Medicine

[Gabbe]

Vaccines, traditional herbs and stuff, here is the new topic

pre-topic.

Maybe I should do a little clarification myself...

When I say "mainstream medical science", I mean the official medical science(of the "Big Pharma"). I do think some of it is true so I use the word science. Why? Because there are other doctors that aren't part of the "Big Pharma".

When did I ever say health was about being fit muscularly?


http://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/dr-russell-blaylock-vaccine-may-be-more-dangerous-than-swine-flu/
This isn't the doctor my Dad reads, but this guy is saying about the same thing.

It's about the human condition, so it's kinda on-topic.

Though this discussion is not for this topic, I have been accused of a logical fallacy and I must defend my honor!    I don't believe I ever said traditional medicine is something to despise.  I was attacking his rejection of modern medicine.  The orient and the brazilian rain forest hold treasures barely imaginable, but the way to unlock health is not to deny those treasures, or those of modern science, but to combine the two, and make sure that you use science as your fact-check.

Okay, that's better.  In that case, I won't argue against that at all.  Neither one is all-good and neither one is all-bad, and they are not at all mutually exclusive.

You make it seem like science is at odds with traditional medicine

Totally not what I was going for.

(that, or you think I think science is at odds with traditional medicine).

It did seem that way at the time.

You say immunization is unnecessary today.  Ya know why?  It is called herd immunity.  It works like this.  Your parents, colleagues and associates have all been vaccinated.  You haven't.  You won't get the disease because no one can spread it to you.  If people aren't vaccinated, no herd immunity, and no protection against the disease until the next Edward Jenner steps up to the plate and figures out what to do.  As long as there exists organisms upon which the contagion can spread, human safety relies upon massive vaccinations to continue the herd immunity.  It doesn't get much more complicated.  It is not hard to understand.

I didn't say/mean that immunization is unnecessary in general.  I said/meant that specifically, I don't need a flu shot at this point in my life, and people who don't need immunization probably shouldn't get it, so I won't be getting one unless/until circumstances change.  I'm not likely to get the flu, and if I do get the flu the odds of it causing any permanent damage are next to nil.  People who don't need it probably should not take any drug that hasn't been extensively tested and proven safe.  Mercury and heroin were both thought to be wonder-drugs, and we now know that they're horribly toxic and harmful.  Why assume that the things they pass off as beneficial these days are that much better?  Two hundred years from now, our descendants may look back at our 21st-century medicine in disgust in the same way we view those two substances.  Any drug is, by default, unsafe until proven otherwise, and it pays to have a modicum of skepticism about adding unknown substances to the body.

If they come up with a reliable HIV vaccine that may or may not cause brain damage, then maybe they should still ship it off in mass quantities to Africa because AIDS is a much bigger concern in many areas of that continent than anything else.  In that case, the potential benefit outweighs the potential risk.  However, in the United States, such a vaccine would best be avoided except by those engaging in high-risk behaviors like promiscuous (especially unprotected) sex and/or intravenous drug use, and those working in medical professions, until/unless it was proven to be safe, because HIV/AIDS isn't a major concern for most of the population.  In this case, the potential benefit is very low while the potential risk is completely unknown.  Similarly, smallpox vaccines were a good idea back when it was a threat, but now they should be avoided because it's known that the vaccine does cause brain damage in some cases.



Does that make more sense?

I never called arch's ideas 'dark age conspiracies'.  Arch holds views that, regardless of whether or not his view are correct, are called conspiracy theories.  America could be run by the bilderbergs and the illuminati and he would still be a conspiracy theorist as he has a theory(in the loose sense) about a conspiracy.  I said he was a dark age conspiracy theorist for his views against medical science, as in the dark ages, people thought the key to health was simply being fit, nothing more, nothing less.  Tell that to Teddy Roosevelt, one of our best and fittest presidents, and he would probably have a problem with your thinking.  Again, I did a poor job of articulating my views, or you didn't understand fully, but somehow the wrong message came across.  Of course modern medicine has its hucksters and charlatans as well.  No one denies that.  However, the scientific method got rid of small pox, and enabled the western world to reach age 20 with ease.  Clearly modern medicine is the savior of something, and because they didn't have it, in the 1900s up to 500 million people died of smallpox (source: InfoPlease).  All horrible deaths, all preventable by a program of worldwide vaccination.  That is, if scientific illiteracy, poverty, and the threat of cultural backlash over forced immunizations wasn't likely to stop it.

Okay, gotcha.  I guess it came across to me as a broader accusation than you meant it to be.  I kinda took it as a "you're all ignorant savages!" kinda thing.  Good thing you clarified.

You are perpetuating a strawman.  I am not saying that being fit is unnecessary for good health.

I think you're doing the same by referring to traditional medicine as "dark age beliefs", or even comparing the two.  In the dark ages they believed that if you were sick, it might be because you just have too much blood, and mercury was thought to be a cure-all.  Obviously there's a lot of alternative medicine out there that is completely bogus, and a large part of the problem is that doesn't fit into the "go to the doctor and get a shot" paradigm gets lumped together with the garbage like homeopathy.

Though this discussion is not for this topic, I have been accused of a logical fallacy and I must defend my honor!    I don't believe I ever said traditional medicine is something to despise.  I was attacking his rejection of modern medicine.  The orient and the brazilian rain forest hold treasures barely imaginable, but the way to unlock health is not to deny those treasures, or those of modern science, but to combine the two, and make sure that you use science as your fact-check.  You make it seem like science is at odds with traditional medicine (that, or you think I think science is at odds with traditional medicine).  Science has confirmed many of the claims of traditional medicine, and rejected others because of logic, and along the way discovered the placebo effect, and it's detrimental twin, the nocebo effect (from latin nocere, to harm).  However, you do have to recognize that immunization has saved countless more lives than traditional medicine.  Traditional medicine never eliminated smallpox or polio.

Regarding vaccines, how many of them have been tested for long-term side effects?  How rigorously can you control the quality of a vaccine when there's a shortage and you just need to produce as much as you can as fast as you can before flu season (like last year)?  There might not be any respected peer-reviewed scientific journal that supports the "flu vaccine causes autism" idea, but how many of them have said "yes we've tested and reviewed the long-term potential side effects of this drug and deemed it to be safe"?  Sure, smallpox and polio were two things that were in dire need of a vaccine, and it's a great thing that we put those two diseases behind us, but if you're a fairly healthy individual with a decent immune system, why go out of your way to get a vaccine for something that's pretty harmless when you have no idea what the long-term effects might be?

I'm not saying that vaccination is always a bad idea, but in general it's not good to put things into your body when you don't know what they'll do, and when you don't need them in the first place.  When someone is skeptical about the safety of a drug, that can be a very good thing.  The job of the FDA is to be skeptical about the safety and effectiveness of new drugs, and it can take years for something to get approved, and still there are recalls when we find out that something slipped through the cracks and caused a lot of people to develop adverse conditions or get killed by the drug that the FDA approved.

You say immunization is unnecessary today.  Ya know why?  It is called herd immunity.  It works like this.  Your parents, colleagues and associates have all been vaccinated.  You haven't.  You won't get the disease because no one can spread it to you.  If people aren't vaccinated, no herd immunity, and no protection against the disease until the next Edward Jenner steps up to the plate and figures out what to do.  As long as there exists organisms upon which the contagion can spread, human safety relies upon massive vaccinations to continue the herd immunity.  It doesn't get much more complicated.  It is not hard to understand.

Traditional medical science has its snake oil salesmen, and so does big pharma.  To call one a "dark age conspiracy" while holding the other up on a pedestal as the savior of mankind is ill-informed and bigoted.

I never called arch's ideas 'dark age conspiracies'.  Arch holds views that, regardless of whether or not his view are correct, are called conspiracy theories.  America could be run by the bilderbergs and the illuminati and he would still be a conspiracy theorist as he has a theory(in the loose sense) about a conspiracy.  I said he was a dark age conspiracy theorist for his views against medical science, as in the dark ages, people thought the key to health was simply being fit, nothing more, nothing less.  Tell that to Teddy Roosevelt, one of our best and fittest presidents, and he would probably have a problem with your thinking.  Again, I did a poor job of articulating my views, or you didn't understand fully, but somehow the wrong message came across.  Of course modern medicine has its hucksters and charlatans as well.  No one denies that.  However, the scientific method got rid of small pox, and enabled the western world to reach age 20 with ease.  Clearly modern medicine is the savior of something, and because they didn't have it, in the 1900s up to 500 million people died of smallpox (source: InfoPlease).  All horrible deaths, all preventable by a program of worldwide vaccination.  That is, if scientific illiteracy, poverty, and the threat of cultural backlash over forced immunizations wasn't likely to stop it.

[John.d.h]

Meh.  I think everything that needed to be said has been said.

[ultifd]

Oh, so you actually made a thread for this? Hmm...ok.
Not much to discuss about or say...
Medicine helps a lot, most of the time. Now people can live 2 to 3 times longer than before.

[John.d.h]

On a tangentially-related note, Gabbe, stop choosing avatars and signatures specifically designed to piss people off.  Kthx.

[Gabbe]

PM*

[wyvern]

Oh, so you actually made a thread for this? Hmm...ok.
Not much to discuss about or say...
Medicine helps a lot, most of the time. Now people can live 2 to 3 times longer than before.

I wouldn't say life expectancy has increased as much

[ElimiNator]

Didn't they use to live to be like 300 years a couple hundred years ago?

(click to show/hide)

This is a joke, see if it were true the people would still be living.

[Mark]

Oh, so you actually made a thread for this? Hmm...ok.
Not much to discuss about or say...
Medicine helps a lot, most of the time. Now people can live 2 to 3 times longer than before.

I wouldn't say life expectancy has increased as much

Then you don't understand life expectancy calculations.  Now, people live to be 80 years old, not 25.