Comments on: Vaccine Doctor Dismissal

By: Clark

Clark — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:01:18 +0000

My family members (on both sides) have lots of alternative medicine “quacks.” I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut. But I think it’s become even more personal to me since coming down with h1n1.

By: m&m

m&m — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:00:02 +0000

Thanks for the heads-up about this story. I for one am so very, very grateful for vaccinations and what they have done for our lives. I think of the horrid diseases we simply don’t even know about because of immunizations. I’m not one who dismisses all concerns about vaccinations, but the existence of some risks in extreme cases truly are the exceptions in my mind and should be treated as such.

Ardis, oh, how I can relate to your experiences. I think many people mean well, but it can be dizzying how many alternative suggestions have come out of the woodwork–including voodoo (I kid you not).

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:16:25 +0000

I’ve been dealing recently with an aunt who spent her career as an RN and therefore should know better, who keeps trying to talk me into a whole raft of alternative treatments — like sticking my head in some guy’s box so he can shoot “vibrations” through me and restore perfect vision. She gets mad when I tell her it’s all bunk, and swears in the most irrational way that alternative medicines work. Her favorite story is that she kept taking some homeopathic “kelation” therapy despite the eye-rolling of the doctor who was treating her heart condition through conventional medicine. “And kelation worked!” she chirps. She doesn’t even seem to hear me when I point out that she was under conventional therapy the entire time, so how in the world can she say it was the homeopathy that did it, instead of the conventional medicine?

Anyway, thanks for linking to this story. The wider publicity given to this man’s fraud, and the more often we preaching “vaccinate!” the more possibility there is that somebody’s life will be saved because they listen to the rational voice instead of the hysteria.

And I’m glad you pulled through the flu, and hope that the need for additional oxygen passes soon, along with any other lingering symptoms. What an illness THAT turned out to be, despite so many people shrugging off the warnings as media hype.

By: rk

rk — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:10:35 +0000

I totally agree. If you would like to get an even better appreciation for vaccines, I highly recommend the book “Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases” by Paul Offit. It outlines the history of most vaccines and tells about what things were like before vaccines.

One particularly interesting thing he mentions is that after the rubella vaccine came out many schools for the blind and deaf were closed because pregnant women were no longer being infected with rubella.