, creating antibodies and a memory record of the pathogen, resulting in immunity.<<
Are we really going to mince words? It's injected into your muscle and is taken directly into your bloodstream (just FYI).
"Vaccines are not like homeopathy because vaccines have active ingredients."
It's the same idea that introducing something that causes a disease can cause your immune system to respond and thus protect you against the disease in question. Pure pseudoscientific voodoo.
Yes, instead of dilute amounts of mostly natural ingredients used in homeopathy and taken properly into your digestive tract, vaccines introduce man-made chemicals that work instantly and flow right into your bloodstream. Common sense should tell you that your digestive tract is your plumbing system–not your circulatory system. Common sense should tell you that any of residues left behind by these agents are better left behind on your digestive tract and not your vital blood-carrying arteries.To place foreign substances directly into your bloodstream bypasses the body's normal digestive, filtering, cleansing, and eliminatory processes (and which allows these permeable chemicals to course throughout all of your body's vital organs including your heart and your brain) is to asking for problems.
Yes, we should mince words. I know someone who has to give himself injections once every couple of months. If he injects into the muscle, that is fine. If he injected the substance “directly into his bloodstream” he could die as a result because the substance would be delivered into his blood much more quickly.
Might I suggest that if you considered a distinction that may mean the difference between life and death as “mincing words” that perhaps you might not understand the chemical and biological realities that impact medical decisions concerning immunology or toxicology as much as you think?
I don’t understand it all either, but I realize I don’t. I attempt to see red flags, detect gross inconsistency in reasoning and hope to ask the right questions. That is what we should do when we are making any important decision based on information that is given to us by anyone.
Ironically, the person who originally shared this graphic with me, who does not vaccinate her many children, has two children who are autistic and she routinely talks about when her children become ill (like many other mothers do on their facebook).
Well, at least I think I may have convinced her that homeopathy is bunk at some point.
“I don’t understand it all either, but I realize I don’t.”
Then how are you in a position to criticize and deem wrong others who feel that they do know and understand the ramifications of the subject matter at hand? How would you know that they are “ill-informed?” YOU could be the one who is ill-informed for all you know. Correct?
No, because when someone misrepresents the function of the liver, has no concept of dose, equates injection with injecting directly into the blood stream, doesn’t realize that toxins can enter the blood when they are ingested, equates homeopathy with vaccination which ignores both dose and germ theory, uses “natural” and “man-made” as indications of a substances’ toxicity, uses an anecdote of non-immunized healthy children to generalize to all non-immunized children in comparison to immunized ones, etc – the errors are so gross that it’s clear they don’t understand the extreme basics of the subjects and are not scientifically literate.
I’m not a car mechanic either, but if I went into the car shop and the mechanic told me that the “thump-ta-thump” sound was caused by a lack of blinker fluid, I would go to a different mechanic.
Telling you that I didn’t understand it all either, was an attempt to not act arrogant and be honest. I’ve noticed that many people who are anti-vaccination are extremely hardened to appeals to a formal education. “I’m right and you’re wrong, because I’m smarter than you,” – doesn’t go over very well and really, it shouldn’t. However, many will routinely swallow hook-line-and-sinker anti-vaccination rhetoric that makes them feel empowered to make their own decisions instead of accepting what they feel is the infinitely corrupt health industry. They confuse having an unpopular opinion or an opinion counter to scientific consensus with “thinking for themselves”.
You’ve brought up THE error in reasoning that this represents. I can’t just know more than you about this or have more training that would allow me to interpret technical information – for me to be credibly to YOU, I need to “understand it all”.
NOBODY understands it all. If they say they have all the answers, they are liars. That is a huge red flag.
So, the “natural health professional”, “homeopathic practitioner”, celebrity “doctor” or lawyer out for a buck, is able to maintain a following for the advice and medical information that they sell by pointing out what the mainstream doesn’t know, exaggerating or misrepresenting real problems (such as publication bias) or over-simplifying complexities in dichotomies (such as pointing out that immunized children are not 100% immune and calling that “ineffective”); and using emotionally charged anecdotes. They set up a comparison between the field of medicine (or their mangled representation of it) and PERFECT; in order to show that mainstream medical science is lacking. Then (at least in many cases) they sell something that they say is effective, will change your life, is ancient or all-natural or other feel-good association, has no side-effects, etc. You’re going to buy this product because your smarter than the mainstream, you’ve seen them for who they are, etc.
I don’t doubt that Jenny McCarthy is sincere, but the way she presents the information she is convinced of has consequences and those are real consequences, and they aren’t good ones.
“I don’t doubt that Jenny McCarthy is sincere, but the way she presents the information she is convinced of has consequences and those are real consequences, and they aren’t good ones.”
This IS an example of an arrogant statement. You admit that you do not know enough about this issue, yet you know that the consequences of warning others about the risks of vaccines “aren’t good ones.” McCarthy may not be an expert either, but she does have an advantage (over most people) of having first hand knowledge about the “negligible” and “minute” risks associated with vaccines.
I think it’s more humble for someone to err on the the side of caution because they realize that they don’t know everything and do not want to take a chance on something that they don’t know enough about.
And this is another error in reasoning. You think that the action of doing nothing is fundamentally less risky than doing something. This completely short-circuits any sort of risk-benefit analysis.
If someone told me they were going to inject my children with something – you know, just for shits – I would say no. There would be no reason to take ANY risk, however small, because there would be no benefit.
The risk-benefit analysis here is the risk of vaccinating (which is, of course, non-zero because nothing has zero risk) and the risk of not vaccinating.
My child also has autism-like symptoms. I know what the cause is with very little doubt. The cause is also something that almost everyone does (just like vaccination). The risk of this happening to other people and other children is arguably much much higher than anyone has proposed is the risk of vaccine injury. This thing does not just have the potential to cause suffering and injury, including injury that results in some symptoms that mimic autism; over 30,000 people died because of it in 2010 with no question as to what that reason was.
So, do you think whatever-it-is-I-am-talking about is worth anyone to “take a chance on”? Why would anyone in their right mind do this thing?
What McCarthy is doing is scaring the living piss out of any parent whose child has a febrile seizure due to a high fever after a vaccination into believing that their child’s brain has been injured by toxins. Parents whose children have various neurological problems are blaming those conditions on vaccines instead of searching for other, more likely, causes. Her fervor is fueling quack science such as chelation therapy and extreme diets. Her misinformation is drowning out and de-legitimizing other, more substantiated concerns about the health industry.
People are making bad decisions based on the fear she is selling.
Sorry if I sound arrogant when I say that the worst result of her campaign is that when people don’t vaccinate or nations resist vaccination programs – it causes needless suffering and death. As far as I’m concerned she is running around stabbing children with her willful ignorance. At least if those children were stabbed to death, they would probably suffer less.
Now, let’s say that (because there is no way to rule this out with statistical studies if it is a small number of people) for a very small percentage of the population has a condition that we do not currently screen for that causes profound vaccine injury.
It is also very unlikely that your car spontaneously starts on fire and you are unable to escape because of the seat belt.
Let’s say that this does happen (and however much it makes me really upset, I do know of one case where it did and it breaks my heart, just thinking about it makes me ill so I will spare you the details).
Now, let’s say that, when I watched that story on television – I (and many others) decided to not wear seat belts or put our children in car-seats because we were so emotionally moved by such a horrible thing.
If that is what I decided to do – my child would be dead and I would probably be recovering from a traumatic brain injury.
Similarly, if I didn’t get the N1H1 vaccine while I was pregnant – and many other people decided not to get the flu vaccine that year; there would be an much increased risk that my child would have contracted the flu as a newborn and died.
Yes, there are some pretty weird things in vaccines, but there is a reason for them. I suspect that some are due to convenience, economy and mass-production concerns; others are absolutely safety concerns. They contain preservatives so that there is less of a possibility of contamination. Some make them work better. I linked an ingredient list in my OP.
In order to determine if the amounts are safe, with consideration as to the way they are introduced to the body, studies are proformed. To get a grasp of what that list of ingredients actually means, we’d have to dig into that literature.
Simply stating that an ingredient (especially ones with negative associations that has nothing to do with whether or not is is actually safe) is dishonest.
To be fair to McCarthy she has said that her goal is to “green vaccines” not to get rid of them. However, her rhetoric is causing fear. Her information is presented in a way that is distorted. When she was confronted in an interview about how some parents were choosing not to vaccinate (as opposed to adopting an alternative schedule) and this was dangerous – she said she didn’t care if that’s what it took.
She sets up a bizarre false choice between autism and measles. (I suspect she doesn’t realize that measles can cause serious neurological problems. At some point also, I wonder how her son might react to how she talks about him when she says that she would rather he had a potentially fatal illness than be the way he is.)
She over-simplifies and distorts the reasonable risk-benefit analysis that every parent should consider when making medical decisions for their children.
“Might I suggest that if you considered a distinction that may mean the difference between life and death as “mincing words” that perhaps you might not understand the chemical and biological realities that impact medical decisions concerning immunology or toxicology as much as you think?”
You are mincing words. When doctors say “directly into your bloodstream” when speaking of vaccines, we know what they are talking about. Because it does go directly into your bloodstream–just not at the rate as it would if you administered the vaccine directly into a major vein (which you are correct in saying that it would be dangerous). You could have corrected me if I had said, “intravenously.” I did not.
No, doctors (nor nurses, nor phlebotomists, nor anyone in the health industry that’s being the least bit careful) don’t say “directly into your bloodstream” when discussing injection into a muscle, because it would be confusing and wrong. Confusing in medicine can result in death, suffering and injury – as I mentioned. When we are discussing toxicology (of all things), this distinction is fundamental. How the substance is introduced to the body is pretty darned important.
Of course, it might be more telling right now that I corrected something you said, something you know was wrong, and you are still arguing about it.
Many ways of introducing a substance to the body can result in that substance being transported into the bloodstream. Eating fish containing methylmercury for example, absolutely can be dangerous if those levels are high enough. That is different than injecting that amount of ethlymercury into muscle. The mercury burden on the body will depend on the type of organic mercury, how it is introduced to the body, how quickly it is introduced to the body and the dose. However, one method is not “safe” and the other “unsafe”.
It DOES go directly into your bloodstream just as a venomous snake bite does (and no, snake do not look for veins either). Why belabor this (moot) point?
The reason why it does directly into your bloodstream is because instead of the pathogens entering your nasal passages or through your mouth as they would in nature (where your immune system is able to properly fight and neutralize the pathogen), your are introducing the pathogens through blood-rich muscle tissue and forcing the pathogens into your bloodstream. Where do you think the pathogens go when injected into your muscles? They are absorbed into the many capillaries and veins throughout your muscles and forced into your circulatory system.
The reason I belabor this point is because it matters. “Technicalities” matter. If you don’t think they matter, than you’ll never understand them. If you don’t care about sample space or the existence of a control group and instead impressions due to experience, if you don’t care about the chemical and biological mechanisms of a process or identity of a substance and instead about whether or not that process or that substance is “natural”, you don’t care about understanding them.
If a simple correction doesn’t results in acceptance of that correction, than you’re caring more about arguing your side (even if it’s false) than the truth. It’s simply not honest. It’s just digging in your heels, even when you know you made a mistake.
All I can say is that if we are to take “directly into your bloodstream” to mean intravenously, then you are correct. Rather than directly finding a vein to introduce the pathogens, they are introduced more indirectly through the capillaries and veins of the muscles. You are also correct in saying one method is potentially more harmful than the other (depending upon the agent being delivered). This, however, is moot as it has nothing to do with assessing the validity of the arguments previously made.
Both methods are sending agents directly into your bloodstream (one more directly and quickly than the other) AS OPPOSED to agents that are introduced intraorally or through the nasal passages. Which was the comparison I was focusing on, wasn’t it?
What does that have to do with not vaccinating your children? We know that introducing substances to the body in different ways can matter. Are you trying to say that injecting substances into the muscle, in all situations, is always harmful?
It is not enough to point out that one method may increase the amount of substance in the blood more than the other given the same amount introduced to the body, but that injecting vaccines (which sometimes have very small doses of substances that we know have ill effects at higher levels) in the muscle is harmful in the forms and the amounts that are actually present in vaccines.
“So, do you think whatever-it-is-I-am-talking about is worth anyone to “take a chance on”? Why would anyone in their right mind do this thing?”
I’m assuming that what you are speaking of was unavoidable or essential in some way. If that’s the case, then I don’t understand the point you are trying to make.
Nope. Not unavoidable or essential.
“So, do you think whatever-it-is-I-am-talking about is worth anyone to “take a chance on.””
If it has those risks and it’s defying nature, then definitely not.
It is unnatural. It is not essential – but it does have very strong benefits. So, we try to make it as safe as possible (within reasons – there are practical and economic concerns in making it as safe as it could be), and (to be fair) many of those deaths and injuries could have been avoided if people were more careful – but certainly not all of them. It’s unreasonable to expect everyone to be perfect all the time.
I couldn’t drive for several weeks after this happened, and I still hate driving. I actually do think we should decrease how much we drive and how fast we drive. I think that many people are so used to taking the risk of driving, that despite MOST people probably knowing someone who has been in a major car crash or even a fatal one, they are cavalier about it because they do it everyday.
My point is that we take risks everyday all the time we can see the benefits. When the benefits are obvious, not hidden.
Since most people vaccinate, the benefits of vaccination are hidden. We don’t see them. My mother, who worked in hospitals when some of these now-very-rare diseases were prevalent, has a different perspective than someone who simply hasn’t met or seen anyone who has gotten a “bad case” of something.
The last person in an iron lung died a couple years ago. I talked to a nurse who took care of a child with lock-jaw while I was in the hospital with my son, and she was visibly emotionally shaken by the experience.
You seem to be making the risk-benefit analysis without seeing the benefits.
My children are vaccinated. Whooping cough is going around right now where I live. It is very likely that the vaccine has saved them from suffering from it badly and may have even saved their lives. It is possible they may have actually gotten it, but I’m not even sure. They had a bad cough for a while before I even knew it was going around. My youngest had it pretty bad for a while, but I just assumed it was a cold. Vaccinated kids have a much higher chance of having a mild case than a severe case because of the immunity they gain from the shot.
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That’s all I need to know to avoid it. You atheists criticize those whom you deem as having “blind faith” but, ironically, demonstrate your blind faith in so many other ways.
And I had thought that you were referring to the greater risk of autism when you were asking me about taking a chance on something else with an even greater risk. As far as the risks of driving, you can experience those same risks walking down the street. In our modern-day society, you can’t avoid the hazards of vehicles and accidents happening–to drivers and pedestrians.
Yes you can. It would suck. However, you could do it. There are even a few walkable communities popping up, so it’s far from impossible. You can always just stay home all day, telecommute, and get your food delivered. People do that all the time.
If we take this on an incident-by-incident basis, it is very doable. I could decide to go on a trip or not. The benefit of going on that specific trip is fun and relaxation. The risk is that I might die or be injured in a car accident. I decide to go on that trip despite the risks – because the benefits are important and even though the risks exist they are reasonably low (if the road conditions are good).
We take these risks because there is a benefit, not because they are unavoidable.
“Are you trying to say that injecting substances into the muscle, in all situations, is always harmful?”
No, just pathogens and foreign substances that would normally be unable to enter into the body and directly into the bloodstream in such a manner.
We have established that:
a) Injecting a foreign substance directly into the bloodstream can be potentially harmful, if not deadly because of the speed of delivery of the agent in question.to your heart and other vital organs
b) That the next quickest way to deliver agents into your bloodstream is to inject it into your muscle tissue.
and,
c) The way that pathogens that we are immunized for are delivered in nature by neither method but enters our bodies in the slowest and most manageable way–through our digestive system.
With these points in mind, why in the world (if you wanted to promote the body’s natural immune response without shocking the system) would you choose to introduce these pathogens through unnatural means directly into the bloodstream so it can quickly bypass the body’s natural defenses which is the normal digestive system? Why would you place unneeded stress on your heart and all of your vital organs?
Snake venom is harmless when imbibed–potentially deadly when it is injected into your muscle via snake bite. For all the reasons previously mentioned.
Perhaps because you actually want the active ingredients to get where they need to go to be effective? I know that there has been other ways of giving vaccines, including oral vaccines and other ways. To really get into why we don’t use those methods for most of them, I would have to do more reading. I do know that someone developed a inhaled one, thinking that people didn’t like shots, but people hating putting something up their nose more. I suspect there are a variety of reasons.
The amounts of substances and how quickly they are delivered matter. However, again, to show that vaccines are dangerous you have to show that those ingredients, in those amounts, that wind up in your blood at that rate, are not safe. The allowed amounts of those substances, administered in that way, are based on known toxicities for those substances (which every substance has, even water).
You’re relying on the concept of “foreign” and “unnatural” still – that doesn’t mean a whole lot. Some of those substances aren’t even that “foreign” (in the sense of not usually being present) even though most people assume that they are. “Foreign” doesn’t always mean bad. “Natural” doesn’t always mean good.
“The body continuously processes formaldehyde, both from what it makes on its own and from what it has been exposed to in the environment. The amount of formaldehyde in a person’s body depends on their weight; babies have lower amounts than adults. Studies have shown that for a newborn of average weight of 6 -8 pounds, the amount of formaldehyde in their body is 50-70 times higher than the upper amount that they could receive from a single dose of a vaccine or from vaccines administered over time ” (from the fda site I linked in the OP)
>>”The toxicity of ethymercury is not well studied…” <<
That’s all I need to know to avoid it. You atheists criticize those whom you deem as having “blind faith” but, ironically, demonstrate your blind faith in so many other ways.
And I had thought that you were referring to the greater risk of autism when you were asking me about taking a chance on something else with an even greater risk. As far as the risks of driving, you can experience those same risks walking down the street. In our modern-day society, you can’t avoid the hazards of vehicles and accidents happening–to drivers and pedestrians.
So how are the levels decided on?
We know about the toxicity of methylmercury better, and that it is worse than ethylmercury. So they used the methylmercury numbers. Since, we have found that ethylmercury exists the body very quickly compared to methylmercury.
Of course, I understand that reading “not well studied” is not very reassuring. Being wary of less-studied substances and processes makes sense. Of course if you wish to avoid ethylmercury in vaccinations that’s not that difficult. It was taken out of routine vaccinations around 2001 and doing so appears to have had no effect what-so-ever on rates of autism diagnosis or any other health concern.
Ethylmercury is only one concern–there are many other ingredients in question. And the method of delivery is in question. Many oils can be harmless if not beneficial if ingested; toxic and even deadly if introduced into your bloodstream.
Yes, we already established that eating something is different than injecting it into your muscle. You seem to think that the medical establishment is unaware of that.
I think they are. I think this has occurred to them. Yes, there is a certain amount of trust there. Again, I’m deciding to go to the mechanic who says that my car makes a “thump-da-thump” noise because of a problem with the transmission, and not the one who just told me it was because I was low on blinker fluid.
To make your point you would need to show that those various ingredients have ill health effects in those amounts, in those forms, with those delivery methods.
I realize the burden of proof should be on the medical establishment; and they are legally compelled to make that case to the FDA before marketing specific products.
I don’t pretend that everyone and every organization is perfect, but I require a reason to believe there is a specific problem with a specific product before that information is going to nudge the cost-benefit analysis from one end to the other for that vaccine, or any vaccine.
A doctor actually offered my son an ASD diagnosis for my child with TBI because such a diagnosis could potentially make it easier to gain access to services.
There was no need for me to do so because the school system that we live in is brilliant and we’re very lucky for that.
So, in a way, it does pertain to increased risk of autism – if you are actually talking about ASD and the increases in diagnosis. That has much more to do with redefinitions in DSM IV than they do about anything else. (Not saying that cases aren’t increasing in frequency, only that it is not nearly as much as some think.)
I’ve heard talk about adding ADHD and ADD to ASD for the next one. I wonder if anyone will be shouting “epidemic” if that happens.
Yeah, because more diagnoses=more government money and more lucrative “treatments” for the health care industry. With that in mind, would would place blind faith in whatever claims this industry makes?
“Again, I’m deciding to go to the mechanic who says that my car makes a “thump-da-thump” noise because of a problem with the transmission, and not the one who just told me it was because I was low on blinker fluid.”
That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it. A better and more realistic example would be trusting the mechanic who knows that you know nothing about cars and has faith in him as an expert when he say there is a problem with your transmission when the sound is coming from your gas tank.
More often than not, blind faith in “the experts” without doing your own independent research can be just as bad or even worse than chronic paranoia.
No, I’m just not a fan of ear-marked diagnosis specific funding models for special education. I think they suck.
No, I wouldn’t. I would do exactly what I said everyone should do – look for red flags, try to act the right questions, heck – read the gigantic insert included in your medicines, etc.
What I see is many people equating NOT placing blind faith in the medical industry with placing blind faith in someone that goes against medical consensus that has MUCH less peer oversight or formal training, makes a heck of a lot less sense, and is selling something.
“What I see is many people equating NOT placing blind faith in the medical industry with placing blind faith in someone that goes against medical consensus that has MUCH less peer oversight or formal training, makes a heck of a lot less sense, and is selling something.”
Yes, sometimes that is true. You’re going from one quack to another. But in the case of people warning about the risks of vaccines, it’s simply offering warnings and information so that you may choose to make an informed consent (or refusal)–it’s not about providing an alternatives to vaccines. There is no proposed alternative to vaccines as far as I know and in fact many who caution against it see no logical reason for them.
Funny story – the ONLY “health care provider” that has EVER said that I need to respect her opinion because I wasn’t as knowledgeable about the topic, etc so forth (and I have interacted with literally dozens of doctors from four different hospitals/clinics in many different fields, in two different states concerning both my sons’ medical issues) was a holistic alternative healer. Her interaction with me: http://sinmantyx.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/so-how-do-acidic-foods-make-your-body-alkaline-youre-fat/
If ANY doctor or health care provider is telling you that you don’t know enough to ask questions and refuses to attempt to give you resources to become informed about your own medical choices or those of your children, using their authority as the only evidence for their claims. Report them. That is against medical ethics. You should find another doctor if you are able.
However, don’t confuse frustration with people who reject that information or mount baseless accusations with insisting on “blind faith”.
Everyone who gets a vaccine or any medication must be provided information about it, including possibly risks/side effects. In my experience this has either been mandated proactively and I had to sign something, or it was given to me when requested. That’s how it works. If this did not happen for you. Report them.
The anti-vaccination crowd (at least the ones who would be responsible for the poster that I shared in the OP) are NOT doing that. They are misleading people and stirring up a panic, which is causing people to make bad medical decisions which can have all sorts of bad outcomes.
They are doing the OPPOSITE of following the ethic of informed consent. They aren’t following the rules because they don’t have to.
I suspect many of them “know enough to be dangerous” which is a phrase that I’ve heard used in science quite a bit (in various fields, even physics). It’s when someone understands something to the point where they THINK they understand it, and they come to all sorts of painfully bad conclusions based on their incomplete understanding. It’s a well-know “thing” that happened. Unfortunately, the public rarely has the tools to pick apart the problems in reasoning (I’m NOT calling them stupid, it just takes YEARS to develop skills and knowledge base in any field – it just does – whether formally or informally), etc, and it can cause all sorts of trouble.
I got a letter once from someone who claimed that light went faster than ‘c’ when it went around corners because when it changed direction it was accelerating. He was really excited about this – and obviously the physics establishment was keeping him down!!
Yeah – I do see the facebook share in the OP as just as wrong as that.
“Funny story – the ONLY “health care provider” that has EVER said that I need to respect her opinion because I wasn’t as knowledgeable about the topic, etc so forth (and I have interacted with literally dozens of doctors from four different hospitals/clinics in many different fields, in two different states concerning both my sons’ medical issues) was a holistic alternative healer. Her interaction with me: http://sinmantyx.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/so-how-do-acidic-foods-make-your-body-alkaline-youre-fat/”
As I see it, she’s giving you free advice online after you were arguing and trying to discredit her due to your lack of knowledge (she could have dismissed you altogether as a shill or a troll, but she didn’t). It wasn’t as though your were a paying client in her office–then she is obligated to help explain things to you without being patronizing or giving you the runaround (which a lot of doctors often do unfortunately). Yes, there’s ways to make your own body more alkaline by eating things that will compensate for possibly lacking in adequate amount of hydrochloric acid–or any other number of possible factors. It’s not rocket science–it’s simply basic body mechanics and common sense (which is unfortunately uncommon these days).
I apologize if using the term “blind faith” insulted you. It’s meant to be an observation on those claiming to reject blind faith and stand for logic and reason alone. Christians are accused of having “blind faith” all the time–I think it is crucial to point out all examples of blind faith, whether it be religious or secular.
I can understand why you might see it that way because you don’t seem to see the problems with her answers. I asked what the bodily fluids she was even talking about and what mechanisms they became acidic or alkaline. She responded that certain foods didn’t “break down” and because they got stuck in your colon, living organism began to multiply and eat the stuck food. So why does it get stuck? She said it was because it doesn’t break down, and she knows this because if you bury it in the ground it doesn’t decay. Why doesn’t it decay? Because it’s “unnatural”.
So, she doesn’t know what process causes “unnatural” foods to not “break down” in the body, how a food “not breaking down” would cause indigestion, how indeigestion causes constipation, how constipation causes worms, how worms eating undigested food cause a difference in pH “of the body”, what fluid in the body she is talking about when she says pH, and how the graphic we were talking about came up with those numbers. She’s also giving a different explanation for how this happens than the alkaline diet proponents – who say that the reason is because these foods create “ash”.
No, if I eat baking soda – the pH of the fluids in my stomach is going to become less acidic. She is not talking about that.
She is saying that if I eat a lemon it is going to make the pH of my “body” higher (more alkaline) because it doesn’t “rot” in my intestine like “unnatural” foods (like subway sandwiches) do, because they don’t “break down”.
Now, the truth of it – is it doesn’t matter a hill of beans what you eat as far as the pH of your blood. The pH of your blood needs to be a particular pH. Your body controls the pH by BREATHING. If you have acid blood, it means that you have too much dissolved carbon dioxide in your blood. When this happens, your body breaths deeper and more rapidly – getting rid of the carbon dioxide and oxygenating the blood. This happens when you exercise. If your body is not good at this – that’s not good. The way you get your body good at this is aerobic exercise.
Now, the truth of what she is saying is that, yes, if you become constipated and have indigestion, bacteria in your intestine feed on the food in your colon and cause all sorts of discomfort. With my youngest son this causes bad diaper rash. A doctor explained that to me – and it makes sense. The way you deal with this problem is fiber and stool softeners; which help move the poo along. Many of the foods that were mentioned as “bad” in the graphic do actually cause this problem because they lack fiber.
I ask her why the specific foods in the chart would cause these problems – her answer “they are unnatural” and do not rot when you bury them in dirt. My child’s medication is also “unnatural” and would not rot if I buried it in dirt – yet it causes the opposite effect.
Her explanation? – I’m fat.
She mentioned lawyers right off the bat, she actually said I should “be careful”, when she couldn’t answer the questions I had she said she didn’t care about theory she wanted to get personal, she said I had no basis of understanding what I was talking about because I was a musician and she was a health professional and I should just trust her, then she gave medical advice to me about my son when she has absolutely no idea what his medical issues are and implied that if I continued to treat him the way I was that I was doing him harm even though she hasn’t even met him or reviewed any of his medical information.
She was not telling me to take an antacid. Even if she was, that would not necessarily change the pH of other fluids in my body.
Alkalinity is associated with being more of a “base” not an acid. You would need to eat foods that are alkaline to deal with excessive hydrochloric acid in your stomach – not a “lacking in adequate amounts”.
No, it’s not rocket science – but it is science.
“Alkalinity is associated with being more of a “base” not an acid. You would need to eat foods that are alkaline to deal with excessive hydrochloric acid in your stomach – not a “lacking in adequate amounts”.”
You’re not understanding what’s being said here. Things that can make your body more alkaline are often not themselves alkaline–in fact they can be quite acidic. If low HCl is not the issue, then taking these acidic foods can in fact aggravate your acidity. Baking soda is alkaline, but if low HCl is your problem, then you should avoid this because you are further depleting your ability to digest food–and will ironically become more acidic. From what you have told me, it seems that you are both a bit confused on the issue. Diagnosing a problem means examining the individual–each individual has different needs. It’s not a one-solution-fits-all world and what is beneficial for one person can be detrimental to another.
“I ask her why the specific foods in the chart would cause these problems – her answer “they are unnatural” and do not rot when you bury them in dirt. My child’s medication is also “unnatural” and would not rot if I buried it in dirt – yet it causes the opposite effect.”
She, unfortunately, wrong and misinformed. I won’t bore you with the details of why she is wrong and why the OPPOSITE of what was claimed above is true. On the other hand, most conventional doctors are full of misinformation as well.
Yeah. If you have poop in your intestine (especially if it is not digested very much) and bacteria begin to grow more than usual as a result – you are going to have the products of the bacterial processes in your intestine.
I’m starting to get out of my depth here (just being honest, not saying I know nothing), but depending on the type of bacteria/yeast/whatever the products could be carbon-dioxide, methane, and I imagine alcohol and acids. This is all sorts of bad.
However, even if acids are produced in the intestine because of these processes, you can’t get from that to making your “body” more acidic – and even if by “body” you mean “blood” – making your blood more acidic would trigger homostatic mechanisms and it isn’t clear why it would cause all sorts of health concerns.
It was strange talking to her, since I could probably make her story more plausible than she did.
However, even just saying “alkalinity of the body” is vague enough to simply be false if no explanation is given. She was defending a graphic that gave pH VALUES for foods that supposedly caused that pH “in your body” somehow. I knew she didn’t know what she was talking about because her explanations made no sense and when questioned on it, she avoided the questions and tried to change the subject.
I have never had a doctor actually *point blank* say they didn’t care about the questions I was asking. And yeah, I did bother explaining to her why the opposite of what she said was true (at least in a sense).
No, not all doctors are well informed and from some of the stories I’ve heard, perhaps I have been lucky. I am not making a blanket, positive statement for all doctors – only that this dichotomy that mainstream doctors are generally bad and alternative practitioners are generally good is not something I accept.
I feel that a claim that goes against medical consensus, or is something they might find difficult to accept, is not necessarily wrong – only that such a claim needs to be supported by solid evidence and make sense.
Eating a lime is not going to make my body pH 9 and if it did that would kill me.
Twenty five micrograms of ethylmercury injected into my muscle would not have damaged the brain of my fetus; but getting the flu may have killed him.
People who perpetuate medical misinformation – whether they are some quasi-celebrity “doctor” selling magnetic underwear or Purdue Pharma downplaying the addictive nature of oxycodone – have a lot to answer for.
“Yeah. If you have poop in your intestine (especially if it is not digested very much) and bacteria begin to grow more than usual as a result – you are going to have the products of the bacterial processes in your intestine.”
True–which makes for a very acidic environment as these bacteria attempt to break down this waste matter that remains in your body. And, as it does not distinguish between your intestinal lining and the dead matter; intestinal irritation, inflammation, and infection can result.
And to be clear, lemons do not aid in the digestive process by acting as HCl, it acts as a cleansing and drying agent of the waste matter in your body to aid in elimination just as fiber acts as roughage or a brush to aid in the elimination of waste matter. But it all depends on what is going inside of the body of the individual; what is the solution for one person, may be further aggravate the condition of another person.
“People who perpetuate medical misinformation – whether they are some quasi-celebrity “doctor” selling magnetic underwear or Purdue Pharma downplaying the addictive nature of oxycodone – have a lot to answer for.”
Agreed.
Hooray!
Huzzah!
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