Anti-vaccine alternative medicine nuts kill son with stupidity

[Underseer]

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/tod...ted-him-with-maple-syrup-instead-of-medicine/

Fuck.

Fuckity fuck fuck fuckfuck.

As a liberal, I have to live with a metric crap ton of specious health claims on my Facebook feed from other liberals. I've gotten through to some of them, but others are completely obstinate. Allowing these bullshit health claims to pass unchallenged has real consequences.

It's not just that the son caught a preventable disease because they didn't vaccinate, after he got sick they gave him squirrely alternative medicine "cures" instead of taking him to the fucking hospital like they should have.

She said they tried to boost the boy’s immune system by feeding him with olive leaf extract, whey protein, water with maple syrup and juice with frozen berries.

This is complete fucking stupidity. Even if it were possible to "boost the immune system," doing so would be a bad thing. There are any number of serious health conditions that essentially result from an overactive immune system. The fact that people don't get these serious health conditions from "boos your immune system" alternative medicine cures pretty much proves that they don't do anything.

So now their son is dead, and they are completely unapologetic about what they did to their own son.

David Stephan has said he believes the government is prosecuting the couple to force parents through the courts — instead of through legislation — to vaccinate their children.

So not only does he fail to recognize his own role in his own son's death, but he is still determined to get other parents to do the same thing to their children.



Can't we just neuter these people and ship them to a remote desert island or something?

Fuck.

 

[Underseer]

The entire alternative medicine industry exists because a couple of idiot senators passed laws in the 1980s (could be wrong about the decade) that allowed certain health claims to completely bypass FDA approval.

This then led to idiots in the media publishing article after article about the amazing benefits of alternative medicine, and they presented those articles in a way that made the health claims seem like legitimate science to the uneducated readers.

So now there is an entire industry with a financial motive for pushing specious health claims, and hordes of idiot customers desperate to believe the claims, and no clue that none of these health claims have any scientific validity.

Which brings us to the couple in the above article. They made a living peddling this alternative medicine crap. They clearly believed all the health claims and had no idea how poorly supported any of these health claims are. At this point, they are so wedded to these bad ideas that they killed their own son and have no fucking idea that they did so. No doubt at some point, someone will show them real hard evidence that their health claims are bullshit, and they will probably still refuse to let go of the bad conclusions they cling to.

That deregulation of the alternative medicine industry was one of the stupidest things the government did in recent decades. How many more people are going to die before we get this problem back under control? Shouldn't the deregulation-backers have realized that they were turning a portion of the health care system into a recreation of the bad old days of snake oil salesmen? This was entirely predictable. We had to create the FDA in the first place because of this crap.

 

[Peez]

It is hard not to want to smack these people. This is a compelling example of how hobbled the human mind can be by 'magical thinking': I have no doubt that they sincerely wanted to help their child, but their arrogant refusal to consider the possibility that those 'sciencey' types are actually right led them to let the child die.

No doubt the changes in the US FDA regulation have had an impact, but note that these particular idiots are Canadian.

Peez

 

[ronburgundy]

Sad, but I got a laugh out of this comment:

I bet the mother was posting curated pics of her homemade Master Cleanse Tonic tinctures on Instagram and touting the meningitis-healing powers and getting likes from other "earth mommas" who spend hours staging photos of their unvaccinated children eating corn whilst the breeze blows through their unkempt hair.

Buy a copy of Kinfolk and some spices from the natural foods store and you too can become a pediatrician!

 

[Tom Sawyer]

It is hard not to want to smack these people. This is a compelling example of how hobbled the human mind can be by 'magical thinking': I have no doubt that they sincerely wanted to help their child, but their arrogant refusal to consider the possibility that those 'sciencey' types are actually right led them to let the child die.

No doubt the changes in the US FDA regulation have had an impact, but note that these particular idiots are Canadian.

Peez

Ya, Canada has just as high a percentage of idiots as the US does. We just put them in charge of our country with slightly less frequency. The issue about the lack of regulation in the "alternative medicine" industry as the same up here.

 

[DolphinDynasty]

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/tod...ted-him-with-maple-syrup-instead-of-medicine/

It's not just that the son caught a preventable disease because they didn't vaccinate, after he got sick they gave him squirrely alternative medicine "cures" instead of taking him to the fucking hospital like they should have.

This is complete fucking stupidity. Even if it were possible to "boost the immune system," doing so would be a bad thing. There are any number of serious health conditions that essentially result from an overactive immune system. The fact that people don't get these serious health conditions from "boos your immune system" alternative medicine cures pretty much proves that they don't do anything.

So now their son is dead, and they are completely unapologetic about what they did to their own son.

David Stephan has said he believes the government is prosecuting the couple to force parents through the courts — instead of through legislation — to vaccinate their children.

So not only does he fail to recognize his own role in his own son's death, but he is still determined to get other parents to do the same thing to their children.


Can't we just neuter these people and ship them to a remote desert island or something?

The really scary thing is whenever a doctor or judge does take a parent to task for killing their own kid through parental fuckery, nearly half this country sides with the parents right being the only acceptable one . . . . even when they killed their own kid. I'd love for it to be ethical to at least temporarily keep people like that from having any more children, but we live in a nation that reinforces that the stupid win more often, get more credentials they did not earn, more air time than they deserve, and more courts to listen and go along with them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Well, it looks like the quacks were at least partially right in blaming the docs for autism.

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/news/qbi-confirms-vitamin-d-link-autism-traits

At least partial culprit: Vitamin D deficiency.

The docs told us to stay out of the sun.

 

[bilby]

Well, it looks like the quacks were at least partially right in blaming the docs for autism.

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/news/qbi-confirms-vitamin-d-link-autism-traits

At least partial culprit: Vitamin D deficiency.

The docs told us to stay out of the sun.

Only if by 'partially right' you mean 'completely wrong'.

No doctor ever advised anyone to become deficient in any vitamin. Sun exposure is not the only way to get vitamin D, and it has the twin harmful effects of increasing skin cancer risk and destroying folate.

And none of this has jack-shit to do with vaccination.

Your suggestion gives the quacks WAY too much credit. They were not right; the doctors were not wrong; and even if the quacks had been right in their advice to ignore doctor's advice (which they very much were NOT), their recommendation would have been right purely accidentally. If I told you not to swim at Burleigh Beach because my horoscope said you would be attacked by a crocodile there; and it later turned out that (against all expectations) a crocodile had actually ventured that far south, that would not make my advice any less crazy, nor would it make horoscopes a viable means of crocodile detection.

When advice turns out to be correct, against the odds and despite being based on nonsense, that doesn't make the original advice sound - just very lucky.

Anti-vaxxers are fucking dangerous lunatics. Their advice leads to the needless deaths of many children. Even if vaccines were responsible for the rise in autism (and they most certainly are not), it would still be good advice to vaccinate your children.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Well, it looks like the quacks were at least partially right in blaming the docs for autism.

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/news/qbi-confirms-vitamin-d-link-autism-traits

At least partial culprit: Vitamin D deficiency.

The docs told us to stay out of the sun.

Only if by 'partially right' you mean 'completely wrong'.

Telling people to stay out of the sun doesn't tell them to take Vitamin D supplements.

No doctor ever advised anyone to become deficient in any vitamin. Sun exposure is not the only way to get vitamin D, and it has the twin harmful effects of increasing skin cancer risk and destroying folate.

I fully agree that staying out of the sun is the right course of action.

 

[purple_kathryn]

Only if by 'partially right' you mean 'completely wrong'.

Telling people to stay out of the sun doesn't tell them to take Vitamin D supplements.

No doctor ever advised anyone to become deficient in any vitamin. Sun exposure is not the only way to get vitamin D, and it has the twin harmful effects of increasing skin cancer risk and destroying folate.

I fully agree that staying out of the sun is the right course of action.

I'm pretty sure that the advice is (always has been) not to over expose yourself to strong sunlight/wear suncream, rather than "never be out in the sun ever!!!!"

 

[bilby]

Only if by 'partially right' you mean 'completely wrong'.

Telling people to stay out of the sun doesn't tell them to take Vitamin D supplements.

Doctors don't tell people to stay out of the sun, and then stop there. They give out lots of other advice, including 'eat a balanced diet', which renders Vitamin D supplements needless other than for a handful of special cases (and in those cases, they DO tell the patients to take Vitamin D supplements).

No doctor ever advised anyone to become deficient in any vitamin. Sun exposure is not the only way to get vitamin D, and it has the twin harmful effects of increasing skin cancer risk and destroying folate.

I fully agree that staying out of the sun is the right course of action.

So you really don't have a point at all. Your claim "Well, it looks like the quacks were at least partially right in blaming the docs for autism" is total crap, and completely wrong.

 

[LordKiran]

Telling people to stay out of the sun doesn't tell them to take Vitamin D supplements.

Doctors don't tell people to stay out of the sun, and then stop there. They give out lots of other advice, including 'eat a balanced diet', which renders Vitamin D supplements needless other than for a handful of special cases (and in those cases, they DO tell the patients to take Vitamin D supplements).

No doctor ever advised anyone to become deficient in any vitamin. Sun exposure is not the only way to get vitamin D, and it has the twin harmful effects of increasing skin cancer risk and destroying folate.

I fully agree that staying out of the sun is the right course of action.

So you really don't have a point at all. Your claim "Well, it looks like the quacks were at least partially right in blaming the docs for autism" is total crap, and completely wrong.

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

I always thought that this was an excellent way of conveying the argument for vaccination. Share with your friends maybe!

 

[tupac chopra]

Doctors don't tell people to stay out of the sun, and then stop there. They give out lots of other advice, including 'eat a balanced diet', which renders Vitamin D supplements needless other than for a handful of special cases (and in those cases, they DO tell the patients to take Vitamin D supplements).

No doctor ever advised anyone to become deficient in any vitamin. Sun exposure is not the only way to get vitamin D, and it has the twin harmful effects of increasing skin cancer risk and destroying folate.

I fully agree that staying out of the sun is the right course of action.

So you really don't have a point at all. Your claim "Well, it looks like the quacks were at least partially right in blaming the docs for autism" is total crap, and completely wrong.

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

I always thought that this was an excellent way of conveying the argument for vaccination. Share with your friends maybe!

I have some friends who are not anti vaccination but want more research done. They are quite intelligent and understand the benefits but they pointed out to me that the CDC dd omit important data from what seems to be one of the most important studies done on MMR vaccine.

I had to admit they had a point. Unless this has been refuted?

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q62DcaNs_0M[/YOUTUBE]

Was that scientist discredited?

 

[LordKiran]

Doctors don't tell people to stay out of the sun, and then stop there. They give out lots of other advice, including 'eat a balanced diet', which renders Vitamin D supplements needless other than for a handful of special cases (and in those cases, they DO tell the patients to take Vitamin D supplements).

No doctor ever advised anyone to become deficient in any vitamin. Sun exposure is not the only way to get vitamin D, and it has the twin harmful effects of increasing skin cancer risk and destroying folate.

I fully agree that staying out of the sun is the right course of action.

So you really don't have a point at all. Your claim "Well, it looks like the quacks were at least partially right in blaming the docs for autism" is total crap, and completely wrong.

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

I always thought that this was an excellent way of conveying the argument for vaccination. Share with your friends maybe!

I have some friends who are not anti vaccination but want more research done. They are quite intelligent and understand the benefits but they pointed out to me that the CDC dd omit important data from what seems to be one of the most important studies done on MMR vaccine.

I had to admit they had a point. Unless this has been refuted?

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q62DcaNs_0M[/YOUTUBE]

Was that scientist discredited?

The first comment on that video refutes it pretty thoroughly actually.

So you submit a hypthesis, not a theory, and claim to be right. See thats why a hypothesis means that you have not done a study on it. If you had actual evidence you'd present it in a paper and win a nobel prize. Since you cant, because its not true, you wont.

How can the narrator prove that she concealed evidence? He cant. Thats called "making shit up". Why dont they site the paper? Where is this study? Why cant we see it if they supposedly have? Notice they dont present any evidence, just circled numbers on a piece of paper. What journal is it in? Oh thats right... its made up shit. 

Small rule of thumb for you and your friends, if someone makes a claim who's evidence you are not already familiar with, demand evidence! The alternative is to risk being led astray by liars and crazies.