So What? I'm Still a Porn Star
Americans have traditionally been defined by two things, people who distrust authority and who love a good fight. It's how we came to be a country and it's how we have continued to define ourselves. It rarely matters what the authority is, someone in this country will start fighting it. One of the more recent and bloody of these battles has been the fight over childhood vaccinations. It all started when a British scientist named Andrew Wakefield said he completed a study where a number of children developed autism after receiving the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccination. One of the earliest believers in his work was Playboy model and mom Jenny McCarthy. After seeing her son get diagnosed with autism, she started reaching out to every alternative medicine she could find when conventional medicine failed her. In her searches she found out about chelation therapy for children with autism. When this showed results, she believed the metals that were in her son were there from Thimerosal in vaccinations. Her crusade against vaccinations began. Since then she has been on Oprah and all the other daytime talkshows talking about how dangerous vaccinations are and calling out for more studies to be done, presumably to prove that to everyone else. The medical establishment, instead of immediately releasing facts to counter her, called her irresponsible and dangerous for suggesting immunizations were a bad thing. Each side has painted the other as the most destructive force to children since Michael Jackson. Now, it appears Dr. Wakefield may have faked his studies for fun and profit but this has still no deterred some people from keeping the fight going.
Jenny McCarthy has recently to the surprise of absolutely no one. She is impervious to any further revelations of fact since she has what she considers to be a scientific study done by a scientist and everyone else is wrong. She is reacting the same way many of us would if all of a sudden we were told that the earth is 6000 years old: we might not have studied all of it ourselves, but we take it on good authority that others have proven it is not. To her mind, she has facts to back her up and other people have a political agenda they are trying to push. She has seen with her own eyes that once a doctor declared her son to have autism, she found a cure and she cured him. She wants to help other parents. She has seen this happen with her own eyes, and maybe seen other parents go through the same regiment of treatment and get results. To her, these are all facts. Medical professionals have been wrong before, so we as people have every right, and even duty, to ask questions to make sure we understand what they're saying and they know what they're talking about when it comes to things like this. There haven't been enough studies on all the different vaccinations we give children, and not nearly enough on how they react in combination to each other. After talking to doctors and getting nowhere with them, she took her show on the road and spoke directly to mothers.
This infuriated doctors, and for decent enough reason. This was a woman who had a couple years of nursing going out and telling people to avoid vaccinations because she once saw it maybe cause autism. She didn't shop the kid around to get a second opinion from another neurologist, she just took the first doctor's word for it then went on the internet. She used the Wakefield study, which had only 12 participants, as an authoritative study. The real problem is that the medical community didn't fight back with facts, reasoning or any of that. There were articles like Dr. Debbie Schlussel repeatedly referring to her as a bimbo (NB: she also refers to The Lancet as "anti-Israel", so maybe she's a parody site). No real refutation of facts, no real showcasing of studies that have been to prove her wrong, just calling her Dr. Bimbo over and over again. Here we have another site calling itself Jenny McCarthy Body Count based on the idea that every child who has died of mumps, measles or rubella since Jun 3 2007. The fact that the logic is as specious as hers (people died of those diseases before she spoke out and will die after McCarthy stops talking) may well be lost. Other people who had similar questions were treated similarly. Questions weren't really answered, just doctors telling people there was nothing to worry about. Luckily, things have changed and doctors are starting to take the people seriously, even if they don't take the questions seriously. A smart person can have a dumb question if he or she doesn't have enough facts. This doesn't make the person less smart, just uninformed. They should not be targets of ridicule like Dr. Schlussel does. Imagine having her as your doctor if you had questions about an upcoming surgery, a diagnosis she had made or anything else.
Luckily, there are now resources like this that can answer questions a lot better than what was previously out there. Check out this old rant. One of the comments is anonymous and from a doctor, but notice he's more about outrage than information. No doubt, many doctors see the vaccine questioning people in much the same light that many professional see the "9/11 Truther" movement: annoying and willfully ignorant. However, the best way to combat that is not through anger but through information. Personally, I managed to disabuse one truther of a lot of uninformed notions about what "Alert-Five" aircraft really meant in terms of CONUS BARCAP (that's continental United States Barrier combat Air Patrol, in other words, flying planes around at all times like a ring around the country. We don't do it.) No vitriol, no condescension, just information. I'm not a doctor and I don't claim to be one. Doctors should remember they are being paid for their education, not their emotional reaction to something. If I want to get mad at things I can do that myself for free. If I want a decade's worth of school in advice, I go to a doctor. Luckily, in the wake of the Lancet retracting the Wakefield study, there can be a new rise of fact based medical decisions. Hopefully, this will also mean that Jenny McCarthy gets to go back to being an actress instead of an expert on childhood vaccinations.
But what do I know? I'm just a ranter.
So it is written, so do I see it.
Jenny McCarthy has recently to the surprise of absolutely no one. She is impervious to any further revelations of fact since she has what she considers to be a scientific study done by a scientist and everyone else is wrong. She is reacting the same way many of us would if all of a sudden we were told that the earth is 6000 years old: we might not have studied all of it ourselves, but we take it on good authority that others have proven it is not. To her mind, she has facts to back her up and other people have a political agenda they are trying to push. She has seen with her own eyes that once a doctor declared her son to have autism, she found a cure and she cured him. She wants to help other parents. She has seen this happen with her own eyes, and maybe seen other parents go through the same regiment of treatment and get results. To her, these are all facts. Medical professionals have been wrong before, so we as people have every right, and even duty, to ask questions to make sure we understand what they're saying and they know what they're talking about when it comes to things like this. There haven't been enough studies on all the different vaccinations we give children, and not nearly enough on how they react in combination to each other. After talking to doctors and getting nowhere with them, she took her show on the road and spoke directly to mothers.
This infuriated doctors, and for decent enough reason. This was a woman who had a couple years of nursing going out and telling people to avoid vaccinations because she once saw it maybe cause autism. She didn't shop the kid around to get a second opinion from another neurologist, she just took the first doctor's word for it then went on the internet. She used the Wakefield study, which had only 12 participants, as an authoritative study. The real problem is that the medical community didn't fight back with facts, reasoning or any of that. There were articles like Dr. Debbie Schlussel repeatedly referring to her as a bimbo (NB: she also refers to The Lancet as "anti-Israel", so maybe she's a parody site). No real refutation of facts, no real showcasing of studies that have been to prove her wrong, just calling her Dr. Bimbo over and over again. Here we have another site calling itself Jenny McCarthy Body Count based on the idea that every child who has died of mumps, measles or rubella since Jun 3 2007. The fact that the logic is as specious as hers (people died of those diseases before she spoke out and will die after McCarthy stops talking) may well be lost. Other people who had similar questions were treated similarly. Questions weren't really answered, just doctors telling people there was nothing to worry about. Luckily, things have changed and doctors are starting to take the people seriously, even if they don't take the questions seriously. A smart person can have a dumb question if he or she doesn't have enough facts. This doesn't make the person less smart, just uninformed. They should not be targets of ridicule like Dr. Schlussel does. Imagine having her as your doctor if you had questions about an upcoming surgery, a diagnosis she had made or anything else.
Luckily, there are now resources like this that can answer questions a lot better than what was previously out there. Check out this old rant. One of the comments is anonymous and from a doctor, but notice he's more about outrage than information. No doubt, many doctors see the vaccine questioning people in much the same light that many professional see the "9/11 Truther" movement: annoying and willfully ignorant. However, the best way to combat that is not through anger but through information. Personally, I managed to disabuse one truther of a lot of uninformed notions about what "Alert-Five" aircraft really meant in terms of CONUS BARCAP (that's continental United States Barrier combat Air Patrol, in other words, flying planes around at all times like a ring around the country. We don't do it.) No vitriol, no condescension, just information. I'm not a doctor and I don't claim to be one. Doctors should remember they are being paid for their education, not their emotional reaction to something. If I want to get mad at things I can do that myself for free. If I want a decade's worth of school in advice, I go to a doctor. Luckily, in the wake of the Lancet retracting the Wakefield study, there can be a new rise of fact based medical decisions. Hopefully, this will also mean that Jenny McCarthy gets to go back to being an actress instead of an expert on childhood vaccinations.
But what do I know? I'm just a ranter.
So it is written, so do I see it.