Just when we thought anti-vaxxers had reached the deepest possible depths of stupid.....

[moonshaz]

.....they go and prove us wrong!

TN newborns get rare bleeding disorder after parents refused vitamin K shots
4 babies diagnosed with preventable bleeding disorder

A bleeding disorder in babies so rare that it typically affects fewer than one in 100,000 is becoming more common in Tennessee because parents are refusing vitamin K injections at

Comments

[the_physicist]

While agree with the facepalming in this post, I think this is a problem that will only get worse - that people don't trust their doctors 100% and think they know better (because let's face it, there are precedents to not trust doctors always). Now we have the internet and all the world's knowledge at our fingertips... except we don't. Journal papers that are reputable (well, and the disreputable ones too) are hidden behind pay wall barriers. A few float around the internet freely, but those tend to be the alarmist ones... the thousands of so-so studies that confirm a treatment is safe and works are not interesting enough to pirate or quote.

As I said, I think the problem will get worse and I think the solution lies in science getting it's head out of its arse and doing something about the ridiculousness that is the current publishing and vetting system for journal papers, for one, and secondly better education in schools to encourage more science literacy.

All that said, even scientists fall for this conspiracy crap, but I still think we need to find a way to counter these alarmist issues before they become a 'thing', by trying to make medicine more transparent and understandable. The hospital did the right thing by doing these consent forms so that there's information there for the parents to read up on, but I guess they can't compete in communication style with an little internet forum full of lay people who speak in lay terms.

[perthro]

This. The summaries of these reputable studies are available for free more often than not... but most people don't have the reading skills required to analyze them. They're written in technical terms, not language the average person understands. People don't have a background in chemistry, so they hear parts of things they recognize as bad and don't know that in their current formulation, it's neutral or even good (like petroleum jelly vs. petroleum you put in a car). So even for the stuff that IS free, it might as well be behind a paywall for as useful as it is.

We need a better education system, with critical thinking as a mandatory course.