OK, so I spent the first part of my Sunday day digging through the interwebs to document that Applied Kineseology is hokum and that vaccines actually have a thing or two going for them, and, no, autism is not one of them thank you for asking. (Please don't ask why I had to do this, that is in the realm of too-bizarre-to-put-on-FB). While these things should be blindingly obvious to anyone with the benefit of public schooling after 1893, it remains a sad fact that the world is full of Zombies like these.
Zombie ideas, that is, ideas that have been shot dead by counter-facts but are reanimated by some virus or evil force. Not only are they out for people's brains in an abstract kind of way, they also kill people just as any flesh-eating monster can do and sometimes faster.
And what is the shotgun in any zombie hunter's arsenal? It is obviously the good ol'fashioned Rant. In this case, triggered by an e-mail concerning parents who want to sign a waiver about not vaccinating their school kids. And we are not talking about medical circumstances that occasionally do provide very valid reasons for not giving a particular kid a vaccination.
However, a waiver does not actually protect a kid, or the kid's playmates, from a disease. What it does do is a marvelous job at telling the parents who sign it that it's OK to live in their fantasy world where no bad germs can take their kids away from them if they just give them sugar pills and crystals and keep them away from the bad scientists, and that it is in no way their own fault when their kid gets really sick or infects someone else with a potentially fatal but totally preventable disease, because they mean so damn well.
Am I being brutal? Sorry. I am just an epidemiologist who has traveled enough to see kids die from diseases that should not have been a worry anymore. Enough to get offended on a personal level by the decadent ignorance of people who believe that their paranoia is a valid substitute for facts and insist on the luxury of playing Russian roulette with their own and others kids because they believe that thousands of people are perfectly willing to spend their lives in science covering up mass murder of children for the benefit of the shareholders of Big Pharma and so choose instead to believe in magic.
Yes, we all sell our soul to get those snazzy white lab coats and mediocre pay checks. And scientists of course never think outside the box either. It's not like we stake our entire livelihood on being able to come up with new and radical ideas to publish. Perfectly valid explanation. Next?
Oh, and by the way; If Homeopathy really had worked, don’t you think Pfitzer would have patented the shit out of the idea? If they instead of spending millions of dollars on those pesky double-blind trials and horribly expensive production facilities instead could have used Homeopatic “provings” involving ten people self-reporting their symptoms after knowingly getting a substance selected by medieval magical principles which can conveniently be mass produced using a water boiler and a shaker, don't you think they would use the opportunity to make a profit? Ironically, for this not to happen you have to suppose that those modern hard-core venture capitalists show a level of restraint and commitment to the interests of their competitors welfare that would make Dalai Lama cry from shame. But honestly, even though I am hesitant to believe that everyone involved in pharmacy is a homicidal narcissist capable of keeping massive conspiracies hidden just for the joy of inflicting needless disease on the innocent, I don’t believe the people in Big Pharma are that selfless either.
Doctors and researchers do not know it all, and they are actually reminded of this on a daily basis (the latter group indeed makes a living from it, as nobody hires a researcher if they know the answer already). They also make mistakes, and fall prey to greed, fear and pride like any other human being. This actually is the case for Homeopaths, Muscle testers and Reiki healers as well. So, employing a healthy level of skepticism, do consult multiple sources of knowledge, not only the ones that believe the same as you do in the first place, and, most importantly, trust people who have the least at stake from the outcome. Do not trust a book made by the guy who sells the medication. Do not trust a new therapy where the only study you find on Google Scholar that supports it was funded by the company marketing the drug. That is why you pay taxes to keep Universities around, to have a supply of geeks who get their paycheck anyway and would rather enjoy the fame of debunking a piece of corrupt fakery thank you very much.
Incidentally, familiarity with a tiny bit of basic statistics to know how to spot the difference between random occurrence and reliably repeating patterns should be as obvious for a functioning citizen as having a drivers license.
So, in conclusion, everyone who have gotten to the point in life where they have the responsibility for a child needs to own up to the fact that sometimes the world sucks. Sometimes there are no magic pill or silver bullet. Sometimes the ills that befall us are not part of a great evil master plan, but germs, genes and accidents. So the reason vaccines have side effects, chemotherapy does not always work and the doctor sometimes looks as bewildered as you are is not because the doctor is a pawn of the Big Conspiracy but because he or she is human and just does his or her best. Sometimes that is enough and sometimes it isn't. Own up to a complex, scary and wonderful world.
Death to the Zombies!
Oh, and by the way: Despite my rant above, I have little faith in "Big Pharma" and their intense marketing of questionable procedures (you have billboards the size of soccer fields every two miles advertising lap band surgery here), their infernal use of patent laws to maximize their profits while millions die from for instance the lack of cheaper off-brand AIDS drugs in Africa, and their distortion of science by using in-house researchers that simply are not allowed to publish their results if they do not support the company's preferred conclusions.
However, this is a known enemy that it is possible to combat. Political action and legislation can curtail abusive marketing and provide drug access to third world countries, and independent research can find the hyped new expensive drugs that are no better than their predecessors, have nasty side effects or simply do not work. In a world with political entities and scientists who work for competing companies or, better yet, draw their funding from public health and thus have no pressure to spin doctor questionable drugs, the pharmaceutical companies cannot expect to get away with murder all the time and it is expensive for them to be found out when they try. Hence, they actually have an incentive to provide drugs that stand up to scrutiny.
Those checks and balances however, becomes less dangerous the smaller the population of people who can perform them, and even less of a problem for the companies the fewer the people scientifically literate enough to understand or care. If everyone else can get away with quackery, why, then Big Pharma can too. If nobody cares whether a procedure actually works, but buy it anyway, then companies will and do exploit this.
Moreover, if you publish a study condemning a new drug as useless or dangerous and the people who join your side in the ensuing debate are Andrew Wakefield and a bunch of homeopathic anti-vaxers, then you have a serious problem. Because the company whose bottom line you are threatening will obviously point to the crowd defending your case and imply that you are of the tin-foil hats and snake oil crowd and your research should be dismissed as such. With those kind of friends...
Thus, the conspiracy theorists who carry their paranoia as a badge of savvyness and their scientific illiteracy as a sign of open-mindedness actually end up being their own worst enemies. Not only by adopting medical (mal)practices that harm themselves and their surroundings, but by helping their purportedly worst enemies.
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