quote:

BACKGROUND: Vaccines are among the safest medical products in use today. Hundreds of millions of vaccinations are administered in the United States each year. Serious adverse reactions are uncommon...

...

CONCLUSION: No concerning pattern was noted among death reports submitted to VAERS during 1997-2013. The main causes of death were consistent with the most common causes of death in the US population.

King Dopplepopolos posted:

Does your friend not know what it says, or are they just twisting its conclusion?

QuarkJets posted:

In case anyone was wondering, bleach enemas as an autism cure are still a thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXb9KjyE3GU

diapermeat posted:

This one is floating around my facebook..

http://yournewswire.com/johns-hopkins-scientist-reveals-shocking-report-on-flu-vaccines/

QuarkJets posted:

In case anyone was wondering, bleach enemas as an autism cure are still a thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXb9KjyE3GU

Throwing Turtles posted:

So if you manage to watch the whole thing through you come to some naked kid with a "worm" hanging out of his rear end. It's up there a long time and I'm probably on a terrible terrible list.

Jack Gladney posted:

Is the "worm" his sloughed-off intestinal lining?

Throwing Turtles posted:

So if you manage to watch the whole thing through you come to some naked kid with a "worm" hanging out of his rear end. It's up there a long time and I'm probably on a terrible terrible list.

Bacon Terrorist posted:

My dad is an anti-vaxxer

My mother thankfully is not, and they split up when I was three. He has just had another child (I'm now 29) and is unlikely to get him vaccinated. He was originally talking about having the child in a natural environment (possibly with dolphins ) unregistered so he could live his life 'off the grid'

Thankfully this didn't come to pass, by all accounts it was a difficult enough labour in a London hospital so god knows what would've happened if the midwife was a dolphin.

Choadmaster posted:

This was a pretty depressing read. WTF is wrong with people.

Choadmaster posted:

This was a pretty depressing read. WTF is wrong with people.

QuarkJets posted:

If only there was a vaccine for stupidity or gullibility, then the naturopath movement probably wouldn't exist

Discendo Vox posted:

"EBM" has a lot of meanings- not all of them as good as implied by the title. While it's a step up from the bad old days of clinical practitioner supremacy, it does nothing to immunize practitioners against their own humanity.

tehllama posted:

With specific regards to medical training:

It's less this and more the fact that we still have to teach Evidence Based Medicine like its some unique thing. The reality is that there are still a lot of what you called "clinical practitioners" (that could mean anything, so I'd just say "traditionally trained" practitioners). This is changing, but the LCME moves at a glacial pace so the places that are doing it best are ahead of what's really required. We just finished a major redesign of EBM curriculum in our school and have worked to integrate it (and medical ethics) into as many places as possible. Another problem that the way it still appears in thing like LCME criteria, the Medical Student Graduation Questionnaire, and board exams is as "epidemiology and biostatistics," which is some of what EBM is but hardly all of it. Our previous curricula was based on that and was dry, disengaging, removed from clinical applicability, and not well received by students. Our revamp was kind of a two pronged approach: 1) give basic skills and knowledge (levels of evidence, how to conduct a search, how to read a paper) and allow students to apply it (via a variety of activities solo and in groups) and 2) convey how important EBM is.

2) is missing from a lot of EBM curriculum and there are many old guard physicians who don't see the importance (and thus in the hidden curriculum of clinical rotations impart bad lessons). People were surprised at my institution when I wanted a major curricular intervention to be based on it and wanted to specifically query what difference it made in part of our evaluation.

Discendo Vox posted:

I'd love to hear more about EBM from the perspective of curricular development- I'm coming out of the bioethics, comm sci and phil sci discourses, so my exposure is limited.

tehllama posted:

We did a literature review early on in our curricular redesign, and the short of it is that a) there aren't a whole lot of agreed upon ways to measure if the curriculum is even good or not and b) there a ton of different ways of delivering curriculum without a clear winner. Basically most evaluations focus on: EBM skills (can you find papers, can you come up with an answerable clinical question, etc), knowledge (do you know what the levels of evidence are etc), behaviors (do you use EBM, are you more likely to after this curriculum), and attitudes.

Since we are looking at the level of the medical student, the behaviors portion is not something we can measure other than to ask "do you think you are now more likely to use EBM in the future." There are all kinds of small activities that have been designed to focus on one or more of the above domains, but since we were redesigning all four years of our EBM curriculum at once, we got to look around and see if there was a sensible, longitudinal way to do it. Surprisingly, not a lot of places actually do longitudinal EBM curriculum - its delivered in small blocks in the first two years of medical school and then basically never again. You might be expected to exercise what you've (hopefully) learned in your 3rd and 4th year by doing some presentations, but those mostly take the form of "present some interesting pathology" and are not that research/EBM oriented.

So knowing all that, my driving goal was not particularly to make students good statisticians or particularly expert at analyzing primary literature (we'd like for them to be able to do that, but most clinicians will mostly read reviews, meta-analyses, etc). Our goal instead was to produce students that see the rest of medicine through the lens of EBM. We agreed that the most important part of the first two years of curriculum, in addition to arming students with basic biostats needed for boards and teaching them how to find and appraise information, was to teach them how important EBM was. We explored a lot of different ways to do that but basically if you want a medical student to be interested in something it has to be clinically relevant in some way. Our curricular interventions are (as far as we can tell) unique and we're planning to publish, so it would be remiss of me to post the details on a public forum, but suffice to say we sought to make it as topical and interactive as possible. I'll also say that in my opinion teaching biostatistics and to some extent literature searching and review is really the easiest and most straightforward part. Lots and lots of disciplines teach biostatistics, basically every discipline teaches its students how to find and critically appraise literature, so there's lots of examples out there on how to do it well. Teaching medical students that something that seems fairly unexciting on its surface should really be the core of medical practice, less so.

We also added curriculum to the third and fourth year to keep them engaged in EBM while they're in the thick of learning clinical skills, also in an interactive format based around things that were topical to them (also in a format we're planning on publishing). On top of all of these direct activities, all of which rely on being able to search the literature and understand what you find, we more heavily emphasized EBM in problem based learning, which is an hour and a half a week of working through a case with physician preceptors. The standards for what students were expected to research between classes were previously relatively lax - students were not held to finding great sources or citing them properly. We changed the preceptor structure to be one clinician and one PhD, reduced the group sizes, and taught database searching techniques much earlier on to emphasize the EBM aspect. Our PhD preceptor may not have a lot of clinical knowledge relevant to the case, but a big reason why they're there is to ask probing questions.

Basically we'll have preliminary results as to how well this all worked by the end of this year, but we won't really know until the current crop of first years who will do the whole shebang graduate. Even measuring whether or not we've improved student attitudes or taught them the importance of evidence based medicine is pretty rare, so hopefully we're somewhat ahead of the curve there. My attitude going into this was "it should be embarrassing for the profession that we even have to teach evidence based medicine - that should be the default."

tehllama posted:

GlyphGryph posted:

This basically sounds like the EBM curriculum is not, previous to your work, evidence based. That... sort of seems like a serious issue? Or am I misunderstanding/

Capn Jobe posted:

This has been making the rounds on FB:

http://yournewswire.com/putin-human-evolution-under-threat-by-big-pharma-gmo-vaccines/

This is hilarious, as any search result for "Vladimir Putin vaccines" returns pages and pages about Russia's supposed Ebola vaccine.

Going by the comments when this was posted on FB, apparently it's not only the far right in America that's in love with Putin.

Truga posted:

http://savage.news/news/anti-vaxx-parents-home-remedies/



I guess if you can't be a good example, you can at least be a horrible warning.

Evil Fluffy posted:

I can't imagine how this is going to affect their remaining kids. "You were taken away form mommy and daddy because they let your baby brother die" is going to cause some serious issues. Though probably not as severe as being left with the parents if they somehow avoid going to jail.

CommieGIR posted:

The worst part is how, after basically letting their son wither and die, they stick to their guns and go 'It was the best method, it works!' while having the proof in their face that it doesn't.

Radish posted:

Canadians treating their kid with maple syrup is like the punchline for some horrible joke.

MrNemo posted:

Yeah, I get that what they're doing is horrible and wrong but mental space wise, their reaction isn't a shock. You do what you believe is best (even if it's clearly bullshit) and accept that there is a chance that it won't work. Even with the best healthcare treatment some people don't make it and it's insane to fully blame yourself and give up on the treatment method as viable just because your child didn't make it.

I mean it should lead to looking at survival rates for other treatment methods and maybe going, 'oh hey all those other kids didn't die. Maybe we should have done that.' But it's hard enough to get people to do a full honest assessment of that after some new programme implementation in an office goes badly because people don't like thinking they hosed up. Good luck getting people to do that rationally when it's their kid that died.

Cockmaster posted:

And where did they even get the idea for their home remedies? Does maple syrup even have any "alternative medicine" con artists promoting it, or were they just grabbing stuff at random and feeding it to the kid?

Halloween Jack posted:

Last I heard, organic maple syrup was recommended as the sugar component in those Mastercleanse things. The one where you drink a mixture of lemon juice, syrup, and red pepper for a few days instead of eating to cleanse your body of "toxins."

As if yoga isn't painful enough.

CommieGIR posted:

"With our method, the need for the liver will be eliminated entirely"