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Oh, ok then that's fine. Take sugar pills all you want. It's just worrying when people who think starvation promotes quick recovery start talking about the medicinal value of one of the most lethal plants in existence.
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Feb 8, 2015 03:09
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OwlFancier posted:Oh, ok then that's fine. Take sugar pills all you want. It's just worrying when people who think starvation promotes quick recovery start talking about the medicinal value of one of the most lethal plants in existence. homeopathy is completely safe because by the time they actually sell the reduction of whatever poison, it's diluted so much there's no poison in it. they're basically bottles of expensive water.
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Feb 8, 2015 03:17
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Yeah if it's homeopathy I'm not worried, I just don't trust people who reject modern medicine completely to not try just eating the drat stuff off the bush.
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Feb 8, 2015 03:19
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OwlFancier posted:Oh, ok then that's fine. Take sugar pills all you want. It's just worrying when people who think starvation promotes quick recovery start talking about the medicinal value of one of the most lethal plants in existence. It's fine to use them since they basically don't do anything, but homeopathic remedies are basically unregulated and are sold right next to actual medicine. So that's annoying
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Feb 8, 2015 03:19
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thrakkorzog posted:So nobody notices that the same companies producing Vitamin C megadoses and other vitamins are basically big pharma? The generics are pretty much the same drugs, but with less advertising. I think you're vastly overestimating how much thought they put into it. Everything in the pharmacy section in the store = bad toxins, everything in the natural organic goods section of the store = pure health-boosting goodness. Besides, they looked at the ingredient list and all it said was "VITAMIN C: 3,000 mg", how could that possibly have toxins in it????? They unconditionally trust the natural goods industry to be good for them, because the natural goods industry was often the one to tell them how bad regular medicine was and how much better for you natural stuff is in the first place. It may be a scam industry, but successful scammers are typically excellent salesmen and conmen, and the high word-of-mouth transmission rate of woo-woo nature crap makes it naturally more believable than information from paid experts. Violet_Sky posted:Back when I was born (1993) the anti-vax movement was at an all-time high. Now my parents were already unfortunate enough to already have a disabled child, (I was born with Cerebral Palsy and later my parents would find out I had Non-Verbal Learning Disability ) Despite this, my parents still vaccinated me and I am now going to university. My point is, having a disabled child isn't the end of the world. Autism is such a broad spectrum anyway. I think what really gets people on about the vaccines/autism thing is that it gives them something to blame. Although they don't usually realize it, a lot of people are downright terrified of the idea that something bad could happen and not be anyone's or anything's fault - that there wasn't anything anyone could have done different to prevent it, or that there isn't anyone who can be blamed for causing it. As horrible as it is to contemplate a global conspiracy to poison literally everybody, it's even more terrifying for them to contemplate the idea that their child could get a permanent incurable disorder essentially randomly and that there is nothing at all that they could possibly do to stop it. Of course, that goes for vaccines too, but that's why most anti-vaxxers also believe in miracle elixirs, super-treatments, or lifestyle changes that will protect them from disease. It's difficult to talk to them about effectiveness, because most people don't realize that even vaccines aren't 100% effective (studies suggest a single shot of measles/MMR vaccine is somewhere between 80% and 95% effective at preventing measles), so the anti-vaxxer will go and search up a case of a vaccinated person getting sick anyway or even spreading it to others (these are both very rare, but anti-vaxxer websites put in a lot of effort into digging up and stockpiling those rare cases), and it's difficult to credibly respond to that if you're treating vaccines as a miracle cure rather than what they actually are: a medical procedure like any other, which doesn't always work and may have risks and side effects. Though, of course, even if you actually know what you're talking about, it's difficult for harsh reality to compete with the sweeping guarantees of the salesmen and conmen.
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Feb 8, 2015 03:27
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The autistic boy didn't seem to be verbal and wasn't focusing on anything much, so I guess he was a severe case. The mom was also pregnant and wasn't going to vaccinate that kid either. My mom only saw that family once and the family never went back again. 
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Yeah it is annoying. My parents have never heard of homeopathy and they buy these zinc tablets at the grocery store that say "homeopathic" in tiny print. It's not a big deal because they're not like that quiverfull mom on that site who thinks magic water is better than taking your kid to the loving doctor and the "zinc" pills aren't expensive, but it's irritating that companies are allowed to steal from people by packaging their sugar pills to like like real medicine and obscuring that there's no medicine in them by listing the active ingredient amount as X30 or some bullshit.
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Feb 8, 2015 03:31
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corn in the bible posted:homeopathy is completely safe because by the time they actually sell the reduction of whatever poison, it's diluted so much there's no poison in it. they're basically bottles of expensive water. Except sometimes manufacturers gently caress up and actually include a real active ingredient that hurts you anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zicam Zicam "homeopathic" nasal sprays permanently and semi-permanently damaged people's sense of smell.
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Feb 8, 2015 04:47
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Nintendo Kid posted:Except sometimes manufacturers gently caress up and actually include a real active ingredient that hurts you anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zicam quote:All information marked as “ingredients” are claimed only, there is no way to discern what is actually in the product. The only biologically active ingredients present in Zicam Cold Remedy is zinc acetate (2X = 1/100 dilution), and zinc gluconate (1X = 1/10 dilution);. The claim that this product has either ingredient cannot be verified, and the product is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration because it is neither. 
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Feb 8, 2015 04:51
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Elderbean posted:But if you try to explain that CHEMICALS are safe in cetain doses they lose their poo poo. But they'll lose their minds forever over the fact that one of the chemicals that preserves vaccines has a mercury molecule in it. It's fun to point out that salt, which you kind of need a certain amount of to not die, is made of chlorine which is also super toxic. By itself. Sodium is also not exactly the best thing in existence but NaCl is one of those funny things that you'll become all sorts of dead if you don't get enough of.
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Feb 8, 2015 04:53
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Another gift of Orrin Hatch's "supplements don't have to be regulated because I'm heavily invested in them" law of 1994!
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Feb 8, 2015 04:53
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corn in the bible posted:homeopathy is completely safe because by the time they actually sell the reduction of whatever poison, it's diluted so much there's no poison in it. they're basically bottles of expensive water. Not always - sometimes they have enough aspirin/alcohol to have an actual effect and make you feel better.
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Feb 8, 2015 04:55
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The commercials that the supplement industry put out at the time were pretty amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV2olDA0w8U Hey America, the government wants
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Feb 8, 2015 04:58
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Main Paineframe posted:I think what really gets people on about the vaccines/autism thing is that it gives them something to blame. Although they don't usually realize it, a lot of people are downright terrified of the idea that something bad could happen and not be anyone's or anything's fault - that there wasn't anything anyone could have done different to prevent it, or that there isn't anyone who can be blamed for causing it. As horrible as it is to contemplate a global conspiracy to poison literally everybody, it's even more terrifying for them to contemplate the idea that their child could get a permanent incurable disorder essentially randomly and that there is nothing at all that they could possibly do to stop it. Of course, that goes for vaccines too, but that's why most anti-vaxxers also believe in miracle elixirs, super-treatments, or lifestyle changes that will protect them from disease. It's difficult to talk to them about effectiveness, because most people don't realize that even vaccines aren't 100% effective (studies suggest a single shot of measles/MMR vaccine is somewhere between 80% and 95% effective at preventing measles), so the anti-vaxxer will go and search up a case of a vaccinated person getting sick anyway or even spreading it to others (these are both very rare, but anti-vaxxer websites put in a lot of effort into digging up and stockpiling those rare cases), and it's difficult to credibly respond to that if you're treating vaccines as a miracle cure rather than what they actually are: a medical procedure like any other, which doesn't always work and may have risks and side effects. Though, of course, even if you actually know what you're talking about, it's difficult for harsh reality to compete with the sweeping guarantees of the salesmen and conmen. I think it's basically about control. People don't understand science or more specifically medical treatments or how the human body actually works. poo poo I don't know how it works either. I know some researchers published articles, the medicine went through clinical trials, it was reviewed by a government agency and now my doctor is telling me to shut up and eat it. The thing is, I can't learn all the things I need to know to make an educated decision and healthcare professionals don't have the resources to make me an expert on it even assuming I have the mental faculties for it. So I'm at their mercy - I'll just have to take their word for it. Works for me but... Alternative medicine is so much easier and comforting. Chakras, energy flow, auras, star signs, magic water, quantum lovehugs etc are nonsensical concepts but if you accept them as true the frameworkr are not difficult to understand or become an "expert" in. Dillution of compound X does Y. Crystal X fixes Y. Star sign X got A, B and C properties. It's easy. Whatever explanation is given it won't have latin phrases or incomprehensible references to biology - it'll be some fuzzy warm words strung together to make you feel special and you can make whatever of it. It's a way to take control and make decisions on your own. I don't need a doctor to inject MysteryCompund in my child - I'll personally take charge. I'm in control! The naturalistic fallacy is so central to it because it's a response to, and rejection of, all the sciency stuff people don't understand, are frustrated with and leaves them feeling powerless.
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Feb 8, 2015 04:59
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OwlFancier posted:Actually one thing I noticed earlier, one of the weird people on that forum mentioned belladonna 6, are they actually taking deadly nightshade as a medicine? Yes, and they're proudly giving it to their infants as well. Check out the "fact sheet" for Hyland's Baby Teething Tablets. http://www.hylands.com/news/teethinginfo.php I particularly like the part where they say that even if your kid eats an entire bottle of them, it can't hurt them because there's nothing in it, but somehow it totally works anyway!
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Feb 8, 2015 05:13
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Captain_Maclaine posted:A friend of mine in high school caught that for some reason; I think she'd been vaccinated but it hadn't taken properly, as her family weren't anti-vax idiots. She ended up having to wear a chest wrap for like a month as she'd coughed so much and hard that she'd damaged her ribs and chest muscles. The parents of a coworker came back from a cruise a couple of weeks ago and brought a case of whooping cough with them. They didn't update their shots before they left because they didn't realise the vaccination only lasts ten years or so. They're in their 70s and it's looking pretty rough for them. But they're making sure as hell to not go near anyone else, have their medication and are telling everyone to make sure they're up to date on their booster shots so it doesn't happen to them.
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Feb 8, 2015 05:26
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OwlFancier posted:Actually one thing I noticed earlier, one of the weird people on that forum mentioned belladonna 6, are they actually taking deadly nightshade as a medicine? Belladonna 6 is short for Belladonna 6C, the 6C is the indication of the specific homeopathic preparation. C stands for 100, 6 is how many times you do it. So in this case you dilute it until your belladonna is 1/100 of the total, take a small portion of that mixture and dilute it until it is 1/100 of the total, etc. 6 times. In the end you will get a solution where the belladonna makes up 1/1,000,000,000,000 the total. Sometimes they also then to on top of it have only a portion of "active" ingredient in the pills and the rest is sugar pill filler which can dilute it much more.
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Feb 8, 2015 10:29
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eNeMeE posted:Not always - sometimes they have enough aspirin/alcohol to have an actual effect and make you feel better. Ah, the old snake oil technique. Back in the day they put in heroine, sometimes cocaine, in it. Whatever they had handy. Whatever was bothering you, Yeah, that's the kind of shady practices that lead to the formation of the FDA. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Feb 8, 2015 |
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Feb 8, 2015 11:05
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Yeah it was pretty bad. You used to have morphine and opium in soothing syrup for babies, with parents unwittingly drugging their babies into unconsciousness every night "it quiets them down so well!" The temperance movement was also big at the time, so you'd have cases of teetotalers who were not accustomed to alcohol get hooked on an 80-proof tonic, and of course find they'd need more and more to get the same relaxing and pain-dulling effect, developing alcohol dependencies. Or money-back guarantee TB cures (often just opium tonic) that would sap away the money of poor and desperate families whereupon after the victims died of their disease anyway, the fly-by-night outfit was nowhere to be found.
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Feb 8, 2015 11:21
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Actually Codeine and related opioids are some real good antitussives, though that is currently being debated. The analgesic effects are also, obviously, strong. Cocaine was also used as a local anesthetic. There was real medicinal thought behind the usage of these drugs, but it's the lack of regulation and easy access that made it so easy for roving hucksters to do what they did.
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Feb 8, 2015 14:29
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Anosmoman posted:I think it's basically about control. People don't understand science or more specifically medical treatments or how the human body actually works. poo poo I don't know how it works either. I know some researchers published articles, the medicine went through clinical trials, it was reviewed by a government agency and now my doctor is telling me to shut up and eat it. The thing is, I can't learn all the things I need to know to make an educated decision and healthcare professionals don't have the resources to make me an expert on it even assuming I have the mental faculties for it. So I'm at their mercy - I'll just have to take their word for it. Works for me but... I don't understand why you think you are incapable of learning basic biology to a level that will let you understand, in a fair amount of detail, any medical treatment your doctor talks about after a little bit of research. Is this a common perception? It is not hidden or even exceptionally complicated knowledge. A few months of reading and listening to science podcasts or recorded lectures a few hours a week would probably give you enough of an understanding of the subject to at least have a more informed opinion about your own healthcare. It's kind of like saying you "can't know" basic car maintenance. Maybe you don't know it, but that's something you can change.
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Feb 8, 2015 18:01
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Jazerus posted:I don't understand why you think you are incapable of learning basic biology to a level that will let you understand, in a fair amount of detail, any medical treatment your doctor talks about after a little bit of research. Is this a common perception? It is not hidden or even exceptionally complicated knowledge. A few months of reading and listening to science podcasts or recorded lectures a few hours a week would probably give you enough of an understanding of the subject to at least have a more informed opinion about your own healthcare. It's kind of like saying you "can't know" basic car maintenance. Maybe you don't know it, but that's something you can change. Oh, all I have to do is learn the equivalent of a college course in my own free time with no motivation to do so outside of my own will? That doesn't sound hard at all.
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Feb 8, 2015 18:39
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One might argue that the proper maintenance of your body and ensuring you don't get sick and die would constitute suitable motivation for a sensible person?
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Feb 8, 2015 18:41
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OwlFancier posted:One might argue that the proper maintenance of your body and ensuring you don't get sick and die would constitute suitable motivation for a sensible person? And that's why the diet industry is one of the most profitable and most confusing industries in existence.
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Feb 8, 2015 18:44
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Jazerus posted:I don't understand why you think you are incapable of learning basic biology to a level that will let you understand, in a fair amount of detail, any medical treatment your doctor talks about after a little bit of research. Is this a common perception? It is not hidden or even exceptionally complicated knowledge. A few months of reading and listening to science podcasts or recorded lectures a few hours a week would probably give you enough of an understanding of the subject to at least have a more informed opinion about your own healthcare. It's kind of like saying you "can't know" basic car maintenance. Maybe you don't know it, but that's something you can change. A few months of reading and listening to podcasts, or about 10 minutes while my friend tells me all about how his natural cures actually work?
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Feb 8, 2015 18:49
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Jazerus posted:I don't understand why you think you are incapable of learning basic biology to a level that will let you understand, in a fair amount of detail, any medical treatment your doctor talks about after a little bit of research. Is this a common perception? It is not hidden or even exceptionally complicated knowledge. A few months of reading and listening to science podcasts or recorded lectures a few hours a week would probably give you enough of an understanding of the subject to at least have a more informed opinion about your own healthcare. It's kind of like saying you "can't know" basic car maintenance. Maybe you don't know it, but that's something you can change. Or maybe we're just hardwired to believe in woo and con-artists take advantage of that to sell snake-oil. I don't know but the overall rejection of science in anti-vaxx, anti-GMO, anti-nuclear, alternative medicine etc is baffling and I can't help but think there's some kind of common denominator.
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Feb 8, 2015 18:51
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OwlFancier posted:One might argue that the proper maintenance of your body and ensuring you don't get sick and die would constitute suitable motivation for a sensible person? Look at how fat, gluttonous, and sedentary America is and then say that again.
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Feb 8, 2015 18:52
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The average person's access to health information is via media outlets that, even when you don't include product marketing, frequently send contradictory messages with no easy way for a lay person to determine the validity thereof. Add in health and food product marketing and it's pretty hopeless for most people whose educational backgrounds do not include things like how to verify information and determine what constitutes a good authoritative source. Add to this that there are actual (quack) doctors in the anti-vax movement and it's easy to see how people who do not have good access to a solid science education or the time to pursue a thorough background in every subject that concerns them (most people; goons who don't have kids and jobs that wear them out don't count) can be easily misled. Also, sometimes the mainstream message is just flat-out wrong. Low-fat used to be a thing. Eggs were bad for you. People who don't understand that the fact that occasionally science just gets things wrong, but mostly gets things right, feel like this invalidates science's claim to greater authority. Vienna Circlejerk fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Feb 8, 2015 |
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Feb 8, 2015 19:07
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Jazerus posted:I don't understand why you think you are incapable of learning basic biology to a level that will let you understand, in a fair amount of detail, any medical treatment your doctor talks about after a little bit of research. Is this a common perception? It is not hidden or even exceptionally complicated knowledge. A few months of reading and listening to science podcasts or recorded lectures a few hours a week would probably give you enough of an understanding of the subject to at least have a more informed opinion about your own healthcare. It's kind of like saying you "can't know" basic car maintenance. Maybe you don't know it, but that's something you can change. To double down on this, clinicians aren't capable of this sort of thing in all subject areas.
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Feb 8, 2015 19:14
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Vienna Circlejerk posted:The average person's access to health information is via media outlets that, even when you don't include product marketing, frequently send contradictory messages with no easy way for a lay person to determine the validity thereof. Add in health and food product marketing and it's pretty hopeless for most people whose educational backgrounds do not include things like how to verify information and determine what constitutes a good authoritative source. Add to this that there are actual (quack) doctors in the anti-vax movement and it's easy to see how people who do not have good access to a solid science education or the time to pursue a thorough background in every subject that concerns them (most people; goons who don't have kids and jobs that wear them out don't count) can be easily misled. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the only requirement for somebody to declare something "healthy" is that somebody, somewhere, that is an "expert" said "yup that's healthy." All the food industry needs to do is pay some expert or another to say that sort of thing and suddenly it becomes healthy. The lack of regulation is another part but the other snag is the media getting involved. Some medical researcher somewhere creates a chemical that decimates cancer cells and he says "well we might be able to use this I think, not really sure though...it might just kill the people around the cancer but I think we're on to something" and you get somebody screaming MIRACLE CURE! CANCER GONE! YAY! All of that coupled with marketing and you end up with bullshit like Pom Wonderful being, you know, Pom Wonderful or Cheerios being labelled with "this may reduce your risk of heart disease!" Plus like you said the information is often contradictory and changes often. It also gets muddled in the fact that "in moderation" is a word that people seem to forget exists. The food industry is big on that; if something is good in a small amount more of it is obviously better! Eat nine boxes of Cheerios every day and your heart will turn into a loving wizard! YEAH! But then you're eating an obscene amount of calories and are going to pork up. Not eating salt ever makes you die. Eating too much salt makes you die. But you end up with people acting like coming in contact with a single salt crystal makes you drop dead of a massive heart attack and must be avoided at all costs. The human body actually also has some very broad tolerances for a lot of things which also vary from person to person. Some people can eat nothing but bacon while smoking two packs a day and live until 90. That doesn't mean that it's a good thing for all of us to do if we want to live until 90. That's where you get a lot of anecdotes. "Well none of my friends vaccinate their children and none of their children ever got measles. BIG PHARMA CHEMTRAILS CHIROPRACTORS!!!!"
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Feb 8, 2015 19:22
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Schools (pre-college) don't really teach logical thought or how to properly filter information, so the average person has no idea how to do so, and just goes with the choice that "feels right" to them at the time. This is also backed up with how a lot of religious and social tradition works - "what feels right in the heart is right every time." You can't really expect people who go a lifetime without ever really invoking pure rationality to do so about something that's so emotionally close, unfortunately.
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Feb 8, 2015 19:35
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Jazerus posted:I don't understand why you think you are incapable of learning basic biology to a level that will let you understand, in a fair amount of detail, any medical treatment your doctor talks about after a little bit of research. Is this a common perception? It is not hidden or even exceptionally complicated knowledge. A few months of reading and listening to science podcasts or recorded lectures a few hours a week would probably give you enough of an understanding of the subject to at least have a more informed opinion about your own healthcare. It's kind of like saying you "can't know" basic car maintenance. Maybe you don't know it, but that's something you can change. The problem is that people don't actually know these things, in that they haven't actually seen them happen themselves - they're just looking random poo poo up on the internet. Non-experts have trouble telling the difference between reliable sources and non-reliable sources, and anti-vaxxer sites go to a lot of trouble to stockpile "evidence" and look semi-legitimate. Many anti-vaxxers are people who, "after a little bit of research", discovered that vaccines are not 100% effective and that there is a chance of them failing to protect your child, infecting your child, or even making your child a contagious carrier of the disease (this is true, though incredibly rare), discovered that there's a controversy over whether or not vaccines are effective and whether or not vaccines cause autism (it's technically true that there's a controversy, even though it's mostly a fake controversy stirred up for exactly this purpose), and because they don't have the knowledge necessary to judge the validity of any of this poo poo they're reading they tend to be reluctant to commit to either side but usually end up perceiving not getting the vaccine "until the science is settled" as being less risky. Anosmoman posted:Yes, but a lot of people don't do that or don't have the mindset for technical explanations. It's probably frustrating and makes you feel powerless especially if you have a strong need to control every aspect of your life. Most people can't read through medical journals to figure out what medicine to take to treat X but they sure can read a blog to figure out what homeopathic water or plant to take. Of course those things also tend to be marketed with zero limit to what they can do for you which is compelling. To most people, science isn't a process, it's something they're told about. It's not really rejection of science, since any anti-vaxxer guru worth their salt will have dozens of dubious studies or misleading news articles to point people as, so non-skeptical people tend to think that anti-vaxxers also have science on their side and that the effectiveness/dangerousness of vaccines is not a settled scientific question. Besides, it fits with an ongoing trend - maybe a couple of times a decade there's some big recall where a chemical, drug, or medical procedure is discovered to maybe not have been safe after all (and that sometimes the company knew that and covered it up) and gets recalled, discontinued, and pulled from the market while commercials encouraging everyone who has ever had that thing to sign onto the class-action lawsuit. That kind of thing happens often enough that people are used to hearing - and believing - the shout of "it turns out that some thing that doctors/other experts were giving everybody for years wasn't actually safe after all and might actually have been slowly killing us or causing rare diseases". For example, Merck, the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world, had to recall Vioxx last decade after it had spent over five years on the market, because it turned out to drastically increase one's chances of having a heart attack. According to the FDA research which led to the drug's withdrawal, it probably caused 110,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were fatal. In addition, one medical journal publicly accused Merck of scientific misconduct and covering up the risks in its early Vioxx studies (although the accusations turned out to have been trumped up by the journal to distract attention away from failings in its own peer review process), and it was later discovered that the researcher who had conducted some of the earlier Vioxx studies was a fraudster who had never actually conducted any of the drug studies he had been commissioned to perform. Although none of that was really found to be Merck's fault, a lot of it was exaggerated, and eventually cooler heads pointed out that Vioxx's increased heart attack risk wasn't really any worse than ibuprofen's anyway, the anti-vaxxer press loved it and gleefully stockpiled and relinked dozens of articles about it. Now whenever they say that vaccines are just a conspiracy by money-grubbing Big Pharma to make us sick by selling us unsafe medicine, they don't just wave their hands around scarily and dig up anti-vax websites - they point at articles like "New England Journal of Medicine accuses Merck of deleting important Vioxx information from study" and "Drug Studies Bogus: Data for Vioxx, Celebrex and Other Drug Studies Faked by Top Pain Researcher". So in one fell move, they've cast doubt on the reliability of the science and cited a credible-sounding source from the real media to support their conspiracy theory. It's easy to find evidence for any claim you're willing to make if you dig deep enough and cherrypick hard enough, especially considering the average quality of science journalism.
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Feb 8, 2015 20:05
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All you really need to know as a standard consumer is that if they have to break out "natural" or "organic" it's probably a scam, and if it claims to cure everything or merely both colds and cancer, it's definitely a scam.
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Feb 8, 2015 20:33
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Main Paineframe posted:The oral polio vaccine is particularly notorious for having a whopping 0.000133333% chance (scary!) of reverting to a dangerous form of polio and paralyzing the patient, 1:750,000 is a ridiculously high number, especially for polio. Did you slip a decimal place, or is the oral vaccine less common nowadays?
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Feb 8, 2015 20:55
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Jazerus posted:I don't understand why you think you are incapable of learning basic biology to a level that will let you understand, in a fair amount of detail, any medical treatment your doctor talks about after a little bit of research. Is this a common perception? It is not hidden or even exceptionally complicated knowledge. A few months of reading and listening to science podcasts or recorded lectures a few hours a week would probably give you enough of an understanding of the subject to at least have a more informed opinion about your own healthcare. It's kind of like saying you "can't know" basic car maintenance. Maybe you don't know it, but that's something you can change. He didn't say that people can't learn this stuff. He said that it's easier to learn about natural healing than real biology and medicine. It takes no time at all to be told that I just need a little reflexology to cure X, and there will be a million blogs and YouTube videos to reinforce that with anecdotes. It is far easier to believe in voodoo medicine than to develop an understanding of what constitutes trustworthy evidence and applying this to a general understanding of modern medicine QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Feb 8, 2015 |
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Feb 8, 2015 21:02
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Harik posted:1:750,000 is a ridiculously high number, especially for polio. Did you slip a decimal place, or is the oral vaccine less common nowadays? Oral vaccine is mostly only used in third-world countries with poor healthcare and no vaccination rate; countries with strong healthcare systems use the injected vaccine now.
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Feb 8, 2015 21:24
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Harik posted:1:750,000 is a ridiculously high number, especially for polio. Did you slip a decimal place, or is the oral vaccine less common nowadays? in countries where polio has been "eradicated" the oral vaccine is rarely, if ever, used. the injected vaccine has a higher rate of not working but also is not going to give you polio; the idea is that since being exposed to polio is itself incredibly unlikely in those places, it's more likely they'd get it from the live vaccine than from being vaccinated through other methods, so it was phased out.
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Feb 8, 2015 21:52
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Main Paineframe posted:The problem is that people don't actually know these things, in that they haven't actually seen them happen themselves - they're just looking random poo poo up on the internet. Non-experts have trouble telling the difference between reliable sources and non-reliable sources, and anti-vaxxer sites go to a lot of trouble to stockpile "evidence" and look semi-legitimate. To add to the whole "why do people fall for this?" thing, I've also personally run into cases where the problem appears to be a lot of self-confidence and not enough self-questioning. I've got a couple of family members who are objectively pretty smart, who know they're pretty smart, and they put a lot of stock into their own intelligence. (One has gone pretty far in his career by being self-taught, the other is college-educated.) The problem is that they're very deeply invested in perceiving themselves as smarter than the average bear and not at all invested in catching critical thinking gently caress-ups that might contradict their self-image. They have no scientific background, but firmly believe that they're able to understand the science anyway. I once got into an argument with one of these guys about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob. She was saying that her guests didn't need to worry about her burgers because she'd cook the beef to well-done and kill the virus. I kept trying to explain the concept of prions in general and these prions in particular to her, and at a certain point she just cut me off with, "I'm in MENSA, I know what I'm talking about!" and stopped responding. They could be an isolated case, but given the prevalence of these ideas among college-educated people, I have to wonder if a lot of them are making the same mistake. "I'm smart and I've read stuff therefore the conclusion I've arrived at must be correct." farfegnougat fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Feb 8, 2015 |
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Feb 8, 2015 22:52
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Tell these people about the Dunning-Kruger effect and that even if you're mega-genius that doesn't make you a master of all things. This is part of what makes Mensa such a joke organization; being generally smart does not make you an expert on everything
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Feb 8, 2015 23:06
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That'd work great until they decide that it's actually you who is the big dummy. After all they've done tons of research into how well a piece of nightshade diluted down 100 times into nothingness cures cancer!
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Feb 8, 2015 23:18
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Interesting, if naive, article by Art Caplan, taking the sort of stance he is known for. Doctors who advocate against vaccines should have their licenses revoked. Then, no discussion of how and why doctors were in a position to advocate for it in the first place. This is especially cringe-inducing for me:quote:Going after doctors for speaking their minds is a tricky business. Doctors use their judgment and experience all the time to recommend things to patients that regulatory bodies have not approved or that their peers might think inadvisable: “Yes, there are risks involved, but I don’t wear a helmet when I ride my motorcycle, and I understand if you don’t want to, either.” In other words, it's OK for doctors to kill their patients as long as it's not something that's immediately politically beneficial for Caplan to talk about. Nevermind that the state medical boards haven't bothered to pursue these people for years, don't worry about that- they'll go after them once it's in the press, and that should be enough. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 02:36
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