Science Falsely So-Called

 It's quite common, in the discussions  and dissent of our day and hour, to refer to 'science' as some sort of  final arbiter of the disagreement.  Science is looked to as this impartial decision maker, an illuminated path by which  all of humanity can brightly see the path forward. Science is  looked to as a settled body of facts, and one need only look at these facts to decide who is and is not right.  This tactic is  handily deployed when the scientific facts appear to be on your side.  For example, Hilary Clinton recently  used science as a bludgeon (while simultaneously trying to revamp her image into some sort of matriarchal font of wisdom as opposed to a bitter, man-hating harpy) when she  tweeted "The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let's protect all our kids. #GrandmothersKnowBest". See the subtlety?  She draws a comparison between two settled facts and then throws in her debatable opinion.  Mrs Clinton, and her ilk, claim to have great faith in 'science'.
  The problem is that not all  facts are equally established and while it is observable and demonstrable that the earth is indeed round (an observation validated by the Bible) and  that the sky is blue, the  jury is still out on many facets of the vaccination process.   There are  a great many very smart people that are on both sides of this issue, but before we start forcing people to  take shots, it might behoove us to look at the track record of 'science' or rather, what the Bible calls 'science falsely so-called"
  For example, it was  a commonly held belief in ancient times  that living matter could  spontaneously arise from non-living matter.  It was  a commonly held-scientific opinion, endorsed and defended  by the great minds of the time, for  hundreds and hundreds of years.  Everybody from Anaximander to Aristotle took the position that dead flesh spontaneously produced maggots, and that  buckets of grain spontaneously produced  mice.  It was such a commonly accepted idea that Shakespeare even alluded to it in Anthony and Cleopatra.  Francisco Reidi performed the first experiments in 1688 that cast  doubt on this notion. His experiment was simple; isolate rotting meat form  flies and see if maggots  develop.  They did not.    For his trouble he was ridiculed and called 'unscientific'.  The pressure was great enough to  cause him to doubt his own hypothesis, not based on the evidence, but rather on its reception in the scientific community.
  In 1745 an Englishman named John Needham performed experiments in which he boiled chicken broth, killing the microorganisms he  believed were present in it.  He sealed the broth up and when  microorganisms grew anyway, victory was claimed for the idea of spontaneous generation.  Later experiments proved that his  boiled broth was still being contaminated by the air  before it was sealed.  It wasn't until 1859 that Louis Pasteur was able to sufficiently isolate the samples to prove , by  demonstrable and repeatable experiments, that the prevailing scientific theory of the day was dead wrong.
  Another  common idea of medieval medicine was the idea of 'humours'. Humours can be loosely defined as 4 different bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) that had to be kept in balance to  assure good health.  This 'science' is a distant cousin to herbalism.  In  humour thoery different foods were assigned to different humours, and a person was supposed to treat deficiencies in their humours by consuming, for example, more pasta to bring your bile into balance or more sugar to  adjust your blood humours.  Humours were also tied  to the Zodiac and the four season.  Further study has discredited humours, but for centuries it was as firmly established a 'fact' as  the color of the sky.  No serious  medical doctor at the time would challenge it, even though it was  kind of silly.
  All the great minds of the scientific community agreed for  almost 3000 years that  bloodletting was a valid medical practice.  This  method resulted in, among other things, the death of George Washington.  
   Trepanning , where a hole is drilled into the skull to relieve pressure ( and let evil spirits out) was practiced from ancient times to the renaissance without being questioned.
  More recently,  electroshock therapy reigned nearly 50 years as a viable  method for treating a  variety of illnesses. In the  1980's a procedure called vertebroplasty was  introduced. In vertebroplasty, a sort of cement is injected into the  spinal cord to relieve pain after an injury, and this method  enjoyed a 90% success rate until  , years later, many of the recipients  began to experience a whole new set of problems, and  further studies  found it be no more effective than a placebo.
    My point in all this this that the last chapter of this has not been written, and before we charge ahead, it behooves us to look behind. Throughout history,  scientists have come up with ideas and theories and procedures that  were widely implemented  and endorsed  and defended before ultimately  proving themselves to be  useless.  Sometimes it took hundreds of years to get the truth out, and it may very well be that future generation will sit back and marvel that we were even considering  injecting people with foreign substances against their will in the interest of medicine.  Perhaps someday the vax pushers of today will be classified  with blood-letters and trepanners.

The New Pediatrician

  For those of  you who have been following all this, all I can say is 'so far so good'.  There has been no negative fallout on the real-world side from our departure from our pediatrician.  There have been no  visits from government workers, no inquiring phone calls. When the story went viral we got lots of interesting emails from people who  were supportive, and a handful of emails from  critical people.  Some people  encouraged me to  look outside of mainstream medicine.  To those people, let me say that I agree with you, for the most part, and  our doctor visits are rare. Some people   predicted death and suffering for my family. I managed to ignore those people.
  But as the hoopla died down, I was tasked with finding a new family doctor that would  meet our needs, not violate our convictions, and  that made my wife comfortable. Not exactly an easy task.
  I started working the yellow pages, and amassed a  short list of potential candidates. Some of them  weren't taking new patients,  at least 2 were getting ready to retire, and maybe  4 or 5  had been absorbed into the local South Georgia Healthcare Borg compound.  This meant, in the short term, that they had no receptionist, just a maddening phone tree with no human beings in sight.  Long term, it meant all their office policies were dictated by corporate bean-counters, which didn't bode well.  My list was getting shorter and shorter and I hadn't even  had a chance to  ask the Big Question; the vax question.
  Finally I found an office  just a few miles north of us, actually in our town, and a human being  answered the phone.  She said that yes, they were accepting new patients. Now came the moment. I had tried to figure out how to phrase this question so that I was clear, but not so clear that someone felt the need to call the authorities on me.  I said " Do you have an office policy regarding vaccinations?"  There was a pause, and she said "I'm not sure I  understand what you mean."
  So much for subtle. I said "I want the choice to decide which vaccinations my children will or will not take.  Does your office honor those choices?" Another pause and she said " Why wouldn't we?".
  Hmmm, good question. "Well, ma'am, some people won't see your family unless all the government mandated shots are given." She made a sound  that sounded like genuine surprise and said "Well we don't do that, and we wouldn't do that. Now we will notate that you declined the shots, but goodness, no, why would we force you to get shots?"
  I ran up to the office which is  literally 4 miles from my front door, and gathered up the necessary paperwork for 6 new patients.  The office  is a bright, cheery place and the receptionists don't hide behind frosted glass, which has always been a pet peeve of mine. All seems to be well. I guess time will tell, but it looks like we're back in business.

We Need a New Pediatrician

  We need a new pediatrician.

  The reason we need a new pediatrician is rather involved.  A while back, the pediatrician that our family has frequented for years came out with what was, in my opinion, a rather draconian and insulting policy regarding immunizations. The policy was simple; you will take the shots the CDC recommends, or we will not treat you.   The written policy went on to refer to the unimmunized as ‘selfish’.  Their policy is reproduced here.  When I read the policy I was incensed, and it lead to a number of family discussions. My wife wanted to stay with the doctor, and I did not.  My compromise was that we would stay with his office until we were forced to leave by this issue.

  Fast forward a few weeks and their office calls to tell me that my oldest needs to come in for his 11 year physical. I had never heard of such a thing, and the person on the phone was just a message service with no insight into such things.  I wanted to know what was driving this physical. My kids aren’t in government schools so I couldn’t imagine any reason that   pre-6^th grade physical would be required. My wife called their office a time or two on my behalf and got no answer that would satisfy me.

  On the day of the appointment my wife called from the doctor’s office and told me that   part of the 11 year checkup was a series of immunizations.  One of the  immunizations was for HPV( Human papillomavirus vaccine), It's ’recommended’ by Big Pharma for both girls and boys to prevent genital warts and certain types of cancer. We had already declined this for my daughter before the new policy came out.  One of the shots was a Tdap booster (Tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis) booster.  The last on the list was the Meningococcal vaccine which supposedly prevents meningitis. She read them off to me and I made a command decision.   She was to instruct the doctor that my son would receive a tetanus booster and that was it. I hung up the phone and waited. I felt in my gut that this was going to be a day of confrontation.

  A few minutes later the phone rang and my wife told me that the pediatrician wanted to speak to me. His first question was whether or not I had actually done any research before I decided to risk my child’s health. I told him I didn’t think the risk was that high, and that injecting foreign substances into my child’s body wasn’t my idea of health care. He warned me of all the meningitis outbreaks that still happen in America and told me that I was putting my child in grave danger. He said, and I quote, “If he catches it, I don’t want to have to stand there in ICU and watch him die because he didn’t get this shot.”  Keeping in mind that meningitis is treatable with penicillin and that death from it usually only happens in a previously compromised immune system, the message was clear; take the shot or death may happen.

  I continued to decline the shots, and he asked me if I was aware of their office policy.  I told him I was and that I found their   low regard for parental choice very troubling. By now we’re both yelling at each other, which wasn’t the best way to handle it. He asked me if I understood that he could no longer treat our family unless we got these shots.  I made some comment about how much money his office makes off of immunizations. He told me he didn’t have time to argue with me, that we were done here.  He handed the phone back to my wife. I instructed her (still in a fairly harsh tone of voice unfortunately) to pack up our son and come home.

  Once I was off the phone, he began to work on my wife.  He apologized for getting so upset on the phone with me, and he wanted to give us some time to ‘think about’ it before we severed the doctor-patient relationship. He gave my wife the party line on vaccines in general, and somehow my upcoming mission trip to Haiti came up.  The idea was floated out there that I could bring back some plague from Haiti and infect our unvaxed kids.  Before she left, my wife had to sign a ‘Refusal to Vaccinate’ form that they would keep on file.  They also informed my wife that she would not be able to get our children’s medical records. Their policy is to release those records to our next doctor, not to us.

  A week went by and I was still trying to locate a doctor that honored our choices as parents when we received a letter in the mail officially severing the doctor-patient services unless we ‘comply’. Included was a revised version of their policy in which the word ‘selfish’ is replaced with a reference to ‘herd immunity’.

  My issue is simple; it’s my child, not theirs.  Maybe vaccines are good, maybe they’re bad. Maybe Wakefield was right and they attribute to allergies and autism, maybe they don’t.  Either way, I as a parent ought to be able to pick and choose what shots are given to my child, not the CDC.  In the pediatricians defense, they are a private practice and can do as they see fit, but I think it’s poor policy and a poor business decision to sever years of customer relations over the recommendations of Big Pharma and their lackeys in the government. I think it’s poor policy as a parent to blindly sign on to whatever injections the government dictates from on high

  So we have no pediatrician at the moment, and there is a certified letter waiting ominously for us  up at the post office from the pediatrician.  My concern is not that we won’t find another doctor, and my concern isn’t that my  son will catch meningitis. My concern at this point is that a visit from Child Protective Services comes out of all this.  Out of concern for the staff at this misguided doctor’s office, I’ve not released the name of the office, but I suspect we have not heard the last from all this.

To Vax or Not to Vax, That is the Question

 It has recently come to my attention that a local pediatrician has made  public their vaccination  policy, committing  their position  to paper.  I don't claim to  know if the stances taken  by the owners of this establishment are the  beliefs of the  employees. I  pondered long and hard before even making this  information available on the Internet, but here we are. In an effort to shield any  innocent  employees from  the actions of any Internet crazies, I have  on purpose modified some of the identifying information.

  My issues with this  policy are so severe that my family is reconsidering our patronage of this clinic.  I resent the  tone, the misleading statements, and the claims that a parent who doubts the Vaccination Industrial Complex must be doing so  out of selfishness or ignorance. Obviously the clinic is a private business and can do whatever they please, but as a consumer so can I.
  Meanwhile, an individual of my acquaintance who has similar views on vaccination combined with a razor-sharp sense of satire  created his  own response, which is way more  biting and insightful than anything I could come up with. I begged for permission to use it, and here it is in all its cleverness.