Survey Finds Nearly 50% In US Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories

cold fjord writes in with some bad news for the people using water fluoridation to pacify the public and install a new world government. "About half of American adults believe in at least one medical conspiracy theory, according to new survey results. (paywalled, first page viewable) Some conspiracy theories have much more traction than others ... three times as many people believe U.S. regulators prevent people from getting natural cures as believe that a U.S. spy agency infected a large number of African Americans with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). J. Eric Oliver, the study's lead author from University of Chicago, said people may believe in conspiracy theories because they're easier to understand than complex medical information. ... Some 49 percent of the survey participants agreed with at least one of the conspiracies. In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory. — One of the conspiracy theories, that the U.S. created HIV, was created for an active disinformation campaign by the Soviet Union against the U.S. as a form of political warfare during the Cold War, and still gets repeated."

Comments

Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

That says it all.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ackthpt]

Stupidity is on the rise.

Seems there was a Far Side cartoon about imbeciles marching with an upside-down banner or such. It's pretty much what I expect to see some times "we r teh stoopids - and we voat"

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

I learned recently that the wife of the quarterback of my beloved Chicago Bears is one of these anti-vaccine people, based on the notion that vaccines have "chemicals" in them. So they don't get their kids vaccinated, endangering the lives of others.

Here, if you really want to be scared, is an interview with noted genius Kristin Cavallari, explaining that the reason she doesn't get her kids vaccinated is because she's "read too many books".

No kidding, you've got to see this:

http://youtu.be/7WzE0qO7tzY?t=...

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[slashmydots]

Jenny McCarthy doesn't exist! She's just a hologram! My friend send me an e-mail forwarded from his 2nd cousin's Xanga page that linked to an archived tripod page that linked to a Myspace account that had a Turkish video that PROVED her birth certificate is actually a fake printed on the back of a Lucky Charms cereal box. That's true! It's even on wikipedia. She's just there to discredit anti-vaxers and stuff lol.

By the way, you'd have to be stupid to not believe that drug companies actively seek non-cures to make more money. Curing allergies forever is $1000 one time let's say. If I take Zyrtec for 80 years, that's a lot more money. That's not a conspiracy, it's reality.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ShanghaiBill]

Stupidity is on the rise.

Or cynicism. Just because a lot of crackpots believe something, that is no guarantee that it is not true. There was a conspiracy theory, dismissed by most rational people, that the government was monitoring our email and phone calls. Then it turned out to be true.

Some of these medical conspiracy theories may be true as well. The one about the CIA causing HIV is unlikely to be true, because it would required the government to have an unreasonably high level of competence. But the theory that the government is "suppressing access to natural cures" is very likely to be true. I certainly hope so, since under Obamacare, my tax dollars would otherwise be paying for these "natural cures", which are mostly superstitious nonsense.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

This article and this site....

That says it all....

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Sique]

But the theory that the government is "suppressing access to natural cures" is very likely to be true.

Actually, that's very likely to be false. If they are "natural cures", everyone could get them, they wouldn't be medication in a legal sense and thus not regulated by the government.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[oscrivellodds]

The feds have been suppressing weed for a long time. It's a natural cure, and as they say, it's da healin' of da nation!

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[dnavid]

Or cynicism. Just because a lot of crackpots believe something, that is no guarantee that it is not true. There was a conspiracy theory, dismissed by most rational people, that the government was monitoring our email and phone calls. Then it turned out to be true.

Since there's a million conspiracy theories, some will end up being at least partially true by random chance. Even here its hard to give credit to the conspiracy nuts, because very few of them believed the government monitoring was specifically of the character revealed by the Snowden leaks.

I'm pretty sure if you try hard enough, you can find a Nostradamus quatrain that predicts the NSA monitoring. That doesn't add credibility to Nostradamus, it just means when that many monkeys bang on keyboards, eventually some of it will start to rhyme.

No amount of conspiracy nuts believing in something makes it true, and no amount makes it false. If they were always exactly wrong, we could use them as bizarro truth meters. What they are is nuts, and contain as much useful information as atmospheric noise.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[hermitdev]

I love her (I've also a Bear's fan) argument that "We didn't used to have this problem". Yeah, we also used to die by 40. We also didn't even know what the hell cancer is. We also didn't smoke. We also didn't use to drive. We also didn't use to send our kids to school. We also didn't use to mandate our kids go to school. We also didn't use to send people to the moon. We also didn't use to stick our head up our ass because it makes us feel all warm and fuzzy.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Algae_94]

Plenty of people who don't get them are very, very smart people.

You're going to have to give a citation on who these people are. All I've heard about is a bunch of celebrities.

I also question that they're "very, very smart" if they are willingly putting their children at risk of death by not vaccinating them. You are right that I can't tell them to get their children vaccinated, but they better not want any sort of help when their kid is horribly ill from a completely preventable disease.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ShanghaiBill]

Actually, that's very likely to be false. If they are "natural cures", everyone could get them

They can get them only if they can afford them. Under Obamacare, not every natural/alternative treatment is covered. In addition the government funds medical research that suppresses "natural cures" by exposing them as ineffective frauds. I really don't see why this is considered a "conspiracy theory", since it is something that the government is clearly doing, and doing in an open and transparent process.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[hermitdev]

Sure, you have the right to tell people to not get vaccinations. I don't get all vaccinations my doctor prescribes, because as a healthy adult, some are stupid. I get my tetanus, rabies, measles (one time shot), that sort. I don't get a flu vaccine, not because I'm afraid of autism, but because they get it wrong most of the time. And the flu "vaccine" is just as likely to make you sick as it is to prevent it in the first place. Granted, the "vaccine" generally doesn't affect you "as bad", but you still get sick.

That said, Jenny McCarthy is fucking nuts in regards to things like Polio & MMR

Hell, we could be done with Polio vaccines if it wasn't for backwaters countries like Pakistan.

We eliminated smallpox worldwide via vaccines. If she think's they're a bad idea, maybe she'd be willing to volunteer to be exposed?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[plover]

It's called "herd immunity", and it's what keeps an infectious disease from becoming a pandemic. It kicks in when about 80% of the population is immune. If you want to live in our society and interact with us, fixing our cars, exchanging pieces of filthy paper money for cheap plastic goods, volunteering to work with kids, whatever you do, yes, you should not be putting the rest of us at risk.

There's still a concern about vaccination rates, because vaccines are less than 100% effective. Herd immunity can help keep the vaccinated-but-still-unprotected from getting the disease. As long no more than 20% of the population is unprotected, the rest of us should be OK. Of course, if you live in Stupidville, where half of the population is voluntarily unvaccinated, then you get to learn about a different concept: the mortality rate.

I wish that vaccines were 100% effective so we wouldn't have to worry about the stupids weeding only themselves out. It would let you be free to expose yourself to a killer disease, with no skin off my nose. But they're not perfect. We need high voluntary rates to keep most of us healthy.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

If it's "their right", then it's the rest of the population's "right" to NOT allow the kids to be in the general population at schools. It's a very tricky situation, but it's not fair or safe to put the rest of the population at a HUGE risk (this is not hypothetical, there have now been outbreaks because of anti-vacers) because they don't understand science. This isn't just a personal stand for freedom...they are killing people via their choices. When "invoking my right of freedom" results in disease outbreaks and dead children, where to we as a free country draw the line?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[plover]

Q: You know what they call a "natural cure" that has been tested and found to work?

A: Medicine.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Zero__Kelvin]

You pretty much just nailed exactly my thought process. The flu vaccine is an excellent example. It's almost an intelligence test. I can ask "did you get a flu shot" and if the answer is yes I can just about guarantee they are of moderate or less intelligence.

I don't care about Jenny McCarthy. Sure, she's not too bright, but anyone who listened to her and dies is probably just giving a nod to Darwin.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange, I working in a University in a microbiology department no less and the department pays for the staff to have flu vaccines. I would suspect the staff know a damn sight more about vaccines that you do and I can guarantee they are probably a lot smarter than you too.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

And the flu "vaccine" is just as likely to make you sick as it is to prevent it in the first place. Granted, the "vaccine" generally doesn't affect you "as bad", but you still get sick.

Can you give a reference for this claim? The CDC claims pretty low rates for adverse reactions (except for the understandable pain at the injection site at 64%).

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/vaccination/vaccine_safety.htm

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Zero__Kelvin]

Can they figure out how to create a Slashdot account and log in? Maybe you should get them to help you if they can!

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

Now who said anything about children "dying in droves due to not being vaccinated"? But there are some very troubling statistics. Like the outbreak in measles in NY, and polio being on the rise. Kids dying of whooping cough which hasn't happened for decades.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember polio. It was a disease that crippled thousands of young kids and because of vaccination was wiped out until these knuckleheads decided they didn't want to vaccinate their kids.

Here's an assignment. Look up "herd immunity". Read about it and come back here and tell us what you've learned. I know you want to be well-informed on this subject, and herd mentality is why refusing to vaccinate your kids is a hostile act toward the rest of us.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

Yes, it is true that the reason why it is such a small chance is because of vaccinations

The problem with this is that the anti-vaccination folks are essentially relying on herd immunity to stay healthy. Previously, when it was just kids who were too young to be vaccinated or people with medical reasons (allergies, immune system issues, etc), herd immunity had no trouble keeping them safe. Measles was all but wiped out in the US. A few people started skipping the vaccines due to one scare or another (e.g. Wakefield's "MMR causes autism" which despite being debunked repeatedly still gets quoted), but they were fine because herd immunity protected them as well. However, when too many people jump on the anti-vax bandwagon and skip vaccinations, herd immunity breaks down and you begin to get outbreaks. This is where we are now. Outbreaks of disease preventable illnesses popping up because some people listen to Jenny McCarthy railing about toxins (just before she gets botox injected into her), listening to some other celebrity, or listening to "some stuff I read on a natural cures website" instead of listening to someone with actual medical experience.

And when these diseases break out again, people will die. (Despite some anti-vaxxers - who obviously have never seen the diseases - claiming that whooping cough and measles not killing anyone.)

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[AlphaWolf_HK]

If they really were smart though they'd recognize that there really is no good reason not to vaccinate.

Symptoms like fever, cough, sneeze, etc are the result of immune reaction to a perceived pathogen, whether a real threat or not. Immunizations simulate a real infection, which causes those symptoms, but you don't actually get sick from it. There is zero connection between autism and vaccines.

The result of vaccination is to cause your immune system to produce antibodies that will cause an infection to die out before it becomes a threat. This is why vaccines prevent 90% of infections, and having everybody around you get sick is likely to result in you getting sick as well even if you're vaccinated. Sometimes your immune system produces these antibodies until you die, sometimes it stops after so many years so you need to do it over again.

Because you do have that extra protection, why on earth would you choose to forgo vaccination? Only either a moron or somebody without a fucking clue would choose otherwise; definitely a far cry from the "very smart people" you mention.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

You're saying "disease outbreaks and dead children" as if it were an evil thing

Libertarians, man. They're a hoot, ain't they?

That pressure should come from the outside, not the inside, or the diversity will suffer and progress with it.

And why should the pressure come from "the outside" and not "the inside"?

I posit that human evolution has already slowed down to a crawl in the first world, due to risk aversion and longer life spans.

"Hey, there's no evolution because I ain't seen none today!"

You are a funny fellow. I bet you're the life of your dorm.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

I completely agree but would only add that herd immunity also covers people with actual valid reasons for not vaccinating. These include medical issues like allergies or immune system problems or age (too young to get the vaccine). A six week old baby shouldn't die of Whooping Cough because some idiot thinks it's their "personal right" to be a disease carrier.

If not vaccinating meant that only you or your children would get sick, I'd say "it's your choice" (though I'd still argue for vaccinating being the better choice). However, when someone tries to claim that their actions (not vaccinating) that affect other people is their choice, I highly disagree. (I keep waiting for them to claim that it's their right to choose to drive drunk - railing against police enforcing driver sobriety and completely ignoring how many people are killed by drunk drivers.)

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anguirel]

Do we need deaths for a completely preventable outbreak of a disease due to lack of vaccination to count as counter to the "ridiculous claim" that you should get vaccinated? Herd immunity breaks down pretty quickly. We're apparently just barely over the line on it. Every "very, very smart" person making that choice is putting us closer to the loss of that herd immunity, and also one step closer to allowing their child (and every child unable to be vaccinated due to complicating factors that have no other option) to suffer unnecessarily from a potentially devastating disease. Opting not to vaccinate when none of those complicating factors exist is not an "intelligent choice" in any way, shape, or form.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

But the theory that the government is "suppressing access to natural cures" is very likely to be true.

The problem here is how are many governments working together to suppress a natural cure. Let's say that someone claimed that grape juice cured cancer but that the federal government was suppressing the research. The USA is not the only country in the world. Is this research being suppressed in England, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Australia, and every other country as well? Wouldn't any of these countries love to be known as the country that the cure for cancer was found in? Wouldn't any researcher love to have their name go down in the history books as the person who cured cancer? Even a company would love this. It would be the best PR around and would be mentioned in every single future ad campaign. "New, from the people who cured your cancer, ..."

The real reason that natural cures aren't widely used is that they tend to be either a) ineffective or b) somewhat effective. If a, they aren't really cures. If b, they are studied until the exact reason for their "somewhat effective" status is understood. Then, the compounds are extracted, synthesized, and quality controlled (so dose 1 is the same as dose 2 which is the same as dose 3). In the end, natural treatments that fall into group b wind up being standard medical treatments. Or, to put it another way: What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine!

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

And the flu "vaccine" is just as likely to make you sick as it is to prevent it in the first place.

This is, of course, a ridiculous comment which you cannot back up. Please provide a single case report of the flu vaccine causing the flu.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ghostrider48]

This thread is certainly a good display of the pseudo-religious hysteria surrounding vaccination, although you also see it in other topics. Basically, the proponents will produce theories as being irrefutable fact (e.g. herd immunity **theory**), and launch into personal attacks against any who don't follow the populist opinions that the proponent subscribes to. In this case, herd immunity theory, as proferred by Fox in his Measles paper, uses a Reed-Frost statistical model consisting of a closed population of 1000 hosts. (The measles virus, like diptheria, does not follow the herd immunity theory. Outbreaks in 100% vaccinated populations have occured and been well documented) The last polio outbreak was caused by the oral polio vaccine - the human waste of the newly vaccinated infected the water source. Now if you argue that an unvaccinated child puts your vaccinated child at risk, aren't you whining that you don't believe the vaccine conferred immunity to your child?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but it's also smart people who aren't getting their kids vaccinated. They don't like to think of their special little ones as being part of a smelly herd, ergo they don't vaccinate their kids. I would imagine watching (and listening) to one of your children dying of whooping cough would be one the most gut-wrenching experiences imaginable, but then I don't have kids, so what would I know?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[arth1]

That pressure should come from the outside, not the inside, or the diversity will suffer and progress with it.

And why should the pressure come from "the outside" and not "the inside"?

Either that's a very profound question, or a very thoughtless one. I will give it the benefit of the doubts and assume that you thought this one through before hitting reply.

Why, indeed? One can argue that protecting the herd from the outside is short-sighted, and it needs to be protected from the inside too. But I fail to see how that's doable on a herd basis. It would be great if doable, but I am not sure evolution would have the means to favor a herd that also is more resistant to attacks from within. In a macro-evolutionary context with multiple herds, surely it will.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[sjames]

Magic mushrooms are known to greatly reduce the frequency and severity of cluster headache and migraine. A session with ibogaine (also a hallucinogen) is thought to greatly reduce the chances of relapse in addicts trying to abstain. Good luck getting either prescription filled!

One by one, the states are rebelling against the fed's ban on marijuana. You might get that one filled if you're in the right state.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

You got your intelligence test upside down. Incidentally, you're on a different point of the curve to where you fondly imagine you are.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a little spare on details. Could you expand upon that?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

As the parent of a child with autism (and someone who is likely on the spectrum as well - albeit undiagnosed), I'm insulted when people imply they'd rather their child get a deadly disease than get autism. Like Penn and Teller said, even if vaccines caused autism - WHICH THEY DON'T - it would be better to get your child vaccinated and risk autism than go unvaccinated.

The real reason for the "rise" in autism is better detection. When I was a kid, I was pegged as "shy", "weird", and my parents were told (while I was in elementary school, mind you) "he won't feel comfortable socially until he is in college." There was no diagnosis as to what was going on with me and definitely no help. I was just not like the other kids and that was it. With my son, we had a doctor spend six hours observing him (3 hours in class and 3 hours one-on-one observation) before getting the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis. Once we had that, there were a lot of resources for us to draw upon to help him out. (Adults can get diagnosed too, but in my case money is tight and a diagnosis wouldn't help me or my son.)

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[FirephoxRising]

Many people are stupid, but it wasn't that long ago that doctors did pretend to treat black people so that they could observe how untreated syphilis develops.....

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Your.Master]

I am extremely skeptical of the hypothesis that people who get flu shots have a significantly different intelligence profile than the total population. You're basing too strong a conclusion on little contextual data.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

You do know what a false dilemma is don't you? If John Doe decides not to get vaccinated and you get vaccinated, how are you at risk? John gets polio and you do not, there is no issue.

If you wish to argue the money issue that also does not exist. Are you really going to argue about your tax helping someone while ignoring what your tax dollars are being spent on? War, big brother keeping tabs on you and denying basic rights to you and everyone else in the world?

tax money is the only point you could argue honestly, but if you do you are picking a small and.insignificant battle in the grand scheme of the World and. Society.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[HatofPig]

Now if you argue that an unvaccinated child puts your vaccinated child at risk, aren't you whining that you don't believe the vaccine conferred immunity to your child?

It's not about PopeRatzo's hypothetically vaccinated child. It's about anyone who had a legitimate medical reason to not be vaccinated whose only protection is through herd immunity. Maybe PopeRatzo confers his blessings onto other people's kids too.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the best bit;

> third world population will have overtaken us, and will take over as top ape

Because members of third world populations are not members of homo sapiens, the current top ape, riiiiiight...

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[epyT-R]

Universities are known for groupthink bandwagoneering. People who routinely fall for those dynamics are not as bright as you may think. In fact, they do usually get the flu strain wrong, making it pointless and possibly detrimental to your health if your immune system reacts like you're actually infected with live virus.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Master Moose]

I took my annual flu shot a few years ago.

Later that night, I visited my friend and his then chiropractic girlfriend. On hearing what I had done, I got a lecture on how I was poisoning myself and that regular adjustments were all that were required for general health. . .

Glad I don't have to deal with her anymore.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Darinbob]

But it takes only a small amount of smarts to realize it's not about a child living or dying necessarily, but that vaccinations STOP DISEASE from spreading. So yes, it is not about ONE CHILD's life but the health of the community and whether or not other children get sick. We not have diseases recurring in America that were nearly wiped out because so many people are refusing to get vaccinated for no reason other than lies that were told Yes, these were LIES told by one doctor in order to try to push his own vaccination scheme, and it was later entirely recanted but the lie keeps perpetuating itself.

Next up, someone hints that water is not safe for children according to some preliminary study results so just to be on the safe side parents should stop allowing their children to drink water or products that include water. And then suddenly people are filled with self doubt about all this, not really sure, but they've read a lot of books and decided that this is best for their children.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

Sounds like only one adjustment was needed... don't deal with the friend's chiropractic girlfriend. I'm guessing not dealing with her has made you happier which should improve your general health.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how herd immunity works. For starters, vaccines are never 100% effective. They depend entirely on the natural immunological response to kick in to high gear to produce the appropriate antibodies for the exposed pseudopathogen. Even if the antibodies are produced to some degree there is no guarantee that the immunological memory will be established strong enough to ensure a fast secondary response. And even if there is a fast secondary response that is no guarantee that the immunological response will be able to hold the real pathogen off. What the vaccine accomplishes is severely curtailing the attack vector of the pathogen so that even those with a lowered response have a chance. If the attack vector exceeds a threshold then the pathogen will be able to thrive within the ecosystem and pass between individuals, both immunized and not.

This is why anytime there is an outbreak these days it hits both the unvaccinated and the vaccinated. That's not to say that if all of those unvaccinated people were vaccinated that the outbreak couldn't happen, but the likelihood would be decreased and the extent of the outbreak would be diminished due to fewer potential hosts.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[epyT-R]

..and yet all you (presumably) socialists can do is hurl ad hominems..

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jane Q. Public]

I believe in medical conspiracy theories because they exist.

(Disclaimer: that doesn't mean I believe very many of them, or very often. But the idea that believing in ANY medical conspiracy is nuts is... well... nuts. "Those who don't remember history" and all that.)

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[arth1]

The funny thing is that in presuming I'm a libertarian, he missed by a mile. I'm as red as they get, which is why I place the welfare of individuals below what I think is best in the long run.

I honestly believe that allowing the herd to be culled is what's best in the long run, even if it causes suffering and tragedies. That's not trolling, nor is it a libertarian point of view.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[firex726]

Well some do have a bit of truth to them...

The CIA did infect many Guatemalans with STDs without their knowledge or consent back in the 40's. They were trying to see if penicillin could prevent infections, not just cure it, so gave people the drug and disease and watched.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3945...

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Universities are known for groupthink bandwagoneering. People who routinely fall for those dynamics are not as bright as you may think. In fact, they do usually get the flu strain wrong, making it pointless and possibly detrimental to your health if your immune system reacts like you're actually infected with live virus.

Even worse: Original Antigenic Sin implies you may even be *less* protected against the flu strain that actually hits.

I'm a med student and the goddamn flu vaccine bandwagon is like a fucking 15th century Torquemada fervor. I just quietly skip the "free mass vaccination" days and roll my eyes whenever they start beating their drums about how amazing the flu vaccine is. There's a reason most physicians won't accept the flu vaccine unless their institutional bureaucrats mandate it...

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[TubeSteak]

Many people are stupid, but it wasn't that long ago that doctors did pretend to treat black people so that they could observe how untreated syphilis develops.....

Your point being?

The fallout from the Tuskegee experiment eventually led to informed consent laws and ethics review boards.
The science based community has learned somewhat from its past.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[TubeSteak]

You probably have a "natural cure" in your medicine cabinet right now.
It's called "aspirin" and was isolated in a lab ~250 years ago, from the bark of Willow trees.
It took ~130 years for a scientist to figure out how to synthesize it from chemicals, and Bayer Aspirin was born.

Many of the every day medicines we use started out as a "natural cure" whose active ingredient(s) was then isolated, synthesized, and mass produced.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

There is zero connection between autism and vaccines.

You proved a negative? Great, now please show the scientific community your proof, they would really like to be able to prove the anti-vaxers wrong once and for all.

I hope you did, because if you didn't, you are just spreading lies, giving the anti-vaxers even more reason to not trust anyone that claims that vaccines are a good thing.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Vaccines are not 100% effective.
Some percentage of people will always be susceptible to the disease, so the more people decide not to get vaccinated the bigger the chance the disease will take hold.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Antonovich]

Maybe someone can explain to me why we don't just change the law. You don't *have* to get your kids vaccinated but if you don't, and your kid gets it, then you are responsible. They get sick and survive you can be charged with grievous bodily harm/serious neglect, and no doubt lose custody. They get sick and die, you get charged with neglect resulting in death (which is probably close to murder in many places). I haven't thought it through completely, but it would seem like a fairly good motivator... If your kid gets it in spite of being vaccinated, you have done everything you could, so it's just unfortunate.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only do they get it wrong sometimes (I'm not conviced that it's "usually"), but there's no measurable difference in the number of people who get the flu between the years they get it wrong and the years they get it right.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I didn't prove anything, I just stated a fact: There is no connection between autism and vaccines.

That's it, and that is the absolute truth. All of the "supposed" connections have turned out to be false. Not only that, but the numbers are actually in for those who don't vaccinate, and guess what? They have autism at the same rates.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[bickerdyke]

You pretty much just nailed exactly my thought process. The flu vaccine is an excellent example. It's almost an intelligence test. I can ask "did you get a flu shot" and if the answer is yes I can just about guarantee they are of moderate or less intelligence.

That's similar to, but not exactly unlike BS.

Espescially with the flu shots as a very targeted vaccacination, there is not much to gain for "herd immunity". Flu shots only are targeted against this seasons most prevalent flavours of the flu. Neither all of them and espescially not agains the common cold that you're still likely to catch.

So the intelligence test questions are rather "Do you have an increased risk for catching infectuous diseases (e.g. working in healthcare or resale being in close contact with varying, large groups of people)?" "Do you have any health problems that would make catching the flu a severe risk?" and "Do you have any immune system issues that would increase the risk of side effects of the vaccacination itself"

The actual intelligence test if the answers to THOSE questions match the answer of "Did you get your flu shot?".

Personal disclosure: I'm not getting flu shots, but recently updated my vaccacinations against the usual suspects. (Measeles, Mumps, Tetanus, Hepatitis...)

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Sique]

Weed was not supressed because it's a natural cure. Thus it's irrelevant in this case. Weed has been supressed for completely different reasons. Same with Heroin. Heroin is a wonderful medication for the common cold. But it is not supressed because it's a possible cure for the common cold.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Sique]

So it's not supressed. You can get all the homeopathy you want, all the chiropractics and all the bach flower remedies. No one will supress it. As they are no medication (they have no proven health effect), you can't get them in an Obamacare plan.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Barsteward]

we are ALL apes, no matter where you were born

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[dave420]

If John Doe doesn't get vaccinated, and you do, but your body's not 100% immune to polio (as happens to most people), and the disease travels via John Doe to you, you have definitely been affected by his stupidity. Or if you can't get vaccinated due to a pre-existing condition or circumstance, you have definitely been affected. Thank goodness you told everyone you're a system engineer/architect (senior at that - wow! - that means something!) and not a medical professional, otherwise we might have been confused by your inanity. You should study a bit more before assuming you know everything, wading in and showing everyone your muppetude.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Sique]

But neither magic mushrooms nor marihuana were ever banned with the argument they would be natural cures and thus should be banned. Their positive health effects didn't play any role when banning them.

If livestock gets some illness like B.S.E. or foot and mouth disease, often the whole flock is culled. It's an effective, natural remedy against the further propagation of the illness. But culling of people because of an illness is forbidden - and not because it's a natural cure.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

The key concept is herd immunity. Look it up, idiot.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[sjames]

They are, nevertheless, natural cures that are banned. They are proof that our government has little to no hesitation to deprive people of a cure for a serious illness to further it's own agenda.

Most conspiracy theories have at their core a grain of truth.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

No. You were factually wrong, and AC corrected you. You clearly do not understand herd immunity. Your immune system does not exist in a vacuum.

These two comments make the same correction, and quite rightly.

If John Doe decides not to get vaccinated and you get vaccinated, how are you at risk? John gets polio and you do not, there is no issue.

This is wrong. You absolutely are affected by an increased number of potential carriers. I don't care to be the fourth person to try to explain herd immunity, though - please, just go and read the Wikipedia article.

If you wish to argue that it is a real dilemma lets see your arguments. If you can't, then I am correct.

Now that's just beautiful.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[WhatHump]

Because sometimes even the vaccinated get the disease.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Zero__Kelvin]

" Now if you argue that an unvaccinated child puts your vaccinated child at risk, aren't you whining that you don't believe the vaccine conferred immunity to your child?"

This is the one thing I totally missed, and I'm a bit emberassed about it, but in my defense it was a really tough day yesterday.

The fact that you have been marked troll for 100% proving that any idiot who worries that some unvaccinated kid will "kill" their vaccinated one.

Seriously, if there is anybody left on Slashdot that prefers irrefutable logic over ridiculous conjecture, please mod this guy (Gordon Smith) to 5 where his post belongs.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Opting not to vaccinate when none of those complicating factors exist is not an "intelligent choice" in any way, shape, or form.

Are you sure? sounds as intelligent as intelligent design to me, and I am sure both corellation and causation agree with me ...

captcha : echelon ... talk about paranoia and conspiracies, Lol

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Zero__Kelvin]

"So the intelligence test questions are rather "Do you have an increased risk for catching infectuous diseases (e.g. working in healthcare or resale being in close contact with varying, large groups of people)?" "

Really? So if I have an increased risk of exposure, my chances of a vaccine for the wrong strain protecting me increases, then? I didn't know that, and I can now see that you have outwitted me!

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean that idiots may get their beliefs reinforced by that, well, there's no cure for stupidity and all we can do is keep them under control.

If that's an argument against liability, it's easy to refute: it's not the consequences but negligence to provide basic protection.

E.g. sometimes kids die in car crashes even though they had their seat belts on. If the kid wasn't, guess what happens to the adult in charge.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

"If John Doe decides not to get vaccinated and you get vaccinated, how are you at risk? John gets polio and you do not, there is no issue. "

Wrong. You're leaving out 2 factors. 1. No vaccine is 100% effective. 2. Herd immunity - i.e. the chances that someone will get a disease when they haven't been immunized for or when the immunization didn't work for them are lower when more people are immunized because there are fewer people to infect them. People who don't vaccinate are 'free riders', enjoying the benefits of herd immunity without the small risk of vaccination.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Antonovich]

Hence the last sentence? The "so it's just unfortunate" meaning no fault/blame can be attributed.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[bickerdyke]

Not exactly, but there's a good chance that if someone sneezes and dumps a load of possible pathogenes on you, that most of them belong to the strain that's currently in season and covered by this years flu shot.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Zero__Kelvin]

So now you are saying that they usually don't get the ful strain right, and vaccinate for the wrong strains, unless you get enough of other people's snot on you?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

unless that natural cure has a chance of stepping on someone's long tail of patents and profits, then it is illegal, and not researched.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Mashiki]

But neither magic mushrooms nor marihuana were ever banned with the argument they would be natural cures and thus should be banned. Their positive health effects didn't play any role when banning them.

Right, marihuana was banned because of scare tactics(the drugs made me do it), and racism. With a heavy dash of protectionism.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

That won't work.

First of all, it doesn't account for the damage a few vaxxer nitwits do to the general population by reducing herd immunity.

But more important, the vaxxer asshats would consider taking on the kind of legal risk you describe as a badge of honor -- "See? Not only am I smarter than those faceless, heartless bureaucrats, but I won't let them bully me into doing something Blondie McBlonderson and I know is Very Bad, even though there's no evidence we're right."

Remember, this is a group that's already addicted to martyrdom and also thinks "Git 'er done!" is/should be the national motto.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time you changed that sig and stopped being so pompous.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Agent0013]

Or cynicism. Just because a lot of crackpots believe something, that is no guarantee that it is not true. There was a conspiracy theory, dismissed by most rational people, that the government was monitoring our email and phone calls. Then it turned out to be true.

I love how the term "conspiracy theory" means something that has been proven false but there are wackos out there who believe it anyway. The email and phone call monitoring is a good example, it would have been a conspiracy theory before we see that it is the truth.

Some of these medical conspiracy theories may be true as well. The one about the CIA causing HIV is unlikely to be true, because it would required the government to have an unreasonably high level of competence.

Just change the word HIV to Syphilis and it is completely true, and document that it was done. Why is it more reasonable to believe one horrible thing than it is to think other examples might also be true? (Not saying I believe the HIV thing, just saying.)

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Agent0013]

Weed was not supressed because it's a natural cure. Thus it's irrelevant in this case. Weed has been supressed for completely different reasons.

I'm not sure if you actually know what the real reasons for the suppression of weed is. The paper did not want the compitition from a much faster growing and better producing plant to take away their business. Hemp makes the best paper from what I have read, and can be used for clothing also so I bet the cotton growers were worried also. It was also very easy to vilify as it was smoked at the time by those "dirty Mexicans". The public service propaganda at the time was about how taking a single puff on a joint would cause teens to go insane and run around shooting people or jumping off bridges to their death. I don't think you can get much more ridiculous.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Cro Magnon]

I'd be very interested in learning what "adjustments" will prevent the flu. Do they have any "adjustments" that stop those annoying cold virii that I get too?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[stdarg]

Your rationale for absolving parents of vaccinated kids is that "you have done everything you could, so it's just unfortunate" -- but that makes no sense because vaccination is not "everything you could" do to prevent illness. Just as a small example, say you give your child the flu vaccine, but he still catches the flu at daycare. You're not absolved. You could have quit your job and kept your child at home instead of sending him to daycare (which is a known risk factor for illness). So you should still be held criminally negligent according to the spirit of your law.

Perhaps that points to why laws like yours are not acceptable. You are criminalizing things which many people still believe fall within their freedoms to take care of themselves and their families as they see fit. I'm curious what you think about the myriad other activities that may (or may not) harm children. I'm guessing you would be pro-criminalization for things like your child twisting his ankle while playing basketball, since you could have easily prevented it by not letting him play basketball. Maybe that's not harmful enough for you to take notice. I'm sure you would agree that the parents of children who are shot in school shootings should be sent to jail for not protecting their kids. "You don't *have* to homeschool your kids, but if you don't and they get shot at school, then you are responsible for their murder." Something like that?

The main thing I'm curious about is why you wrote your hypothetical law the way you did. You clearly want to encourage vaccination. So why not make the law "You have to get your kids vaccinated" rather than the circuitous route you took?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Gryle]

This coupled with a weird anti-intellectual mind-set that masquerades as "anti-establishment" or "anti-authority".

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[S.O.B.]

Of course chiropractors think regular adjustments are the one solution to everything because one solution is all they know how to do.

When all you have is a chiropractic hammer, everyone's spine looks like a nail.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[BobMcD]

Espescially with the flu shots as a very targeted vaccacination

I was vaccinated for this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... - and got it anyway.

I'm pretty sure the 'target' of that vaccine is big pharma profit, because it may as well have been a placebo.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[stdarg]

A six week old baby shouldn't die of Whooping Cough because some idiot thinks it's their "personal right" to be a disease carrier.

People who want the right not to be vaccinated are not motivated out of a desire to kill babies with the diseases they carry. That's a ridiculous argument. It's just like how people who want the right to drive are not motivated out of a desire to cause car accidents and kill babies, even though they know that getting in the car raises the risk that they will kill a baby in a car accident.

However, when someone tries to claim that their actions (not vaccinating) that affect other people is their choice, I highly disagree.

All of our actions affect other people, so you'll have to be more specific.

I keep waiting for them to claim that it's their right to choose to drive drunk - railing against police enforcing driver sobriety and completely ignoring how many people are killed by drunk drivers.

That's a great example... to me, it's not okay for the police to do things I think are unconstitutional in the name of ending drunk driving. Are you really okay with things like police checkpoints where everybody is forced to submit to a search in order to get past it?? It's not worth giving up our rights to slightly reduce the chance that some people will die. We're all going to die eventually.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

Herd immunity does not make the dilemma true, so you either missed what I said or are choosing to ignore what I said and divert the topic elsewhere (again). Since you will probably argue, as you already have, I'll quote the first paragraph of the article you claim makes the dilemma true.

Herd immunity (or community immunity) describes a form of immunity that occurs when the vaccination of a significant portion of a population (or herd) provides a measure of protection for individuals who have not developed immunity.[1] Herd immunity theory proposes that, in contagious diseases that are transmitted from individual to individual, chains of infection are likely to be disrupted when large numbers of a population are immune or less susceptible to the disease.

Nowhere in this theory does it claim that an un-vaccinated person increases the risk for a vaccinated person. The theory claims that vaccinated people can act as a firewall for those that are not vaccinated. I'll give you another quote which states this very clearly under the "mechanism" portion of the document.

Vaccination acts as a sort of firebreak or firewall in the spread of the disease, slowing or preventing further transmission of the disease to others.[3] Unvaccinated individuals are indirectly protected by vaccinated individuals, as the latter are less likely to contract and transmit the disease between infected and susceptible individuals.[2]

Can you show me any study which backs the dilemma I said was false? I won't hold my breath, because twice now false information has been presented to back the false dilemma.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

The real reason is the widening of the "spectrum."

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[slackware 3.6]

Hey dipshits with mod points "troll" down mod is not intended to silence people that disagree with you or make you feel stupid.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[slackware 3.6]

Then the phama companies should be liable for damages if something goes wrong. But the science of vaccines is so irrefutable that the pharma companies have to hide behind government immunity from lawsuits.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't add limiters to cars which prevent them from going 100mph. We do charge people when driving 100mph ends up killing someone.

Anyway, there are legitimate medical reasons which can make vaccination more risky. Just as it's theoretically possible that someone may need to drive 100mph. The goal is to make risking others lives mean more than just guilt.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you'd make a fine, upstanding Sith lord.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[interkin3tic]

Wait wait wait wait... stupidity is on the rise? Citation needed. That's simple elitism.

I'd believe that stupidity is highlighted due to the internet and such, but stupidity in medical issues seems to be at about a constant rate to me. Fears over vaccinations are nothing new. The vaccine court was setup in the 80's specifically because fears over vaccines leading to silly lawsuits were threatening vaccine makers. Vaccines since their invention have been viewed with fear. Illogical, but it's easy to see why: the benefits aren't as tangible as many medical procedures. It's not like a broken arm or antibiotics where the treatment makes people get healthier, you just STAY healthy.

With the autism link, there was one (fraudulent) study which supported the whole mess, and a charlatan WHO IS STILL FUCKING OUT THERE PROMOTING HIS NONSENSE. Moreover, autism's first signs happen to occur at about the age when the kids get vaccinated, so to frightened parents there appears to be a correlation (obviously not causation). There's no cure for autism, and no clear cut answers as to what DOES cause autism.

You're suggesting it's stupidity that makes people fear vaccines? Well, if you want to look down your nose at people, fine, go ahead, but where does that get us? You feel better about yourself, but we don't get rid of the antivax movement.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Sique]

With the same argument you could state that the government has little to no hesitation to limit the ways we can go by protecting the properties and rights of landowners. Or that the government has little to no hesitation to limit the places we can put our knifes by making stabbing someone illegal.

This is pure rabulism and not a "grain of truth".

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just not like the other kids and that was it. With my son, we had a doctor spend six hours observing him (3 hours in class and 3 hours one-on-one observation) before getting the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis. Once we had that, there were a lot of resources for us to draw upon to help him out. (Adults can get diagnosed too, but in my case money is tight and a diagnosis wouldn't help me or my son.)

Did you not once stop to think that perhaps you were the product of defective genes ?

Of course not, you went ahead and procreated like all the other sheep.

Some day it will be necessary to expunge your kind from the human race in order to
prevent the downfall of the human race.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[slackware 3.6]

"The real reason for the "rise" in autism is better detection." The real reason is socially awkward/no self discipline people want something to blame other than themselves. So blaming some phantom condition instead of stopping being weird is easier. I actually blame the parents for not raising their children properly and blaming some phantom condition every time their kids act up.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Jenny McCarthy doesn't exist! She's just a hologram!

Well, a buddy of mine in L.A. fucked her and he said she was pretty nice,
so I think you're wrong, you sad little faggot.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

Please spell out for me which false dilemma you are referring to - I honestly can't see one.

divert the topic elsewhere (again)

It's hardly 'diverting': you still aren't understanding the core point that ignorant people not being vaccinated does affect you.

The theory claims that vaccinated people can act as a firewall for those that are not vaccinated.

Right. You get herd immunity when most the people are immunised with a treatment which works most the time. The anti-vac morons have compromised the previously-established herd-immunity, increasing the risk of infection not only for themselves, but also for those who have been given the vaccination, but for whom it did not work, not to mention those too young to have been vaccinated etc.

Nowhere in this theory does it claim that an un-vaccinated person increases the risk for a vaccinated person. The theory claims that vaccinated people can act as a firewall for those that are not vaccinated

I really don't see where the problem lies. This firewall effect is exactly what we're talking about. The only way you break the firewall is by a non-trivial subpopulation not getting vaccinated.

Suppose a population has herd immunity to start with, having all been vaccinated with a mostly-effective vaccine. Then, anti-vac morons decide not to vaccinate their children, introducing into the population a subpopulation of unvaccinated individuals. This can go on to break herd immunity: the disease gets a chance to spread, which it would never otherwise have had. If the anti-vac morons had not been anti-vac morons, this would not have happened. Agreed?

Now suppose you were one of the rare individuals who was vaccinated, but for whom the vaccine didn't work. Now you are at risk, all because of the actions of the anti-vac morons. Were it not for them, there would have been so few infectable people in the population that it would never have spread in the first place.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

"Universities are known for groupthink bandwagoneering."

Which itself calls into question many students claims that being educated means being taught critical thinking.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

The mainstream media is focused this week on trying to convince you that "medical conspiracy theories" are whacky and untrue. Published by Reuters, USA Today and other mainstream media outlets, a false story based on distorted research is now trying to convince you that there is no such thing as a "medical conspiracy." No, drug companies never conducted experiments on children, killing many in the process. No, the NIH never took part in criminal medical experiments on prisoners. No, the U.S. government never lied to you, or covered up natural cures, or conspired with Big Pharma. GMOs were created by people who LOVE the ecosystem, too!

That's the nonsense we're all supposed to believe, according to the mainstream media.

By invoking the phrase "conspiracy theories," junk science authors and corporate-sellout journalists try to marginalize the true history of Big Pharma felony crimes, medical experiments on children, factual government collusion with industry and the incredible harm which has been perpetrated on the American people by the medical industrial complex.

In fact, the mainstream media's coverage of all this is truly Orwellian, as if the Ministry of Truth is trying to rewrite U.S. history to eliminate all the parts where drug companies, the NIH and the U.S. government quite literally murdered prisoners, blacks, babies and soldiers in the name of "scientific medicine."

I refuse to gloss over the history of TRUE medical conspiracies and all the lives lost to the destructive pursuit of medical profits at the expense of human dignity. So to answer the mainstream media's delusional attempt to gloss over the real history of true medical conspiracies, we've put together the top ten TRUE medical conspiracies along with links to sources.

Read and learn the true history the mainstream media is trying to erase!

Top ten TRUE medical conspiracies
#1) Pfizer conducts medical experiments on Nigerian children - In 2009 (and in subsequent years, as follow-up), we reported on how giant drug maker Pfizer was ordered to compensate Nigerian families after conducting illegal medical experimentation that left scores of Nigerian children either deaddamaged:

The case began in 1996, when Pfizer needed a human trial to gain approval for its new antibiotic Trovan. When an epidemic of meningitis, cholera and measles broke out in Kano, Nigeria, the company quickly put together a research team and flew them to that country. Pfizer set up a tent right near the medical station where Doctors Without Borders were giving free treatments and recruited 200 children to participate in an unlicensed drug trial.

Parents say they were not told that proven medications were being distributed only yards away, that their children were being enrolled in a drug trial, or that animal studies had suggested that Trovan could cause liver and joint damage.

Eleven of the 200 children in the study died, and parents claim that others suffered from brain damage, organ failure and other severe side effects.

#2) Illegal price fixing to cheat the American people and state governments out of billions - Apparently, the Big Government / Big Pharma cabal in Washington would have you believe that drug makers only have your best interests in mind, not their profits or power.

In fact, for years drug makers have regularly conspired to engage in illegal price fixing, as evidenced by numerous lawsuits and court. As I previously reported:

In what is now the largest criminal fraud settlement ever to come out of the pharmaceutical industry, GlaxoSmithKline has pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $1 billion in criminal fines and $2 billion in civil fines following a nine-year federal investigation into its activities.

According to U.S. federal investigators, GlaxoSmithKline:

Routinely bribed doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs
Fabricated drug safety data and lied to the FDA
Defrauded Medicare and Medicaid out of billions
Deceived regulators abou

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

I spelled the dilemma out very clearly, and you responded to exactly that dilemma. I get the feeling you are feigning ignorance, but I'll play along for a minute.

GP stated that he was at a higher risk because someone did not get a vaccine.

That, is a false dilemma. He is at _NO_ higher risk because someone does not get a vaccine, and neither is anyone else that receives a vaccine.

The Herd immunity you claimed backed this false dilemma does not do so in any way shape or form. Herd immunity states that people not receiving vaccines are safer when others receive them.

You then pump out ad hominem, straw men, and red herrings to repeat the same false dilemma that you claimed not to see.

I won't even touch the irrational and fallacy ridden separation you attempt to make between people that "can't" and people that "won't" get vaccinated because their impact (bidirectionally) is "EXACTLY"exactly the same!

So for the 3rd time, if you wish prove that the dilemma is real show me facts to back your claim. Don't continue to spread horse shit and ad hominem. You won't find any such facts by the way, but you will of course stumble on propaganda pieces spewing similar irrational and fallacy ridden garbage.

For what it's worth, I'm not against all vaccines. As a veteran I have had more than most people will ever hear of, and take no issue because it was MY decision and MY risk. I should have no right to make you get vaccinate for the Plague, because it's an extremely risky vaccine.

I'm anti Flu vaccine because the results don't offset the risk and the benefits of a Flu vaccine are extremely questionable. I'm all for the Polio vaccine, because the results do offset the risk. Not all vaccines are the same, not all results are the same, and not all risks are the same.

When we hear benefits of all vaccines we receive horribly distorted information. Polio was cured at least as much by increased sanitation as it was by the vaccine. People getting the Flu stopped dying because we understand hydration and temperature regulation today better than we did 40 years ago (my grandfather died of influenza in the 50s). Vaccine makers insinuate that the only reason things get better is due to their wonder medicine, which is not just an unsubstantiated claim but completely false.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

obviously, you have not bothered to read up on the basics of the basics of the legal system.

allow me to correct your ignorance and lack of knowledge: you're legally obliged to wear a seatbelt when driving. if an crash happens, and you get hurt, your medical insurance pays for treatment (requiring the money from the culprit causing the accident, but thats another thing). if you DONT wear a seatbelt, they can (and here in germany, they do) refuse to pay (which means, they pay, but require parts of it back from you afterwards).

you DO NOT have to bunker up at home. there is this word called "reasonably". you are never required to do literally everything possible, only evrything reaosonable to avoid damage.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[DavidHumus]

...the government funds medical research that suppresses "natural cures" by exposing them as ineffective frauds.

Not enough of this given the giant loopholes opened by our clueless congresscritters, e.g. the DSHEA - http://www.wholefoodsmagazine.... .

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite the opposite. Autistics are the "new man". It is the hyper-irrational, gut-following dullards that will have to go.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[thirdender]

You're probably one of the people who believe curing depression is as simple as thinking happier thoughts. Newsflash: The brain is a complicated mechanism, and we don't fully understand how it works yet. We do know that certain chemical balances can result in certain behavior patterns. There are certainly mental exercises that can help, but don't be insulting to people who suffer very real mental struggles on a daily basis.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

GP stated that he was at a higher risk because someone did not get a vaccine.

That, is a false dilemma. He is at _NO_ higher risk because someone does not get a vaccine, and neither is anyone else that receives a vaccine.

Even if GP is wrong, I don't see how this fits 'false dilemma'. From Wikipedia: informal fallacy that involves a situation in which limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option. In what way has OP falsely presented only 2 options as being all there can be?

He is at _NO_ higher risk because someone does not get a vaccine, and neither is anyone else that receives a vaccine.

Assuming 100% vaccination efficacy, sure. Otherwise, no.

I won't even touch the irrational and fallacy ridden separation you attempt to make between people that "can't" and people that "won't" get vaccinated

What?

I'm anti Flu vaccine because the results don't offset the risk and the benefits of a Flu vaccine are extremely questionable

If you have a decent source explaining the higher-than-perceived risks here, I'd be interested to read it.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[chronoglass]

as a depressed person.. the crappy but true answer is, not being depressed, really just takes not being depressed.
it's stupidly easy. Would be laughably so if I weren't depressed.
  it's just so freaking haaaaaaard. why not take a pill instead?
but don't kid yourself into thinking that a person can't control themselves, it's a conscious choice to take that decision out of your own hands, and give it to a doctor, and/or a pill.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ToddInSF]

This is exactly why slashdottheads simply can not be trusted when it comes to anything medical.

Modded as "troll" ? For stating the facts about the polio vaccine ? Really ?

"Now if you argue that an unvaccinated child puts your vaccinated child at risk, aren't you whining that you don't believe the vaccine conferred immunity to your child?"

THIS, a thousand times THIS !

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

No, I won't attempt to teach the basics of rhetoric and logic here, I studied them for years in a formal environment as opposed to you pointing to Wiki articles for fallacy definitions. Attempting to nitpick the name of the fallacy won't change the fallacy from true to false either, so it's a poor argument all around.

Herd immunity does not claim 100% is needed, so you are again using fallacy arguments. You said yourself that some people can not be vaccinated so you provide an impossible condition and you know it.

I was not unclear with what you replied "What?' to, so try and work on your reading and comprehension skills.

To your last point, you can use internet searches to try and back false claims so you can surely use internet searches to find information regarding the risks associated with vaccines of all sorts, including "Flu". Further internet searches should lead you to scientists and doctors that question the benefits. I refuse to do the work for you when you are arguing something irrational and illogical (see my first post).

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Orange juice can be an effective treatment for diabetic hypoglycemia. I would be curious to know what percentage of people would classify orange juice as a "medicine" vs a "natural cure" in this context. I suppose that depends on how you worded the question.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Master Moose]

When all you have is a chiropractic hammer, everyone's spine looks like a nail.

Off topic I know, but I love this tag line!

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Master Moose]

I don't believe the adjustments stop the flu so much as they help your body to cure itself should you fall ill.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

No, I won't attempt to teach the basics of rhetoric and logic here, I studied them for years in a formal environment as opposed to you pointing to Wiki articles for fallacy definitions.

I'm sure you're well aware, then, of the argument-from-authority fallacy. I dare not link to Wikipedia, of course. That would make me a bumbling amateur, right?

Attempting to nitpick the name of the fallacy won't change the fallacy from true to false either, so it's a poor argument all around.

I wasn't being obtuse. I really don't get you.

Herd immunity does not claim 100% is needed, so you are again using fallacy arguments. You said yourself that some people can not be vaccinated so you provide an impossible condition and you know it.

Well, you not being vaccinated probably means one more potential carrier, right? ('Probably' because of the chance it wouldn't have worked on you.) The only way this doesn't affect me is if I'm 100% guaranteed to be immune. (Or, I suppose, if I'm 100% guaranteed never to meet you, or if I'm already infected.) I don't see that I can be missing much here, but if this reasoning is unsound, please point out in what way.

You not getting a vaccination doesn't affect me much, sure, but without 100% effective vaccinations, it surely has to affect me some non-zero amount. (The impossibility of 100% effective vaccinations doesn't affect the reasoning here.)

I was not unclear with what you replied "What?' to, so try and work on your reading and comprehension skills.

Condescension doesn't strengthen your position, but I thought it was clear: I don't know where you're getting this from: the irrational and fallacy ridden separation you attempt to make between people that "can't" and people that "won't" get vaccinated. I certainly wasn't trying to make any such distinction.

Regarding the facts, then: there seems to be a 1 in 1,000,000 risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome, and it's also not good for people with severe egg allergies. Regarding whether flu shots have saved lives, this source says it's unclear. (It's still possible it's saved many people from a few unpleasant days of flu, mind, and that alone could make it worthwhile.)

Even if you're right that flu shots in particular aren't worthwhile, vaccinations have proven themselves on other diseases. I don't think anyone would argue that flu shots are the most important vaccination.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

If your comment was directed specifically at my child - implying that he doesn't have Asperger's Syndrome and instead just "acts up" because he wasn't raised properly - you'll excuse me if I don't take the diagnosis of an Internet commenter with zero knowledge of my child over a professional who observed my child for 6 hours.

Before the diagnosis, we thought he was being defiant and put some strict punishment measures in place both at home and at school. The behaviors didn't get better and, in many ways, got worse. After the diagnosis, those punishment measures were removed and replaced with measures designed to help kids with High Functioning Autism/Asperger's Syndrome. His problems for the most part went away. It's always a challenge as any minor change can throw him off, but we're much better off now than we were pre-diagnosis.

Saying "those kids don't really have autism - they're just misbehaving because of bad parenting" shows a profound lack of understanding of what Autism actually is and the challenges that parents of children with autism face on a day to day basis.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Jason Levine]

Chances are, if you can cure your "depression" by just deciding to be happy, you aren't clinically depressed. People with clinical depression don't wake up and say "Hey, today I think I'll be depressed instead of happy." They would love to be happy and not be depressed. They physically can't any more than you can just decide that you're going to fly by flapping your arms (and then actually fly).

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Nephandus]

Yeah, that's what flamebait's for...

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

There was also the Tuskegee experiments on black men by intentionally infecting them with syphilis to study the progression of the disease. This took place from 1932 to 1972. The men were told they were getting free health care.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

No, I won't attempt to teach the basics of rhetoric and logic here, I studied them for years in a formal environment as opposed to you pointing to Wiki articles for fallacy definitions.

I'm sure you're well aware, then, of the argument-from-authority fallacy. I dare not link to Wikipedia, of course. That would make me a bumbling amateur, right?

Attempting to nitpick the name of the fallacy won't change the fallacy from true to false either, so it's a poor argument all around.

I wasn't being obtuse. I really don't get you.

Herd immunity does not claim 100% is needed, so you are again using fallacy arguments. You said yourself that some people can not be vaccinated so you provide an impossible condition and you know it.

Well, you not being vaccinated probably means one more potential carrier, right? ('Probably' because of the chance it wouldn't have worked on you.) The only way this doesn't affect me is if I'm 100% guaranteed to be immune. (Or, I suppose, if I'm 100% guaranteed never to meet you, or if I'm already infected.) I don't see that I can be missing much here, but if this reasoning is unsound, please point out in what way.

You not getting a vaccination doesn't affect me much, sure, but without 100% effective vaccinations, it surely has to affect me some non-zero amount. (The impossibility of 100% effective vaccinations doesn't affect the reasoning here.)

I was not unclear with what you replied "What?' to, so try and work on your reading and comprehension skills.

Condescension doesn't strengthen your position, but I thought it was clear: I don't know where you're getting this from: the irrational and fallacy ridden separation you attempt to make between people that "can't" and people that "won't" get vaccinated. I certainly wasn't trying to make any such distinction.

Regarding the facts, then: there seems to be a 1 in 1,000,000 risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome, and it's also not good for people with severe egg allergies. Regarding whether flu shots have saved lives, this source says it's unclear. (It's still possible it's saved many people from a few unpleasant days of flu, mind, and that alone could make it worthwhile.)

Even if you're right that flu shots in particular aren't worthwhile, vaccinations have proven themselves on other diseases. I don't think anyone would argue that flu shots are the most important vaccination.

I'm sure you're well aware, then, of the argument-from-authority fallacy. I dare not link to Wikipedia, of course. That would make me a bumbling amateur, right?

As stated, nitpicking a fallacy name does not make a fallacy true. A fallacy is still a fallacy, and falsity is still falsity. Faulty logic most often can be described using numerous "named" fallacies depending on the point of reference. Continuing to debate the point will never make faulty logic good logic, it's nitpicking and diversionary.

Well, you not being vaccinated probably means one more potential carrier, right? ('Probably' because of the chance it wouldn't have worked on you.) The only way this doesn't affect me is if I'm 100% guaranteed to be immune. (Or, I suppose, if I'm 100% guaranteed never to meet you, or if I'm already infected.) I don't see that I can be missing much here, but if this reasoning is unsound, please point out in what way.

You just said probably, which is a correct statement. Then again you claim you want a 100% guarantee. No such guarantee is possible no matter what the circumstanc

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

Bah, hopefully you can decipher this properly since I missed a symbol up top and the quotes are off. If you can not, let me know and I'll re-post with a correction.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ghostrider48]

I guess that not many others in the thread have studied virology or molecular biology... or read a textbook :-) What this does show really well is just how powerful the popular media is at influencing individuals, to the point where theories are believed to be factual and beyond question. Wonder what a psych major would make of that? There seems to be a trend these days of people wanting to abdicate all thought and personal responsibility, preferring their govt to make all their decisions for them. Enough to make anyone afraid....

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[chronoglass]

you're right, they don't.. if they did, and could EASILY, they would.. I would happily do the same.
Training yourself to not be depressed is harder than taking the pill.. but the pill, whatever form it takes doesn't handle depression, it "levels the highs and lows" and should be administered along with a training regiment to teach you to "cope" with your situation.

otherwise.. you are a lost cause, which is rather depressing.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ghostrider48]

I probably should've posted links regarding the herd immunity theory though.... For those genuinely interested, the following is a very good read: Epidemiologic Reviews 1993 Herd Immunity: History, Theory, Practice Paul E. M. Fine http://op12no2.me/stuff/herdhi...

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[FirephoxRising]

My point is that society remembers that sort of crap and it takes many years for the distrust to dissipate.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Algae_94]

On a related note, where is the evidence that thousands and thousands of children are dying in droves due to not being vaccinated? Did Jenny's kids die and I missed it or something?

Here's a breakdown of what preventable diseases killed 2.5 million children under 5 in 2002 PDF document
The vast majority of these are outside the US, but the fact remains - thousands and thousands of children are dying in droves due to not being vaccinated.

Regrettably many of these children never had the option to obtain vaccinations. Kids in the US have that option and denying it to them is irresponsible. Every negative aspect of routine vaccinations has been shown to be false. There is no valid reason not to get it done.

I have no right to force anyone to get vaccinations, but if they choose to not do so, their sobs of regret when their child is sick will fall on deaf ears.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

In this case, herd immunity theory, as proferred by Fox in his Measles paper, uses a Reed-Frost statistical model consisting of a closed population of 1000 hosts.

You say that as if it was a bad thing.

The measles virus, like diptheria, does not follow the herd immunity theory.

But poliomyelitis, pertussis, small pox, and many of the other diseases for which there is an effective vaccine, do.

There are actually several ways unvaccinated children put the entire population at risk.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...

But be careful, you may find the dreaded Reed-Frost statistical model therein.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

If John Doe decides not to get vaccinated and you get vaccinated, how are you at risk?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

Of course there are medical conspiracies.

I was just pointing out that the most popular current-day one is being promoted by some very kookie people.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, I knew several kids growing up who I'm pretty sure were somewhere along the autism spectrum, but people just figured they were odd and that there was nothing to be done.

My friendship with a guy with an Asperger's diagnosis has really made me reflect on just how hard it must have been for people from previous generations who suffered with it.

I wish you well friend, and your son.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ghostrider48]

Cheers... :-)

It's always puzzled me why people believe that.
That this whole debate is still going on is a real testament to media manipulation and induced hysteria though.
If anyone ever doubted the effectiveness of using the media to manipulate the perceptions of a population, this should put those doubts to rest.

Isn't it a sad indictment of the society we live in, where we place greater reliance on what journalists spoonfeed us than we do on (admittedly dull) textbooks and research publications? Even though the latter are readily available to anyone that wants to read them?

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ghostrider48]

There is zero connection between autism and vaccines.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...

There **may** or **may not** be a link. Bottom line is, we really don't know, because we don't know what DOES cause the condition.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

When the point hurts your head, just attack the person instead of the point. Got it! I enjoy it so much when people with such immature points make such obvious errors in spelling and grammar. Please tell me more about my "inanity" and "muppetude" man, you are like a rocket scientist with your magical cognitive abilities. Really, because you have to believe in fairies and magic to have such poor skills with rational thought and dialogue. Go back to the TV, Honey Boo Boo misses you!

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[ghostrider48]

I didn't prove anything, I just stated a fact: There is no connection between autism and vaccines.

That's it, and that is the absolute truth. All of the "supposed" connections have turned out to be false. Not only that, but the numbers are actually in for those who don't vaccinate, and guess what? They have autism at the same rates.

Then I'm sure you won't mind linking the study demonstrating what the real cause is.
Otherwise your assertions are nothing more than baseless opinions.

Personally, I think that if such a discovery had been made, it would've been headline news... but then again, it could be that is was & I missed it

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[floobedy]

I enjoy it so much when people with such immature points make such obvious errors in spelling and grammar. Please tell me more about my "inanity" and "muppetude" man, you are like a rocket scientist with your magical cognitive abilities.

Before you criticize others' grammar, you should learn the difference between a comma and a period. Most people had mastered that by the 3rd grade. You, on the other hand, didn't manage to put together two sentences without making childlike mistakes.

John gets polio and you do not, there is no issue.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You can't even write at the 3rd grade level.

You do know what a false dilemma is don't you?

The poster hadn't committed the false dilemma fallacy. Look it up, and figure out what it means.

You're just an utter idiot, over and over again.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the premise that vaccinations are 100% safe beyond all doubt and that not vaccinating will DEFINITELY affect people other than oneself...

I still say it should be a choice. We as individuals should have choice as to what we put into our bodies, even if it negatively affects other people. You fight ignorance with education, and if people choose to deny it, so be it. I feel it's a much worse problem using the force of government to bend people to the will of the majority regardless of truth.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[ceoyoyo]

The original replier demolished one of your fundamental assumptions: vaccinations don't confer 100% immunity. You've spent the rest of the thread writing random things to try and make yourself sound smart. Yup, sounds like you studied rhetoric all right.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[Fned]

Keep in mind, though, that before it was tested, it still worked.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

They can't "take over as top ape" unless they somehow differentiate into a separate (ie, non-crossbreed-able) species. Until then, we're all the "same ape" even though we may look different, genetically we're all still the same (or close enough). The various differences we see now are mostly epigenetic, not genetic. Every single human has the genetics to be a range of shades, but only certain shades are expressed epigenetically depending on the environment. And per most genetic studies done this century, our evolution is speeding up, not slowing down...but this is due to the massive amount of people on Earth - which, as you pointed out, is a totally different yet much more pressing issue!

Evolution doesn't really occur in a "couple of generations" either. Certain genes get suppressed by enough generations over time and those suppressions become genetic (as opposed to epigenetic) and then the underlying DNA is altered to save energy in copying during procreation. When we see genetic divergence in species, it comes from after a period of epigenetic alteration (during which time there is only one species, even if they appear differently) before the change gets "locked in". Even then, often the "pre-divergence" genetic code is still there somewhere, shuffled off into that area we like to call "junk DNA" for future recall in case of environmental changes.

Check this out, it's actually pretty amazing. Watch this BBC documentary too...fascinating to see how the two-tiered system works!

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

The person I replied to said that the only way he would accept a non compliance is by guaranteeing 100% vaccination which we can not achieve. He did not demolish anything, he created an impossible criteria to be correct. A base rate fallacy does not win, it's bad logic.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

I am still unclear what you're referring to by 'dilemma'. Going back to the start:

I learned recently that the wife of the quarterback of my beloved Chicago Bears is one of these anti-vaccine people, based on the notion that vaccines have "chemicals" in them. So they don't get their kids vaccinated, endangering the lives of others.

To which you responded:

You do know what a false dilemma is don't you? If John Doe decides not to get vaccinated and you get vaccinated, how are you at risk? John gets polio and you do not, there is no issue.

I don't see any faulty reasoning in PopeRatzo's comment.

You just said probably, which is a correct statement. Then again you claim you want a 100% guarantee. No such guarantee is possible no matter what the circumstanc

Well yes, it was always going to be a matter of small degree, as we're discussing the decision of a single individual.

The impossibility of a 100% guarantee (I agree, it is essentially impossible) is not a factor regarding the soundness of my reasoning.

The point I'm really making is this: Unless the vaccination is 100% effective, then when someone makes the decision not to be vaccinated, that does increase the odds that vaccinated individuals (the ones for whom the vaccine did not work) may end up getting infected.

100% effective vaccinations are impossible, therefore, it's always the case that when someone makes the decision not to be vaccinated, that does increase the odds that vaccinated individuals may end up getting infected.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

You keep throwing that 100% thing out there, and it's absolutely meaningless. Certainly there are a few vaccines that have very high rates of effectiveness, but I don't believe any of them are 100% (show me one). People getting a flu vaccine are not immune to the Flu, often not even immune to the strain they have been immunized for.

Then to the other way you could be using the 100%, that is in people receiving the vaccines. Again, this is impossible due to many medical conditions preventing people from ever getting a vaccine. I'm pretty sure you agreed to this, but still continue to toss the number out as if it has meaning.

The document linked "herd immunity" shows my argument pretty clearly, even though you assumed it backed the post I responded to.

You getting a vaccine, have no increased risk to that disease if I do not get a vaccine. It is impossible for that to be true unless the vaccine fails, in which case whether I had the vaccine or not makes no difference. We would still both get the disease after we both got the vaccine.

You are imagining a scenario that can not exist! Re-read the above paragraph if you are still confused, and keep reading it over and over again until you get it. As I said, put it in math terms. (I ! D) and (~ D). There is no way for me to give you D if you have I. (I=Immunization and D=Disease, I was going to use V for vaccine but that would look horrible.)

Where there is an increased risk is with the people not vaccinated. Herd immunity reduces their risks, and causes no harm to vaccinated people. The more people with vaccines, the LESS the risk of a person WITHOUT immunization to get a disease. It can not work in the other direction because (I ! D) people with vaccines are immune to the disease.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

To your first 2 paragraphs: I was very verbose, so as to eliminate any chance of a misunderstanding. Did you actually read my previous comment?

Certainly there are a few vaccines that have very high rates of effectiveness, but I don't believe any of them are 100% (show me one).

I made it very clear that I'm not contesting this. Indeed, it's central to my point. From my previous comment:

The impossibility of a 100% guarantee (I agree, it is essentially impossible)

100% effective vaccinations are impossible

Once more: it is precisely because no vaccine can be 100% effective, that we are having this discussion. If they were effective for everyone who received them, then yes, the number of unvaccinated people would have no bearing on the risk of infection for the vaccinated people: the risk for the vaccinated would remain 0.

Then to the other way you could be using the 100%, that is in people receiving the vaccines. Again, this is impossible due to many medical conditions preventing people from ever getting a vaccine.

No, I did not conflate effectiveness and proportion of populated treated. (I believe that strictly the correct medical term here is 'efficacy', not 'effectiveness', but no matter). Also, agreed that a 100% vaccinated population won't happen.

There is no way for me to give you D if you have I. (I=Immunization and D=Disease

Assuming that I refers to has been vaccinated (and not the body has successfully developed immunity), this is false: you have assumed a 100% effective vaccine.

The more people with vaccines, the LESS the risk of a person WITHOUT immunization to get a disease.

True.

It can not work in the other direction because (I ! D) people with vaccines are immune to the disease.

Again, untrue. This would only be the case if everyone vaccinated really has immunity, which, as we've repeatedly agreed, is not the case.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

My points with the 100% is that you keep using it like it's either achievable or important. It's not, so it should be dropped as a measure of anything.

Assuming that I refers to has been vaccinated (and not the body has successfully developed immunity), this is false: you have assumed a 100% effective vaccine.

You are trying to rewrite an issue I presented a couple of times with bad logic. No, I don't assume 100% effective vaccines. Read what I presented again, since this was very clearly written on multiple occasions. The same statement can be used to discount your final sentence. Namely that if a vaccine is not effective then vaccination will not matter for either the vaccinated or not vaccinated. Neither person is protected by the vaccine so the same exact end result occurs. (I ~ D). If a person is exposed to the disease there is a chance for them to get the disease. Please save the easily proved arguments of a bigger pool of D since most diseases are not carried by humans, the pool of potential D does not change very much by a single human choosing not to get a vaccine.

This is all very straight forward logic, I gave the math and it should be simple for you to confirm the math. If you try and assign variables by appeal to either I or E you will end up with faulty logic. Why? Because a person that can NOT get vaccines is exactly the same as a person that chooses not to be vaccinated. Neither person increases _your_ risk to getting a disease that _you_ have been immunized for.

Obviously there is a hint above at a scale, and I believe I mentioned this earlier. If the pool of population choosing not to vaccinate reaches a measurable percentage the potential carriers for D increases. This still does not give a person with (I ! D) any greater risk, it only impacts the people with (I ~ D) risk.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

My points with the 100% is that you keep using it like it's either achievable or important.

For Pete's sake! I have repeatedly stated that I agree with you that it's not achievable! Did you not read I made it very clear that I'm not contesting this. Indeed, it's central to my point. in my previous comment? It certainly is important, however, as I shall explain again.

if a vaccine is not effective then vaccination will not matter for either the vaccinated or not vaccinated.

Nonsense. Effectiveness is not binary, it's a matter of proportion over the population. That's what 'not 100% effective' means. A vaccine might successfully make 90% of those treated immune, but not work on the remaining 10% that were treated.

Because a person that can NOT get vaccines is exactly the same as a person that chooses not to be vaccinated.

Of course.

Look: suppose I am vaccinated, but the vaccine didn't work for me, because I'm one of the unfortunate 10% for whom it isn't effective. Suppose also that although the vaccine would have worked for you (not that there'd be any way to know this, of course, but no matter), you chose not to get it. You then get infected, and then infect me. Had you taken the vaccination, neither of us would have become infected.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

Look: suppose I am vaccinated, but the vaccine didn't work for me, because I'm one of the unfortunate 10% for whom it isn't effective. Suppose also that although the vaccine would have worked for you (not that there'd be any way to know this, of course, but no matter), you chose not to get it. You then get infected, and then infect me. Had you taken the vaccination, neither of us would have become infected.

Glad we could reduce the debate down to this.

What if I am also one of the 10%? The point I have been trying to make is that the very few refusing vaccines don't make any difference in the equation! This would only make a difference if a large percentage of the population was refusing vaccines. There is no large percentage, so me refusing does not change your risk.

Given your 90% effective number, this is the equivalent to 10% of the population not being immunized even if 100% received the vaccine. With ~350 million people in the US do the math and calculate the percentage of people refusing vaccines. It won't make a dent in your risk!

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

Yes, the effect (on the population) of one person is small, especially when the population is already over the herd immunity threshold (~85%), but the effect is nonzero.

The point I have been trying to make is that the very few refusing vaccines don't make any difference in the equation!

Well, no, it does make a difference, it's just a small one. Perhaps a very small one, but still it's non-zero.

Also, there's a No raindrop thinks it's responsible for the flood going on here. Enough people opt-out and you drop below the herd immunity threshold. The harm done by an individual opting-out increases with the total number of people opting-out.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

I think your analogy at the end is a bit wrong. Having a draindrop does not make a flood, does it?

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

I think the analogy holds ok. It's related to the the continuum fallacy in that no one raindrop can be said to have turned it from rain to flood, but it remains that each raindrop is a part of the problem and is making things worse.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

There has to be a flood to have that point of view. We currently lack a pandemic style plague for that viewpoint to be realistic. The common flu virus is not a pandemic, and this happens to be the most commonly refused vaccine.

Even if we had such a black plague style pandemic, claiming every other vaccine relates is not true. Especially with viruses like common influenza.

Making such claims are generalization fallacies, and bad logic.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

I was thinking of the recent rise of measles cases in the US. It's not pandemic though, sure, as the herd-immunity threshold is exceeded.

From the USA Today article:

The country's safety net has become more porous in recent years, as like-minded parents who refuse vaccines have clustered in the same communities. In August, for example, a visitor who had traveled abroad infected 15 people at a Texas megachurch.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

I think we are close to an agreement. How about this: I'll agree that someone has additional risk due to someone refusing the vaccine, considering that the risk is so small it's irrelevant to debate. This would only be the true for only one type of vaccine against one disease or virus however, because they are all vastly different with different risks and different results for each vaccine.

This is very much where I started the debate from, but it does concede an risk so small that it could not be measured.

Would you agree to this arrangement? If not, I really need to see where there is any risk increase due to a person refusing a vaccine. Please show me where my logic is wrong. While you have raised some very interesting arguments, my arguments have not been befuddled or changed by them.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

I think we're just about agreed. I couldn't say as to the actual concrete numbers at play here, but no doubt the per-individual numbers are very small assuming we're already well above the herd-immunity threshold. The example of the Texan with measles raises an interesting point regarding 'clusters of non-immunity', though.

I'm not convinced that there are significant risks associated with the 'standard issue' vaccinations. Regarding measles, for instance, this article is a far cry from a solid medical paper.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

Well, you bring up an interesting point which is separate from the numbers game we just played. I heard a medical doctor say it best a few years back, and I wish I could remember his name. I have a good enough memory to paraphrase, but I'll warn you that this is again not "pro vaccine" territory. Then again, it's not anti-vaccine. I consider it to be a piece of sanity in the world of two extremes.

Vaccines are a medical procedure. Like all medical procedures nothing can ever be guaranteed and no two procedures will be identical because no two bodies are identical. No body is the same before a vaccine, and all bodies will react and heal at different rates after receiving a vaccine. A body having an illness prior to getting a vaccine, even if minor, may cause the recipient to have a different experience to the vaccination of a 'healthy' body. Sometimes these reactions are extremely violent, and other times they are mere nuisances and discomfort. Every time we get a vaccine, our bodies have to react to the vaccine. This is in essence what the vaccine is supposed to do, to teach the body to react to invaders and kill them. It is frightening that we are often giving children so many vaccines, because we can't know if the body has recovered from the previous vaccine yet. Giving multiple vaccines at once, such as the MMR vaccine means a normal body is healing three different exposures to a disease simultaneously. Then we give them Chicken Pox or Polio at the same time? That is insanity.

This goes back to another of my original points. Vaccines are not necessarily bad, but are not necessarily good. Again, I don't believe my position changes any because I'm not arguing either side in the extreme games. I don't believe we need people crying wolf about vaccines, but I don't believe it any benefit to ignore problems and potential problems due to vaccines either. Some are good and important, like Polio. Others, like flue, are not very important and extremely questionable to be forcing on people.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

No disrespect intended, but it would be remiss of me to pull any punches here:

I consider it to be a piece of sanity in the world of two extremes.

I don't believe my position changes any because I'm not arguing either side in the extreme games

This is the argument to moderation fallacy on a silver platter. Calling a position 'extreme' does not make it so. Sometimes, one position is right, and another is wrong. No midpoint should be sought.

The fact that some people oppose vaccination does not mean there is legitimacy to their opposition, and does not mean that the damn-near-uncontested view in the medical profession is wide of the mark.

The paragraph you paraphrase is nothing but empty scaremongering. Doctors do give advice regarding whether people are in an unfit state to be vaccinated. I sincerely doubt the medical profession has simply failed to notice an issue of the body not recovering from one vaccination before another is applied. The idea certainly might sound scary to a lay person, but I see no reason to give it serious consideration.

It's just scare talk. It's not medical science.

Extraordinary claims - such as that the entire medical community is dangerously mistaken about a widely-used technique - require extraordinary evidence. There is no body of evidence here at all. These objections would be laughed out of a medical hearing, and rightly so.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

Clipping a bit to cover your comments.

I consider it to be a piece of sanity in the world of two extremes.

This is the argument to moderation fallacy on a silver platter. Calling a position 'extreme' does not make it so.

Claiming something like "vaccines" as a general term is either "good" or "bad" are all extremes. All three terms I have quoted here are generalization fallacies. Vaccines are not all the same, do not all have the same value, and do not all have the same risks, and from batch to batch can be completely different makeup changing the value even among the same vaccine. It is impossible to logically assign "good" or "bad" which just extend the generalization fallacy. A person claiming "people should take every vaccine" are an extremist implying that all vaccines are "good". A person claiming "refuse all vaccines" is a person another extremist implying all vaccines are "bad". This is simply not true and we can measure it's lack of truthfulness by facts.

You don't discount the paraphrased message from the doctor, so are attempting to claim fallacy when none actually exists. Sorry, if you are guilty of being an extremist on one side or the other, shame on you.

There is no scare mongering, the doctor said what many vaccine producers already admit and recommend. This is in addition to numerous medical professionals which hold this same criteria. Do not get a vaccine within X time of an illness, do not get vaccines if you are being treated for X, do not take vaccines if you are undergoing X procedure, and do not take X vaccine if you have had Y virus/disease.

Claiming this is scare mongering is an invalid appeal to emotion which is provably false based on medical practices and source data. The doctor was surely claiming that we did not do enough of those things, because people _do_ have reactions to vaccines and those reactions can rarely cause permanent damage. Numerous class action law suits show that position to also be true, but of course since we allow gag orders we don't have all of the facts in those cases.

So look, you can get as many vaccines as you want when ever you want them. I'm okay with that, it's your choice. You are judging the reward worth the risk and that's fine. Don't demand that others have your same value system and deny that people should be educated as to the risks of any medical procedure including vaccines so that the issue is propagandized to match your beliefs.

You started with a piece of bad logic that claimed that a person not getting a vaccine increases your risk to getting a disease. This was shown to not change your risk to getting a disease or virus by any measurable amount. Now you have another piece of bad logic, which is that anyone not backing your belief is "scare mongering". This one is worse logic however because it's not just faulty reasoning, it's absolutely false.

Re:Jenny McCarthy

[stdarg]

Hi anon, you are an idiot.

allow me to correct your ignorance and lack of knowledge: you're legally obliged to wear a seatbelt when driving.

You better alert states like New Hampshire, which don't require you to wear a seatbelt.

you DO NOT have to bunker up at home. there is this word called "reasonably". you are never required to do literally everything possible, only evrything reaosonable to avoid damage.

Bunkering up at home is not the only alternative to vaccination. How about, for instance, breast feeding your baby so that the baby has the advantage of the mother's immunities before he can be vaccinated himself? Should that be a legal requirement since it's a pretty reasonable thing to do? If a woman chooses not to breastfeed, should she be criminally liable if the baby gets sick?

I don't think you read the post I was responding to.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

No, you did falsely paint the medical consensus as 'extreme'. You have now invented a position - people should take every vaccine (which no-one is arguing, and certainly is certainly not the medical consensus). Let's be clear: do you consider the position held by the bulk of the medical community, to be extreme?

You started with a piece of bad logic that claimed that a person not getting a vaccine increases your risk to getting a disease. This was shown to not change your risk to getting a disease or virus by any measurable amount.

Do we have to go through this again? Having conceded that my logic was actually sound, you have now moved from reasoning about category to reasoning about degree, and have simply assumed that the degree is vanishing. by any measurable amount is just your guesswork, it is absolutely not 'shown to be'.

I stand by my claim that it's empty scaremongering. It falsely assumes that the medical community hasn't thought to account for individual variation or for 'overloading' the body with administration of several vaccines in a short period.

There is no scare mongering, the doctor said what many vaccine producers already admit and recommend.

You're referring to the 'official line' on the matter of when not to get a vaccine? With which view, then, are you disagreeing?

The doctor was surely claiming that we did not do enough of those things, because people _do_ have reactions to vaccines and those reactions can rarely cause permanent damage.

Unless these extremely rare serious side-effects outweigh the benefits, to describe vaccination as insanity really doesn't hold up.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

No, you did falsely paint the medical consensus as 'extreme'.

Anything that does not match your view is 'extreme' according to you. That is poor logic and irrational but you continue to make such invalid claims and have repeatedly done so here.

You have now invented a position - people should take every vaccine (which no-one is arguing, and certainly is certainly not the medical consensus). Let's be clear: do you consider the position held by the bulk of the medical community, to be extreme?

Huh? I never 'just' invented a position, the position I have matches numerous medical professionals and would have been said at the start if the debate started there. Go back and read the thread, it was you that changed the subject since you lost the debate on increase risk (there is none). I pointed out that your change in subject was wrong out of courtesy, and you turn it into another circus of poor logic and showcase of fallacy.

I stand by my claim that it's empty scaremongering. It falsely assumes that the medical community hasn't thought to account for individual variation or for 'overloading' the body with administration of several vaccines in a short period.

More fallacy, no I'm not surprised!! If it matches your opinion it's fine, but anything else is 'scaremongering' even when medical professionals tell you otherwise.

Unless these extremely rare serious side-effects outweigh the benefits, to describe vaccination as insanity really doesn't hold up.

You missed the doctors point completely, and intentionally since you consistently argue the same bad logic. If you have pneumonia it is not recommended that you get vaccines. Period. Sure, there are a few people that tell you there are no issues, but it is well known that the body will have a difficult time coping with a vaccine when it's already fighting an illness. A certain jackasses make false claims that you can get 10,000 vaccines in a day and it will cause no harm. That same person was offered $10,000.00 to get just 1,000 over the course of 10 days and that person refused (Google that with 'Natural News' and you can find the info). His position, and yours, is horse shit and wrong!

The doctors point was that we need to treat vaccines like other medical procedures, not all refuse vaccines. If you don't feel well should you get a vaccine? Can a Medical Doctor make measurements to reduce risks by postponing vaccines? Are people falsely convinced that vaccines do nothing to the human body, including some medical professionals? Are we doing enough testing of the vaccines themselves to ensure they are safe (contaminated vaccines are uncommon but happen)?

Currently there is very little done to measure a persons health at the time they get a vaccine. Further, we are compounding potential issues by giving multiple vaccines at the same time. Vaccines are also a for profit industry, which has lead to contaminated vaccines being given to people in third world countries to save a company money instead of being trashed because they were contaminated. Perhaps if we did more thinking instead of repeating false claims those rare cases of permanent injury from vaccines would be reduced.

I'm guessing that you will change the argument again, or make up more bad logic to continue to make false claims so let me close with these two points.

1. You can do what ever you want when ever you want. Take your children in to the doctor and get them loaded with everything possible when ever you feel the mood strikes you. I feel bad for your children because that's reckless behavior, but I can't stop you from making decisions, even if I believe they are poorly made. Hell, sit in the Doctors office yourself and get the most vaccines in history. It's you that's at risk, and I can't force you to behave intelligently.

2. We have already agreed that there is no increased risk to you by allowing me making my own choices. I interview Doctors the same way I interrogate a procedure someone recommends, objectively and with as much knowledge as possible. When I have to accept the risk, I can make my own choices.

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[Wootery]

When I put:

No, you did falsely paint the medical consensus as 'extreme'.

I was referring to:

I consider it to be a piece of sanity in the world of two extremes

You are calling the mainstream advice of the medical community 'extreme', no? This categorisation looks an awful lot like the argument to moderation fallacy.

I don't know where you're getting Anything that does not match your view is 'extreme' according to you from. I'm not calling anyone extreme. I'm questioning your use of the term.

Huh? I never 'just' invented a position

Looks like I rather mangled my point there: I was trying to say that no-one is arguing that everyone should be given every vaccine irrespective of their state-of-health/family-history/intolerances. No-one is saying to ignore the do-not-vaccinate-if conditions. That, of course, really would be an extreme pro-vaccination position.

since you lost the debate on increase risk (there is none)

I lost nothing. It is here that you move from arguing category to assuming vanishing degree:

I'll agree that someone has additional risk due to someone refusing the vaccine, considering that the risk is so small it's irrelevant to debate

You have no idea if it's actually so small it's irrelevant to debate, you just made that up. I have no idea either, but I'm not pretending.

If you have pneumonia it is not recommended that you get vaccines. Period.

I wasn't able to find anything on the web about getting vaccines whilst having pneumonia. If you have a good source on this - or on any failure of the medical community to communicate the 'do-not-vaccinate-if conditions' - I'd be interested.

The doctors point was that we need to treat vaccines like other medical procedures, not all refuse vaccines.

I'm just not convinced that they're not already doing this. I've already pointed-out an example case (with the severe egg intolerance).

Currently there is very little done to measure a persons health at the time they get a vaccine. Further, we are compounding potential issues by giving multiple vaccines at the same time.

Again, extraordinary claim, but no evidence. I'm not going to just take your word for it that the medical community is negligent.

Are people falsely convinced that vaccines do nothing to the human body, including some medical professionals?

Well naturally they're not expected to do nothing. The side-effects are studied and documented, and patients are told what they are. You are suggesting hidden damage is done?

Are we doing enough testing of the vaccines themselves to ensure they are safe (contaminated vaccines are uncommon but happen)?

As far as I can see, yes we are.

I feel bad for your children because that's reckless behavior

Extraordinary claim. Evidence please.

let me close with these two points

We're not done yet, surely. Thanks for your time anyway though, if you insist.

We have already agreed that there is no increased risk to you by allowing me making my own choices.

This really is curious. At which point exactly do you think I agreed to this? Please, quote away. I have repeatedly pointed out why the increased risk is non-zero, and you have even agreed, only to go on to assume that the non-zero value must surely be tiny (though you have offered nothing as to why this must be true).

Re: Jenny McCarthy

[s.petry]

When I put:

No, you did falsely paint the medical consensus as 'extreme'.

I was referring to:

I consider it to be a piece of sanity in the world of two extremes

You are calling the mainstream advice of the medical community 'extreme', no? This categorisation looks an awful lot like the argument to moderation fallacy.

I don't know where you're getting Anything that does not match your view is 'extreme' according to you from. I'm not calling anyone extreme. I'm questioning your use of the term.

No, I was not calling a particular person's advice extreme. I said very clearly that there are two extremes. 1) Don't get vaccinated and 2) Get all vaccines. Very few people take a middle ground in the debate, yourself included. You are in the #2 camp, and me arguing in the middle of the two extremes has caused you to label me an 'extremist' on more than one occasion. As stated, you are of the belief that anyone disagreeing with you is an extremist, so any claim of fallacy you have is based on bad logic. Sorry, but that is in plain view. My point is, and was, that sanity is somewhere in between the two extremes.

Huh? I never 'just' invented a position

Looks like I rather mangled my point there: I was trying to say that no-one is arguing that everyone should be given every vaccine irrespective of their state-of-health/family-history/intolerances. No-one is saying to ignore the do-not-vaccinate-if conditions. That, of course, really would be an extreme pro-vaccination position.

This is a rational viewpoint, but is different than what you previously said.

since you lost the debate on increase risk (there is none)

I lost nothing. It is here that you move from arguing category to assuming vanishing degree:

I did not change the subject, go back and see who changed topics. I thought you mentioned something interesting so offered an opinion backed by paraphrasing someone from the medical community. You agree with that position on here, but not previously.

If _you_ change the subject then how is it my fallacy of vanishing degrees? I believe you have that logic reversed, if it exists at all. I don't believe you diverted the topic intentionally so did not see it as such a fallacy.

I'll agree that someone has additional risk due to someone refusing the vaccine, considering that the risk is so small it's irrelevant to debate

You have no idea if it's actually so small it's irrelevant to debate, you just made that up. I have no idea either, but I'm not pretending.

No, it's a logical conclusion. You started with an invalid premise that the Herd immunity backed a claim that you have increased risk due to a person refusing a vaccine. Herd immunity claims the opposite. If there is such a risk, it is not measurable. We have been through that part of the debate, go back and read it if you are still confused. If it was 10% of the population refusing vaccines we could measure risk. The percentage not receiving vaccines is less than .001% of the population (willful or due to medical issues preventing vaccines). If your risk is already impossible to measure, say Polio in the US then a single person refusing makes no difference. If your risk is still high even with a vaccine, like flu then the numbers will be skewed in a different direction. This is where I stated previously that we would have to measure risk for all vaccines against all diseases and viruses separately, because they are all drastically different.

If you have pneumonia it is not recommended that you get vaccines. Period.

I wasn't able to find anything on the web about getting vaccines whilst having pneumonia. If you have

73.6% Of All Statistics Are Made Up

[ibneko]

Numbers are so silly.

Re:73.6% Of All Statistics Are Made Up

[flyneye]

Yup, one of the S words. Statistics; one of the worlds I think of when a confidence scheme is happening. Study (noun) is another one of those words.
Put them both together and you will find the fuel for conspiracy theories. Just add an outrageous hospital bill, an inept intern and the usual detatched ambivalence any member of the public would find at most any medical institution and a pinch of actual occasional corruption, apply the names of any big money involved or just plain old fashioned corrupt government. It isn't hard to see where the theories come from. Whats hard is; to figure out what percentage of which theory(ies are) is truth, not if there is a true one or ones. Even fairy tales and fables are based on some event or activity, there is no spontaneous generation of human behavior.
Its all been done before, now just a question of who, what, where and when.
Just as big an impediment to human progress are the denialists, whom, I suppose wear tin foil underwear. When faced with that which they prefer not to believe, usually resort to denial, down- play, and defer to majority mantra rather than self driven thought, investigation and appropriate action. The equivalent of donning a blindfold to drive the freeway. After all , if they all go the same way, the damage will be minimal and they can always blame the others. But the reward is; never having to deal with the unpleasant.
So, damned if you do and damned if you dont.
Time for a beer...

Re:73.6% Of All Statistics Are Made Up

[Sentrion]

I remember when climate change was a conspiracy theory.

Re:73.6% Of All Statistics Are Made Up

[flyneye]

Now conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories.

Re:73.6% Of All Statistics Are Made Up

[slackware 3.6]

No Global Warming (they even had to change the name) is a conspiracy not a conspiracy theory.

The Cure? Good Luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you imagine how many jobs would be lost if they released the cure for cancer?

Thats bad business

Re:The Cure? Good Luck

[flyneye]

Can you imagine how many researchers could go on to OTHER pressing problems instead of succumbing to the usual dimwitted cliche , you just dropped?
Deep intense regulation of Medical companies, complete with special taxes and loss of IP protection for leaving the country or for having foreign facilities which could escape regulation, would be a nice start to setting this whole mess and others straight.
No offence to other countries, but if we cant make them do the right thing, theres no point in calling them anyones asset. Medicine wouldnt be held back by doing this. Medicine IS held back, as you pointed out by the current gard.

Re:The Cure? Good Luck

[hermitdev]

I would posit: not many. Cancer is the leading cause today. One might call it a ticking DNA time bomb. Who's to say there isn't another lurking?

Besides, even if cancer can be cured, can you cure other self-inflicted "diseases"?

Re:The Cure? Good Luck

[Jarik C-Bol]

Can you imagine what it would take for the medical bureaucracy that can't seem to find its own ass with two hands, a stethoscope and a flashlight to pull off suppressing a working cure? My main argument against 'Conspiracy Theories' is that most large organizations are so incompetent at doing there actual jobs, they in no way have the level of skill, organization and attention to detail required to make any decent conspiracy work for any length of time that can be measured without resorting to planck units.

Re:The Cure? Good Luck

[Sentrion]

That's the problem with conspiracy theories. The proponents of such theories usually believe that there is some exclusive group of a few people actively engaged in a secret plot to accomplish some stated goal by pursuing or suppressing some seemingly harmless agenda. The reality is often much darker, not because there is any sinister plot, but simply that organizational dynamics and the natural pursuit of self interest tend to combine in ways that serve one class of people at the expense of another, or that serve short term interests of decision makers at the expense of the long term interests of all parties involved. These are often best illustrated by case studies, particularly when a large business fails without much advanced warning.

Conspiracy theories thrive when the proponents become aware of some disturbing reality or half-truth from an environment or industry that is not very transparent or easily understood. Recent revelations about "Pink Slime" have people questioning the quality and safety of the food they consume, and after accepting the reality that dark things do happen in the food industry it is much easier for the same people to accept with less, or no, evidence all sorts of industrial food conspiracies. It's not as fun to just accept that if a few companies in a very competitive industry with low margins have found a way to make a waste product edible, giving a slight boost to profits, that other companies will jump on the bandwagon. It's much more fun to believe that a secret organization of world leaders, a wealthy and powerful crime syndicate, or the prominent members of a close-knit religious or ethnic group is intentionally trying to alter our food supply and trick us into consuming food laced with carcinogens and flesh eating bacteria as one step towards achieving some even more sinister objective.

Re:The Cure? Good Luck

[Anonymous Coward]

So many economic fails there. While it makes a nice drug-pusher narrative it is not good business. First off if you can find it then others can do so eventually as well. You know it would be found by someone else, and shoving it under the rug is giving it away to the next person to rediscover it.

Second, it would be great for their profits. If you cure cancer then you consume the whole damn drug market by making them obsolete - every buyer of cancer drugs would pretty much have to buy from you. With the current cost of current cancer treatments they could charge a lot of money and not even be price gouging. If they could get a reliable cure that takes a month or so they could charge ten times the existing treatment drugs and the insurance companies would gladly pay it just for the long-term savings since it means not having to pay for treatment for years.

Third, even the most sociopathic CEO would have a use for cancer cures. They'd rather their company lose money than find themselves dying of cancer that they could have cured.

Re:The Cure? Good Luck

[coinreturn]

That's the problem with conspiracy theories. The proponents of such theories usually believe that there is some exclusive group of a few people actively engaged in a secret plot to accomplish some stated goal by pursuing or suppressing some seemingly harmless agenda.

FYI: I'm one of those people in such an exclusive group, you insensitive clod!

Re: The Cure? Good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

There will never be a cure for "cancer" - the very concept makes no sense because there is no such disease as "cancer". Cancer is a collective noun for a whole host of disparate diseases with many different causes who just happen to have one single attribute in common (only one...).
It's not *a* disease, hence there isn't and never will be *a* cure - it's a collection of diseases and bit by bit we are working towards cures for more and more of them - and the most promising research in this regard (coming out of gene therapy which can target specific cancer cells directly thus greatly minimizing the harm the treatment does to the rest of the body) have already started extending lives, have already saved the lives of some patients who, a mere 5 years ago, were at the death-warrant stage.

That's the reality. Expecting one cure for cancer is like expecting to develop a drug that cures head-aches AND sets broken legs.

Re:The Cure? Good Luck

[gzuckier]

Could you imagine how many jobs would be lost if they released the cure for cancer?

Thats bad business

All the jobs involved in putting out carcinogenic chemicals, mainly,
Ironically, cancer is one of the few diseases that can be fully cured these days, in many cases, like infections. Unlike diabetes, asthma, arthritis, depression, lupus, sickle cell, migraine, atherosclerosis, alzheimer's, etc etc etc. You don't hear about people being treated for cancer for 40 years; it's either cured or fatal, although sometimes it takes a couple of rounds of therapy for one or the other.

Statistical Lies

[pubwvj]

Statistically speaking some conspiracies are true.

Re:Statistical Lies

[Frobnicator]

In this case, some of the conspiracy questions are also due to sampling methods and poor questions.

In the publicly viewable section of the report, they use an "online survey sample of 1351 adults ... The survey results were then weighted to provide a representative sample of the population".

Consider who is most likely to click on the "Take online surveys now!" button. We should all know about the problems with self-selected participants.

If the participant selection method isn't bad enough, look at the questions:

"Health officials know that cell phones cause cancer but are doing nothing to stop it because large corporations won't let them". I immediately see three critical flaws with that one. Do I vote "Disagree" because it doesn't cause cancer? Or maybe they used to cause cancer but have done something? Or maybe it isn't being withheld because of large corporations?

Or another one, "Doctors and the government still want to vaccinate children even though they known these vaccines cause autism and other psychological disorders." What if it is just doctors, not government? What does the "other psychological disorders" include? Can't we all just get along?

As for the results, just look at things Jimmy Kimmel's 'Lie Witness News" where they ask people about made-up things and people proudly state that they know the things for truth. I'd put most of those people firmly into the category who would click the "Take online surveys now!" buttons.

Took me a bit to find this

[rsilvergun]

Operation Whitecoat it was called. If you were a Conscientious Objector you did this instead of shooting people.

There's lots and lots of conspiracies out there. All a conspiracy means is that two or more people get together to do something. Banking is rife with them. So is the software industry (and the hardware, anyone remember when flat panels suddenly got cheap? Conspiracy among vendors to keep prices high...).

Yes, there are crack pots out there. But that doesn't mean organized groups of people aren't doing bad things...

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[rahvin112]

Hundreds of Black soldiers at Tuskegee during WWII were deliberately infected with Syphilis and then not told and deliberately not treated as an experiment to understand the long term impacts of Syphilis. There is also evidence that the CIA facilitated the smuggling and sale of crack cocaine in black neighborhoods to finance covert projects during the 80's.

Given that it's not hard to understand why there are conspiracy theories involving this.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[wisnoskij]

Even just restricting that to full blown government conspiracies. It is amazing the absolutely crazy things the government has been forced to admit to 40+ years after the fact. Stuff every bit as crazy as any of those conspiracy nuts come up with. And that is just the stuff that leaks out. If the government can keep huge completely illegal and immoral projects a secret for 40+ years, by then half the people involved at already dead, then who knows what never comes to light, or what is kept so off the official record that there could never be any proof.

Unfortunately, we know that the government is not completely unwilling to perform secret medical tests on their own unwitting and unconsenting civilians.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[guantamanera]

Considering there is evidence that the goverment has done it before I somewhat believe is pausible. The USA goverment infected black people with syphilis Then later on they moved their operation south and infected Guatemalans and you may find many more here

Operation Whitecoat it was called. If you were a Conscientious Objector you did this instead of shooting people. There's lots and lots of conspiracies out there. All a conspiracy means is that two or more people get together to do something. Banking is rife with them. So is the software industry (and the hardware, anyone remember when flat panels suddenly got cheap? Conspiracy among vendors to keep prices high...). Yes, there are crack pots out there. But that doesn't mean organized groups of people aren't doing bad things...

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Aighearach]

From wikipedia:

The volunteers were allowed to consult with outside sources, such as family and clergy members, before deciding to participate. The participants were required to sign consent forms after discussing the risks and treatments with a medical officer. Of the soldiers who were approached about participating, 20% declined. ...
No Whitecoats died during the test period. ... at least one subject claims to have serious health problems as a result of the experiments.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[ShadowRangerRIT]

They weren't deliberately infected, they weren't soldiers, (they were sharecroppers, and they were provided with free medical cares, meals and burial insurance as compensation), and for the first decade of the study, there was no verified cure for syphilis (the efficacy of penicillin wasn't verified until the 1940s; the study began in 1932). It's hard to blame the architects of the study for studying an incurable disease to chart its progress, though obviously their successors lacked any moral compass.

The facts of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment were bad enough, but you're making it seem even worse. This is the part of the problem. Actual malfeasance gets exaggerated even further; it changes from failure to take action (treat patients like they should have) to deliberate malevolence (intentionally infecting patients). If you reinterpret the world as one in which everything is explained by deliberate malice, of course you'll believe in conspiracy theories.

Sadly, in this particular case, despite being completely off base about Tuskegee, there were in fact acts of active evil perpetrated in Guatemala. Unlike Tuskegee, the experiments weren't on U.S. citizens, only lasted three years, not forty, and the subjects were treated for the conditions they were infected with (though some still died). Doesn't excuse it, but again, it's not a good basis for proving the existence of long term, actively malevolent policies.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[tmosley]

Those are just crazy conspiracy theories, and if you believe anything like that then you are a terrorist who hates freedom.

More and more, we find that conspiracy theories become conspiracy facts. Our government has destroyed its credibility, and as a result, it is no longer a stretch to apply ANY horrible action to their list of monstrous deeds. The next global empire could learn from these failings. But they won't.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[ShanghaiBill]

Hundreds of Black soldiers at Tuskegee during WWII were deliberately infected with Syphilis

No they weren't. What acutally happened is bad enough. You don't have to embellish it with made up nonsense. No one was deliberately infected. They were just left untreated. They were mostly sharecroppers (farmers). They were not soldiers. The study began in 1932, nearly a decade before WWII. At the time, penicillin was still experimental, and not used to treat syphilis. There was no effective treatment before antibiotics became available after 1943, so at least when the study was conceived, it was not quite as unethical as it appears in hindsight, since there weren't a lot of good treatment options at the time anyway. Leaving the subjects untreated until 1972 was, of course, appallingly unethical.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[flyneye]

Somewhere car dealers are conspiring to unload a fucked up Hyundai on you.
Somewhere a store clerk is conspiring with a manager to replace your broken smart phone claim with a used phone from someone elses claim.
Somewhere a panel of experts is conspiring to get you to eat a sandwich with less than 2 % real meat in it, more than 50% soy and 10% sawdust and 38% lips, intestines, eyeballs and assholes.
Somewhere a politician is conspiring to tell you anything you want to hear, so he can do anything he wants to do.
Somewhere a couple guys have a good story to play off each other to get a couple girls off their bar stools and onto their penises.
But then again, there is a quorum of rich elite people who run the world and are concerned their empires will disappear with the planet if the population outpaces the food supply and they are using their assets to decrease the lifespans of the poor and needy, the unmotivated, the radical and the coy. Elvis secretly came across this by eating Twinkies laced with secret government mind expander and now with the tutelage of Richard Nixon and the doctors who keep them alive, they mean to open a fuel station that turns sunlight into diesel and save the world!

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[flyneye]

I think theyve learned from their mistakes and now conduct cheap research on the general public with no regard to race, religion or political affiliation.
The CIA funds themselves. No tax dollars there. So you can imagine when Geo.Bush Sr. went to fund his boys, he set them up with a no brainer. Set up the Coke trade and control South Am. politics, make money and oh, yeah, need some customers, plentiful , stupid and predisposed to.....

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[AK Marc]

They weren't deliberately infected, they weren't soldiers,

Everyone knows the Tuskegee Blacks were in the military. They were airmen.

(they were sharecroppers, and they were provided with free medical cares,

What good is "medical care" when there's a deliberate lie about the care?

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[AK Marc]

They were not soldiers.

Then why do so many call them the Tuskegee Airmen?

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[ShadowRangerRIT]

They weren't deliberately infected, they weren't soldiers,

Everyone knows the Tuskegee Blacks were in the military. They were airmen.

You're confusing the Tuskegee airmen with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. They have nothing in common besides being trained (the airmen) and conducted (the experiments) in proximity to Tuskegee, AL. Tuskegee is an almost exclusively Black/African American city, so most things that are associated with Tuskegee are also associated with black people.

(they were sharecroppers, and they were provided with free medical cares,

What good is "medical care" when there's a deliberate lie about the care?

If you read another sentence or two, you'd note that there was no verified treatment for syphilis for the first decade of the experiments. Providing palliative care to those with incurable diseases is a net good; there are legitimate philosophical arguments over how much information a doctor should provide when the information cannot be understood or acted upon in a meaningful way.

Clearly this was unethical, but recall, this was Jim Crow era. A lot of people considered black people sub-human. Sure, the doctors didn't tell them they had syphilis. But the South made it nigh impossible for them to vote, hold elected office, get a meaningful education, buy property, use public services, receive a fair trial, etc. We were kind of awful in general; the Tuskegee experiments weren't that much more awful when compared to everything else we did.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Anonymous Coward]

quite an irony that this story is right below the science maverick dearth story.

"science types" are becoming more fundamentalist than the westboro baptist church... no tolerance for anything... just that they are crazy... refuting an argument is a different thing.

two of the smartest people i know are convinced that HIV is manmade... from the nazi labs that came over after wwii with the scientists we kidnapped.

regardless of this assertion, there is no question that at the very least, there is a passive conspiracy in the pharma industry to NOT FIND a cure to hiv... it is too lucrative to treat.

the cure for hiv is already peeking through from behind the curtain.... there are plenty of reversals, and any number of very promising potential avenues of research.

there is just no money available... it is, in a way, preventing planned obsolescence... a much easier argument to make in hiv than in cancer... but it still holds water there too.

doctors that are making real efforts with promise to cure hiv are being subjected to public excoriation, via government and private sources. people have been shut out of medicine trying to do so.

the more people there are in the world, the more sociopaths we have.... and consequently, the more smart sociopaths. we would be silly to think that as we become a more unwieldy population that things like this wont happen.

'rationality' is now sharing some of the traits of the evolution deniers... another irony.

one of the greatest thinkers (st thomas aquinas) in the western world would refute arguments by proving them true first... his five ontological proofs come on the heels of his disproving the existence of god. how far we have come.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[sjames]

While the architects of the Tuskegee experiment may not have been the bad guys, you are seriously underplaying the evil of anyone involved once the cure for syphilis became known. They purported to be providing quality medical care when they were knowingly and willfully failing to cure an easily curable condition. Keep in mind that they also stood by while others were infected and babies were born with congenital syphilis.

That sounds both malicious and deliberate to me. Even worse, they had 4 decades to reconsider and cure the subjects and they didn't do it.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Three decades, not four, but your point is valid. I'm not really trying to defend them. I do think the location and era (largely Jim Crow) influenced this more than a general lack of medical ethics; it's a lot easier to justify atrocities when you don't see your subjects as truly human. Think less "conspiracy of unscrupulous doctors" and more "complete inability to see members of another race as people".

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[AK Marc]

If you read another sentence or two, you'd note that there was no verified treatment for syphilis for the first decade of the experiments.

So when the treatments were available they were given? The "unverified" treatments were given? Perhaps doses of arsenic of varying strength to see whether near-lethal doses cured it better than longer doses of lower levels? No, there was no care given, and there was to be no care given. It wasn't about treating it, but from what I have seen, it was an experiment to track the pathology (especially used to diagnose dead people, especially royalty and other "important" figures). It was torture, nothing more. It's "unethical" like the holocaust was "unethical".

the Tuskegee experiments weren't that much more awful when compared to everything else we did.

And serve to prove that US government conspiracies do exist.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Hognoxious]

Everyone knows the Tuskegee Blacks were in the military. They were airmen.

Wrong movie, sleepy boy.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[dave420]

Because you are massively confused, and don't seem to realise it. Which kind of brings everything else you say into doubt, as if you can be so obviously incorrect about this, what else are you wrong about?

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Eunuchswear]

Drat, bad mod. Why no fucking undo button

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Anonymous Coward]

on that sliding moral scale, you can almost call the experiment a good thing, as bringing an early ending to the life of someone so mistreated by society is doing them a favor.

It was a shitty, shitty thing.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Anonymous Coward]

Marc didn't "confuse" anything. He's known to take whatever is said and force his own thoughts into any potential gaps to try to make it seem like something was implied even if he can't back it up in a meaningful way. You're feeding a troll. He's part of the problem you spoke of about as someone making a problem seem worse by distorting the facts.
 
He posts his garbage endlessly and from time to time gets modded up just because he throws something out that most are prone to agree with even if it lacks any real facts. Sometimes even to the point that a five year old could soundly dismiss his posts as nonsense... Slashdot isn't know for rational discussion.
 
Please stop feeding this troll.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't feed the trolls.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read another sentence or two, you'd note that there was no verified treatment for syphilis for the first decade of the experiments. Providing palliative care to those with incurable diseases is a net good; there are legitimate philosophical arguments over how much information a doctor should provide when the information cannot be understood or acted upon in a meaningful way.

The problem here is that once penicillin was discovered to be effective as a treatment for syphilis, this treatment was denied. In fact, one such study subject left the area to get treated when he heard about it, and when the hospital discovered he was a Tuskegee subject and refused to treat him. That is the point where the study went to a very dark place. Never mind all of the people who spread the infection just because they didn't know they had it.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[nedlohs]

No one does. Well I guess you do, but you are clearly an idiot.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, there are plenty of "conspiracy theories" that are real. I prefer to use the term "business as usual". Why did they do that? Because they _could_.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[AK Marc]

Previous people were confused about them being in the military, so I just pointed out the overlap that causes confusion. Why all the hate?

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[AK Marc]

I'm not wrong about anything. I indicated that people confuse the Tuskegee Airmen and the Tuskegee Experiment. Are you asserting that nobody confuses them?

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[AK Marc]

The whoosh is you getting the joke, but not realizing it was a joke. There's a reason so many people think the vicctims of the Tuskegee Experiment were in the military. What could that reason be?

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[AK Marc]

I never distorted a single fact. I pointed out associated facts that cause confusion. That you can't make basic connections like that makes you the idiot troll stalker.

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Anonymous Coward]

er because they're stupid, the Airmen were wait for it... DIFFERENT PEOPLE!

shocking I know, how on Earth could there be more than one group of people in the same town!

Re:Took me a bit to find this

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh Huh:

...because researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin as an effective cure for the disease they were studying.

Nothing to see here. Move along citizens

[Anonymous Coward]

Tuskegee

Conspiracy or act of legislature?

[GodInHell]

In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory.

Marijuana is still illegal, right? I mean, it's it a conspiracy theory if I can point to the status and rules at issue?

Re:Conspiracy or act of legislature?

[Anonymous Coward]

There were actual medical conspiracies to keep vaccination as respectable as possible to cure smallpox. It worked, smallpox is gone, probably saving millions years. We missed the opportunity to prove vaccination works using double blind experiments though :
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2012/09/05/when-americans-rejected-small-pox-vaccines/

Re:Conspiracy or act of legislature?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Marijuana cures nothing, except perhaps intelligence.

Gosh, then reading this patent would become so difficult!

They might believe it because it's true

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment? The U.S. Public Health Service concealed the diagnosis of syphilis from patients so they could study the disease, even after a standard cure was in common use.

Like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes conspiracies are easier to understand cuz they are true.

Re:Like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment?

[Sentrion]

It's worth noting that the rumors of death camps and the mass extermination of men, women, and children of "undesirables" by the Nazis were generally disregarded by Allied commanders as wartime propaganda until they began stumbling onto mass graves and liberating the death camps themselves. Such propaganda would not have been unusual, as "Huns" were often depicted during the First World War as eating babies in propaganda posters.

freaking DUH

[Anonymous Coward]

how many new "Cures" crop up anymore with modern technology, everything is about Treatments anymore and whats muh Muntly payment. its pretty batshit obvious when the legalized dope dealer goes on tv and says the first one is on us.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that infecting African-Americans with AIDS was done using homepathic medicine.

my thoughts on conspiracy's

[the simurgh]

"Lesson number one: trust no one. The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them. Welcome to earth, watch your back no one else will.

Re:my thoughts on conspiracy's

[ScentCone]

my thoughts on conspiracy's

I'm still trying to figure out what the Trilateral Commission, the Rothschilds, the Masons, and George Soros hope to gain by tricking people into being so actively bad at understanding the difference between the plural and possessive uses of the apostrophe. There must be some money in it, somewhere.

Re:my thoughts on conspiracy's

[HornWumpus]

I think they stuff coal up the butts of grammar pedants and come back later harvesting diamonds.

Re: my thoughts on conspiracy's

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy! While you were playing grammar nazi they were stealing your cash a d humping your brother.

Re:my thoughts on conspiracy's

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I seriously the only one who got that Venture Brothers reference?

Re:my thoughts on conspiracy's

[Anonymous Coward]

In this comment chain I mean.

Other 50% are uninformed

[iamacat]

Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, without liver side effects statin pills. Yet FDA bans sale of supplements calibrated to have enough active components.

Pot has helped millions to get measurable relieve from debilitating conditions. Yet federal government still considers it to be highly addictive and without medical value.

Countless food additives have been banned in most of the world outside US and most countries require clear labeling of genetically modified foods? Are our government scientists that much smarter?

FDA review process denies potentially life saving treatments for many years, even to people who are about to die without them anyway.

With this kind of track record, it's no wonder people are suspicious about other things. If a vaccine killed 10% of people compared to statistically saved lives, would YOU trust our government to admit to that?

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[hedgemage]

Cite sources please. Reputable journals only.

Problem is that the US has made it nearly impossible to research the effects of marijuana/THC so there is a real lack of good data. Facing this lack of evidence, too many people are stating outrageous claims that pot will do everything from cure the common cold to cancer and everything in between.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[mjwx]

Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, without liver side effects statin pills. Yet FDA bans sale of supplements calibrated to have enough active components.

If people who believe vitamin supplements work were included in this study, that number would be a hell of a lot higher than "nearly 50%".

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[roc97007]

Hang on, Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, because red rice yeast contains a statin. Lovastatin, in fact, which is a naturally occuring statin as opposed to a synthetic. (Some people think this is a good thing; personally I have a bad reaction to all statins, including lovastatin.)

You should add Thiomersal to the mix. The US is lagging behind a bit in that area. (Still in flu shots, and in animal vaccines.)

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust your government and live by the Constitution and all shall be well, citizen. Anything bad we are doing is in your best interest to fight your worst nightmares, terrorism, child pornography and drugs (and communism).

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[roc97007]

Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, without liver side effects statin pills. Yet FDA bans sale of supplements calibrated to have enough active components.

If people who believe vitamin supplements work were included in this study, that number would be a hell of a lot higher than "nearly 50%".

Psst. The FDA controls the import of Red Rice Yeast because it *contains a statin*. Any red rice yeast you can buy on the shelf has had the naturally occurring statin removed.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[JimSadler]

And in an unregulated industry how do you determine if your red rice yeast is authentic or the right strain? We can't even get real olive oil in grocery stores as most brands contain almost zero olive oil. So far the health food industry is a total scam with no assurance at all of any element of fairness or honesty.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[mjwx]

Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, without liver side effects statin pills. Yet FDA bans sale of supplements calibrated to have enough active components.

If people who believe vitamin supplements work were included in this study, that number would be a hell of a lot higher than "nearly 50%".

Psst. The FDA controls the import of Red Rice Yeast because it *contains a statin*. Any red rice yeast you can buy on the shelf has had the naturally occurring statin removed.

Erm... that does not mean vitamin supplements work, in fact your own post says the FDA prohibits substances that have an active ingredient powerful enough to have an effect.

It's like the morons who claim all gluten free foods are good for you whilst they ignore that polonium is gluten free.

If people understood the science behind nutrition, they'd see things like vitamin supplement as the scam they are. You get more vitamins out of fruit and vegetables then supplements with 3-4 times the dosage.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[quantaman]

Red rice yeast is as effective as statins at lowering cholesterol, without liver side effects statin pills. Yet FDA bans sale of supplements calibrated to have enough active components.

So I don't know a lot about the red rice yeast thing but I have to defend the FDA here. To be an 'active component' it means that the ingredient in question is actually having a biological effect. The moment you're taking something that has the potential to significantly affect your body chemistry you're taking something that has the ability to harm you. How do we figure out what that something is? We study it, we understand what the effect is, good things and bad things, for what people do the good or bad things occur, at what dosages, etc.

A natural product is going to be worse for your health. If you're getting enough of the ingredient to affect your health you're also getting more of the side effects than you would through a pill that was properly designed and tested.

Re: Other 50% are uninformed

[ShieldW0lf]

Reputable journals? Seriously? Do you read the news at all?

There are no reputable journals. There are no trustworthy labs, no trustworthy drug companies. There are salesmen, and there is money. That's all. Sucks, but it's how the world is today.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[nine-times]

And though they're not a medical conspiracies, quite a few 'conspiracy theories' have turned out to be true in the past few decades. We've found out in recent years that our government *does* have secret prisons where they torture people. The NSA *does* read your email and tap your phone. People within the finance industry *do* apparently help to torpedo the economy so that they can make money from the collapse. Private prisons *do* raise money for candidates who support excessive prison terms and mandatory sentencing. The Republican party *does* have meetings where rich funders talk to the presidential nominee about how poor people are parasites and rich people deserve more money. Wasn't there something about the CIA selling crack?

All of these conspiracy theories have turned out to be more or less real. It doesn't seem to crazy to think that the pharmaceutical industry has engaged in some kinds of similarly insane shenanigans.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[AK Marc]

And when they do allow tests, the burry any that doesn't show what they want. There was one I saw that was around smoking MJ and driving. The result was that driving high was *safer* than driving sober. The reason was that stoners over-estimate their impairment, while drunks under-estimate theirs. The stoners said "dude, I feel *soooo* high" and drove slower and more carefully when high than when sober.

But I can't link to it. I had it bookmarked years ago, but it disappears from everywhere I've seen it. I'd suspect a conspiracy, but we know that's unlikey, right?

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[iamacat]

Nope, eating refined sugar by the spoon doesn't have the same effect as eating whole fruit, taking cholesterol pills doesn't have the same effect as eating eggs and apparently eating red yeast doesn't screw your liver. While pills have been tested for less than half a century, natural food has been tested by humans and our primate ancestors for millennia. Most importantly, it's not for FDA to ban and for private companies to patent stuff that people have been eating long before patents or regulations were conceived.

Re: Other 50% are uninformed

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no reputable journals. There are no trustworthy labs, no trustworthy drug companies. There are salesmen, and there is money. That's all.

I'll certainly admit that the headline journals and the studies published therein have some issues, but to paraphrase Isaac Asimov: if you think the results published in major academic journals are just as untrustworthy as Dr. Naturopath's Blog and Online Homeopathy Clinic, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Re: Other 50% are uninformed

[Anonymous Coward]

It is an old trick. Ask for something that does not exist, then use the unavailability to uphold your own worldview.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[quantaman]

Nope, eating refined sugar by the spoon doesn't have the same effect as eating whole fruit, taking cholesterol pills doesn't have the same effect as eating eggs and apparently eating red yeast doesn't screw your liver. While pills have been tested for less than half a century, natural food has been tested by humans and our primate ancestors for millennia. Most importantly, it's not for FDA to ban and for private companies to patent stuff that people have been eating long before patents or regulations were conceived.

So I don't buy the sugar vs fruit analogy because you're talking about food which means you're comparing something with multiple active ingredients as opposed to just one.

And ancestral knowledge can actually be pretty brutal at evaluating evidence, unless the side effects were extremely common all people had to go on was random anecdotes, it doesn't matter how many millennia they used it, they never had the knowledge to fully evaluate the safetyr.

Even your chosen example turns out to be wrong, wikipedia alone lists seven peer-reviewed articles linking red rice yeast to muscle myopathy and liver damage. If you are relying on natural supplements for your health I think you should be concerned that even with 1000+ years Chinese medicine was unable to detect this risk.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[phantomfive]

That's a study that would lose its effect just by being publicized.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[s.petry]

Aspirin a man made synthetic compound mimicking the pain relieving properties of willow bark? I believe that every anti-biotic we use today is also a mimicker of natural remedies. Numerous plants have known medicinal properties, such as coagulants, anti-coagulants, antiseptics, anti-fungus, anti-bacterial, numbing, etc.. etc..

If you drink Milk purchased in a store you get Milk fortified with Vitamin A and Vitamin D. We are trying to fortify Rice with Vitamin A for mass consumption. Pregnant women are given massive amounts of prescription vitamins, and we know that certain deficiencies cause health problems like gout, rickets, scurvy, immune deficiency, and more. If you believe a recent report regarding vitamins this is obviously a waste of time because artificial sources of vitamins are all useless (This was all over the TV news a few months back).

So while I believe you have a point regarding false claims, but take issue with you doing so in only one direction. I also take issue with you requesting "reputable journals" when you know none exist. You state right after you make that request that there is no evidence in any journals and even provide a reason why the data is lacking.

Perhaps I'm twisting your point a bit, if I am my apologies. I'm astounded at how many people simply don't get that the US position on drugs and medications purely backs money making operations. Often times their own work gets contradicted by themselves to further a different portion of their funding (see the vitamin example above). People for the most part completely miss that part, don't do any research to find contradictions or problems, and both ends of the spectrum end up providing false information.

People claiming there are no natural remedies are not telling the truth, intentionally or otherwise. There are a great many natural remedies, but they are not as profitable to make, and not as easy to provide to the masses. Looking at the abuses to antibiotics and various pain relievers over the last 30 years, the mass distribution and low cost has not necessarily a good thing.

Finally, I agree that people make false claims regarding natural remedies, making them more than what they are. At the same time you can't honestly deny that Companies/Corporations make false claims regarding their products. Countless class action lawsuits back the latter fact. People don't know who to trust, and quite frankly you can't blame them. The FDA stopped being an agency looking out for the best interest of our citizens long ago.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[s.petry]

So you are petitioning to get vitamin A and D removed from Milk, all sorts of vitamins and minerals removed from cereals and oatmeal? Are you further demanding that vitamin A fortified Rice should be killed? Will you refuse to allow a pregnant woman or an elderly person to take vitamins because it's a scam, even though a doctor will highly recommend it and even provide prescription vitamins?

You can't have it both ways without suffering extreme cognitive dissonance. If vitamin supplements do nothing, then they do nothing and we have wasted millions of man hours studying nutrition and health. If they do something, then they all do something. Obviously different concentrations would have different impact, but vitamins from GNC would not be a scam if you believe vitamins from Bayer work.

I really don't think you should be worried about how much other people understand, because the science behind nutrition very much backs adding vitamins and minerals to diets. We have had a good amount of success with this method too. I know people that eat very little fruit that don't have scurvy or rickets.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[AK Marc]

Bah, stoners don't read.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[markass530]

Red yeast rice is a statin drug -- with all the same side effects, nice try though

Re: Other 50% are uninformed

[markass530]

they're actually behind you right now...

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[dave420]

Your point doesn't really make sense. There are countries outside the US who also engage in full-on medical research, and they don't agree with you. Yes, there are natural substances which are great, but when they are discovered to be great, they are made part of what we call "medicine", which is the point that has been plastered all over this thread - natural cures which are shown to work are called "medicine". And people still don't give a damn about your job. It has nothing to do with the conversation, is meaningless in itself, and makes you look like an insecure muppet.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[s.petry]

My point makes perfect sense, because it's wrong to claim that there are no natural remedies. A great number of remedies are exactly a mimicker of natural compounds. I gave aspirin and antibiotics as examples of "natural medicine".

How much intellectual capacity does it take to both not understand what a "signature" is and use this to divert the point? Not a whole lot. For what it's worth, my signature has been the same for about 10 years and I have no interest in changing it because it shows me who I am dealing with intellectually.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[Evil Pete]

Aspirin [wikipedia.org] a man made synthetic compound mimicking the pain relieving properties of willow bark?

Willow bark does not relieve pain. It has anti-inflammatory properties just as aspirin does, but not pain relief. The addition of the acetyl group artificially produced the pain relief effects.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[s.petry]

Good grief, I provided a link to the Wiki which exactly backs my statement, and you got it wrong.

Plant extracts, including willow bark and spiraea, of which salicylic acid was the active ingredient, had been known to help alleviate headaches, pains, and fevers since antiquity. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates (c. 460 - c. 377 BC), left historical records describing the use of powder made from the bark and leaves of the willow tree to help these symptoms.[140]

Yes it does relieve pain, yes it does reduce swelling, yes it does relieve fevers, and we have known it's properties for at least 2,500 years.

Re:Other 50% are uninformed

[david_thornley]

A friend of mine who worked for the FDA for some years takes all her herbal supplements and whatever as teas. She says nobody regulates the supplements, but the teas have some oversight.

"conspiracy theory" is loaded language

[globaljustin]

Researchers messed up from the start using the "conspiracy theory" contextualization.

Operation Northwoods would certainly **sound** like a conspiracy theory, a US gov't plan investigating the use of false-flag actions on US population to manufacture consent, but follow the link to the official documents, declassified, proving the plan existed

Or how about The Gulf of Tonkin Incident which was a **all fake** and used to justify Vietnam intervention. Again...follow the link...the documents are declassified and it's true.

Today's conspiracy "theory" is tomorrows class action settlement!

By using the "conspiracy theory" contextualization, the researchers then biased **what theories they chose** and to go deeper **which variation of the theory to use**

ex: Flouride. Some say flouride in the water table is for dumping toxic chemicals to cause their Pineal Gland to calcify...others don't think it's so devious...just a way to make money off of industrial waste (selling something uneccesary on decades-long contracts w/ governments) not actually ***hurt people***

from TFA, here's the **versions** of various theories they chose:

They include the theory that the government knows cell phones cause cancer but does nothing about it, that genetically modified organisms are being used to shrink the world's population, that routine vaccinations cause autism and that water fluoridation is a way for companies to dump dangerous chemicals into the environment.

Notice that ****corporate conspiracies**** are not mentioned!!!

The health care industry profits from **artificial scarcity**...and lobbying to get unsafe, easily abusable drugs approved by the FDA over objections (see: Rudy Guilianni's early career as an attorney ;)

Artificial Scarcity & corporate cronyism is not a "conspiracy theory"...in fact, if you toss out the craziness, just about all "conspiracy theories" can be explained by unscrupulous people doing criminal behavior on a large scale.

Re:"conspiracy theory" is loaded language

[s.petry]

You cover things very well, but I'd like to make an addition to your repertoire. Does fluoride cause cause the calcification of the pineal gland? We have evidence that this is true, though there could obviously be additional factors involved. The theories try to address why someone would intentionally harm others, but the theories do not change the effect of calcification.

To make matters worse we often see obnoxious theories introduced to confuse issues and maintain a status quot.

The best example of this is not in medicine but easily demonstrates the problem. Look at "Global Warming" as a prime example of the Government funding both sides of the debate, and the impact of that debate. The impact of that debate is that nothing has been done to resolve any issues. Polluters are still polluting, Dumpers are still dumping, Petroleum is still being used at higher and higher rates, and _nothing_ is being corrected.

Re:"conspiracy theory" is loaded language

[ameen.ross]

To make matters worse we often see obnoxious theories introduced to confuse issues and maintain a status quot.

That's called muddying the waters and I frequently point that out to people I consider naive as well as people who exaggerate, IE the tinfoil hatters.

There are plenty of conspiracies and often the only conspiracy theory is the one where the conspirators are made out to be the victims.

Re:"conspiracy theory" is loaded language

[s.petry]

I gave a generalization which not only covered "muddying the waters" but "poisoning the well". I could have been more specific, but didn't see the need at the time.

Obligatory South Park clip

[elbonia]

1/4 of Americans are retards

It is understandable ...

[MacTO]

It is understandable when people see something that they don't like, then proceed to create an opinion without informing themselves in even the most basic manner.

people getting wise, let's discredit them

[frovingslosh]

When people start getting wise to something, one way to discredit them is to just label their understanding of the problem as a "conspiracy". Clearly then they are just the lunatic fringe, and can still be called the lunatic fringe even after they become the majority.

Conspiracy?? Yes? Well consider this then:

[Anonymous Coward]

Big pharma is already moaning over the fact that most people don't unquestioningly
roll up their sleeves for their bullshit anymore ... I've read their papers .. "Uuuh uuuh
vaccine uptake is disappointing .. uuuh uuuh non-compliant patients .. uuuh uuuuh
people are not buying our shit ....". They write PAPERS on this and on ways to turn
the tide (though without success, which is why they feel they need to put out crap like
this). There is not a whole lot of surprise element for them in this. This is more part of
  their reaction to it

So what's this article all about??
Another paid for article to paint people who go along with every bullshit they put out
as nuts and kookoo?? Lol .. do you think people get paid by slashdot with mod points?
(Though I wouldn't be surprised if they actually sold them to their advertiser's shills).

Anybody here who actually goes and researchs this topic probably wont be back
  to this site (and probably delete their DICE profile should they even have it in disgust).
Except maybe to point out the kind of shit that's put out by the paid4 dice advertising whores.

Think of it this way... only a few months ago you would never have believe what
kind of immense and lawless bullshit NSA is pulling on you ... (and now with "TURBINE"
  and other projects they're kicking it into even higher gear by automating it to compromise
millions of machines in the shortest time they can).

Now you know all about so now you're all exasperated, outraged and yapping all about it ...
but again if it had been pointed out to you only a little while before Snowden you would have
gone 'Uuuuh what a kooky rednecky CONSPEARACY THEEORY'.

Consider this:

IF the NSA is pulling all this shit on you .. what do you think the FDA and the CDC are
getting away with?? How much do you really think you know what's going on??

I wonder is there a way to filter the topics for what's really relevant
like the stuff I work with that actually gets me paid every day??

What does it cure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than just alleviate?

Re:What does it cure?

[rubycodez]

does current treatment for AIDS cure, or just alleviate? does current treatment for genital herpes cure, or just alleviate?

Re:What does it cure?

[asylumx]

The problem is the OP didn't say "suppressing access to natural means of alleviating symptoms", instead he said "suppressing access to natural cures." So, we're talking about natural cures that are suppressed, and marijuana is not an example of one of those, as the GP pointed out. Questions about whether or not other treatments are cures are not relevant.

Re:What does it cure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the "natural cures" mentioned in the study really cures?

And there's a difference between "treatment" and "cure". Is the AIDS thing you mention a treatment or a cure? For genital herpes is it a treatment or a cure? Do you know that treatments only alleviate (like the actual AIDS and herpes medication advertise), and "natural cures" for these conditions don't even alleviate symptoms, let alone actually cure it like they promise?

Re:What does it cure?

[AK Marc]

Sometimes the "cure" is a lifetime of medication. Glaucoma can be "cured" that way the way many diseases are "cured" by terminal management of symptoms.

Re:What does it cure?

[rubycodez]

very minor point, natural medicines and government's forbidding access to them are the issue. there are other examples than MJ.

Re:What does it cure?

[meglon]

Yes, like Laetrile. That wonder drug saved so many lives and cured cancer and made hair grow back and... wait... what? Cyanide kills people? No shit. Well, at least it made some con artists a bunch of money while it was killing people because they took it instead of medicine that might actually have helped.

Plover said it perfectly in a post above:

Q: You know what they call a "natural cure" that has been tested and found to work?

A: Medicine.

More on point, all this study says is that, once again, we have a bunch of stupid fucking ignorant people in the US who don't even have a passing acquaintance with reality.

Re: What does it cure?

[s.petry]

Wait, are you claiming that the only. Slid medicine is man made synthetic compounds? Surely that is what your generalization is implying. It is cheaper to make pain killers than harvest tree bark, but there are at least two I can think of off the top of my head with proven pain relieving properties in their bark. We know of natural anti-biotics, antiseptics, antistringents, blood thinners, coagulants, etc... You. Red to fix your generalization.

Re: What does it cure?

[s.petry]

F?@" I hat this iPhone. "only valid medicine"

Re:What does it cure?

[rubycodez]

raising your own silly straw man and setting it on fire proves nothing.

do you deny wintergreen tea is similar to and can act identically to aspirin (including dangers of overdose)? that is a natural medicine, currently unrelated, which does work with obvious proof due to the chemical involved.

Re:What does it cure?

[rubycodez]

currently unregulated, phone spell correction often incorrect

Re:What does it cure?

[s.petry]

Then those are not "cures", please read the definition. I believe I get your point, but trying to redefine words is not the best way of making a point.

Re:What does it cure?

[jbo5112]

There is some evidence of chemicals in marijuana killing cancer cells, but more research needs to be done, including studies on humans.

Re:What does it cure?

[Anonymous Coward]

that isnt fair. If you dismiss a family of products because it isnt really a "cure" , but then ignore the fact that the preferred products being pushed aren't "cures" either, then what are we really discussing. That is ignoring a huge man behind the curtain.

Re:What does it cure?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does morphine cure, rather than just alleviate?

Re: What does it cure?

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact about half of approved drugs (including aspirin) had their beginnings as natural products. The natural products are then modified to improve bioavailability, reduce side effects, and improve activity. Many, perhaps most, natural "cures" have a known mechanism of action that corresponds to a widely available drug with known purity and potency. In some cases, there is not drug equivalent because of known problems with the compound or the protein it targets.

Re:What does it cure?

[asylumx]

there are other examples than MJ.

Then use those.

Re: What does it cure?

[ceoyoyo]

He didn't say any such thing. If anything, he implied the opposite. He said natural cures that work are called medicine.

ASA (aka aspirin) is a compound naturally found in willow bark. It occurs quite naturally. It's known to work as a pain reliever (among other things). Know what it's colloquially called? Medicine.

I've seen a lot of posts from you in this thread, and most of them don't make the slightest bit of sense. Are you trolling? That might be funny sometimes, but it's really not cool when you're writing something that someone might take as health advice.

Mwuhaha!!

[gstoddart]

I see my conspiracy to make people believe in conspiracies is proceeding according to plan ...

Re:Mwuhaha!!

[n6kuy]

Yes, but we know that it's really a conspiracy to make people believe that people believe in conspiracies.

Re:Mwuhaha!!

[gstoddart]

In which case, if people know it's a conspiracy to do that, people would stop believing in conspiracies. Which is phase two of my conspiracy.

There, I've run rings around you. ;-)

paranoid, delusional, nuts. and with lots of guns.

[h00manist]

50% of the population suffer from some level of paranoia and delusion, we have a public health issue.
With the amount of marketing, PR and publicity (aka lies and false stories) everyone is bombarded with, it's hard for the average person not to go nuts. added to that, quite a few true stories are just so twisted it becomes hard to believe in.
Yes, we have a public health issue with too many people losing their mind. plus, many of them have lots of guns.
A large section of the population has mental issues and guns. Yep, that could be bad.

Big Pharma

[DaMattster]

I believe they conspire with physicians to not emphasize cures. There is no long term profit in a cure.

Re:Big Pharma

[RightSaidFred99]

That's why you're a kook.

Re:Big Pharma

[dave420]

Which is clearly nonsense, as other countries have the same "Big Pharma", and less-greedy healthcare industries, and they prescribe the same drugs and treatments, albeit sometimes in smaller amounts.

well they have to some thing with the 1000% markup

[Joe_Dragon]

well they have to some thing with the 1000% markup

it's a low fucking bar

[epine]

Underling pulls some stupid shit. Boss gets word, but it's political suicide to divulge the mess. Voila! A conspiracy is born.

avoid that red rice yeast

[Anonymous Coward]

lowering cholesterol isn't good for you if you lower the good cholesterol. I don't blame you for falling into their trap.

Where It Comes From -

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in a locale with a high level of religious participation I can say with a high degree of certainty that it's the church, and baptists in particular, that spread these conspiracies around the most, and that the religious are the ones most likely to believe them. Before gaining mainstream acceptance the proliferation of vaccine hysteria and the vaccine-autism link, among other theories, were almost entirely the product of churches here spreading misinformation. Black churches are also known for spreading conspiracies revolving around HIV, among them that the virus was artificially created and given to African Americans as well as Africans in order to destroy their race. (However, churchgoers seem just as likely to accept that HIV is 'natural' inasmuch as God created it to punish homosexuals and the promiscuous.)

Religious institutions here have long had a contentious relationship with the sciences, and the very poor state of scientific research today is not helping science as an institution retain its credibility. However a line in the sand needs to be drawn. If churches are going to willfully spread misinformation that leads to low incidences of inoculation, irresponsible behavior, and disease outbreaks, then they should be held responsible for the consequences. For the first time in half a century, measles is making a comeback. Teen pregnancy rates and STD transmission rates are the highest in areas that exclusively teach abstinence-only sex education. People are becoming suspicious not only of scientists and the intellectual elite, but of doctors, physicians, surgeons - it's not difficult to see where this will lead.

There's a certain irony that there is now a causal link between Christianity and the spread of plagues, especially ones that cause rashes and boils.

Re:Where It Comes From -

[slackware 3.6]

Whats the vaccination rate among Muslims? Right you don't want to go there, no Christians to bash.

conspiracy is irrelevant...

[harvey the nerd]

but there are a lot of cheaper, better therapies that are ignored or attacked by pharmaceutical, medical interests, whether natural substances or generic drugs used off label. The FDA essentially promotes expensive, less effective, often dangerous therapies that are officially blessed. I've saved $40,000+ a month recognizing this situation the last several years, with better research and results in my family when the doctors themselves said no real hope several years ago.

Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Guatemala syphilis e

[Anonymous Coward]

At least these two conspiracies are true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment

Vocabulary Tar-pit

[Tablizer]

"Conspiracy" is a vague word. In an industry as large and complex as medical care, I can almost guarantee that underhanded manipulation is going on, and have heard about such directly from acquaintances who worked or are working in it.

Whether one can label underhanded manipulation a "conspiracy" is tricky one. Multiple people of power work together to manipulate for selfish reasons. But often they use "gray lies" so that they have a fall-back argument such as "It's a matter of interpretation".

I'd generally call such "coordinated bullshit" and reserve "conspiracy" for outright coordinated lies or clear-cut criminal acts.

The largest volume of BS in the world is done at the grey borders of "truth", not so much dead people in car trunks or planted microscope slides. If you want to clean up corruption and BS, then going after manipulation of grey areas is probably the biggest bang for the buck.

The word "conspiracy" has kind of been diluted similar to how we use "robbed" to mean "burglarized". "Robbed" technically usually means you were approached and threatened in person by the thief. Taking your TV while you are on vacation doesn't count. That's "burglarized", not "robbed". But humans like to add drama to their speech such that the embellishment causes a kind of "severity deflation" of meaning over time. Thus "robbed" grew weaker in perceived meaning.

Re:Vocabulary Tar-pit

[arth1]

The word "conspiracy" has kind of been diluted similar to how we use "robbed" to mean "burglarized".

Words change meaning. Which you (likely by accident) illustrate quite well by writing "burglarized" instead of "burgled". "Burlgarized" would originally have meant turning someone into a burglar, but has now become a synonym for "burgled", and here in the US, you hardly ever hear "burgled" anymore.

The -ized words seem particularly prone to the effect. "Ruggedized" has been used instead of "rugged" to the point that it takes on the meaning of rugged.
"Mesmerized" instead of mesmered.
"Specialized" instead of "special".
"Civilized" instead of civil.
I call the effect izeized.

Re:Vocabulary Tar-pit

[kermit1221]

You didn't quite go far enough. "Taking your TV while you are on vacation" now seems to be referred to as a "home invasion robbery" as often as not. Before that it was "taking your TV while you slept". Which was diluted from the original "they broke in, threatened you with guns, duct-taped you to a chair, and stole the TV while you watched".

Just like having your credit card number copied by a waitress who uses it to purchase stuff on ebay is now called "identity theft".

Re:Vocabulary Tar-pit

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Burglary is the entry of a person into a structure without the owner's permission. Source: I was once arrested and charged with burglary (third degree), a felony (but charges were eventually dropped), despite having allegedly been in a structure that contained nothing more than air (charges were dropped due to me getting a lawyer that was close friends with both the judge and the prosecutor).

Burglary is to a structure as trespass is to land.

We are VERY VERY disappointed with YOU!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the real reason why they're running articles like this:

Below are just the first 5 pages worth of google search results for how PISSED pharma and public health (i.e. CDC,FDA down to your municipal public health department) are that

YOU ARE NOT ROLLING UP YOUR SLEEVES in droves just because they have something new to stick into your arm. They are VERY DISAPPOINTED WITH YOU.

Shingles Vaccine Uptake Disappointing - Medscape
Mar 5, 2014 - NEWS: Shingles Vaccine Uptake Disappointing. A quarter of all cases of shingles can cause ocular complications, vision loss, and pain, but ...
Shingles Vaccine Uptake Disappointing | Department of Population ...
pophealth.med.nyu.edu/.../shingles-vaccin...
NYU Langone Medical Center
Nov 27, 2013 - Although most adults 40 years and older are at risk for herpes zoster infection, also known as shingles, uptake of the vaccine (Zostavax) to ...
Shingles Vaccine Uptake Disappointing – Medscape | Herpes ...
herpeszostertreatmentnews.wordpress.com/.../shingles-vaccine-uptake-dis...
Nov 29, 2013 - Heya guys, I have been reading a great deal of shingles treatment recently and I have found some terrific advice. Check out the related links ...
Shingles Vaccine Uptake Disappointing – Medscape | Shingles ...
shinglesnewstoday.wordpress.com/.../shingles-vaccine-uptake-disappoint...
Nov 27, 2013 - Shingles Vaccine Uptake DisappointingMedscape”The risk of herpes zoster is increasing faster than the aging population,” said Elizabeth ...
Shingles Vaccine Uptake Disappointing | ViralNewsChart via ...
www.viralnewschart.com/ShowLink.aspx?linkId=20739283
Nov 27, 2013 - Medscape - A quarter of all cases of shingles can cause ocular complications vision loss and pain but they can.
Bluetongue vaccine uptake disappointing says Welsh Assembly - 23 ...
www.fwi.co.uk/.../bluetongue-vaccine-uptake-disappointing-says-welsh-...
Sep 23, 2008 - Rural affairs minister Elin Jones told a plenary session of the Welsh assembly on, 23 September, that she was very disappointed with the ...
Bluetongue vaccine uptake disappointing says Welsh Assembly
217.169.63.174/F4F/news/index.jhtml;jsessionid...?article_id...
Farmers have used only 24% of the 7.5m doses of bluetongue vaccine available in Wales.
Welsh Uptake of Bluetongue Vaccine 'Disappointing' - The Dairy Site
www.thedairysite.com/.../welsh-uptake-of-bluetongue-vaccine-disappoin...
Welsh Uptake of Bluetongue Vaccine 'Disappointing'. 24 September 2008. UK - Farmers across Wales came under fire this week from Welsh Assembly Rural ...
CDC shows disappointing 2011 flu vaccination data | Vaccine News ...
vaccinenewsdaily.com/.../320080-cdc-shows-disappointing-2011-flu-vac...
Sep 27, 2012 - CDC shows disappointing 2011 flu vaccination data ... women demonstrate the difficulty in recent attempts to increase overall vaccine uptake.
Page 2 of about 1,270,000 results (0.28 seconds)
Search Results
Disappointing 2011 flu vaccination rates - Skeptical Raptor
www.skepticalraptor.com/.../disappointing-2011-flu-vaccination-rates/
Sep 27, 2012 - Mostly, the numbers continue to be disappointing, even in groups ... to demonstrate the difficulty in increasing the vaccine uptake rate in the US.
[PDF]
Vaccination of health and social care workers against flu ... - Gov.uk
https://www.gov.uk/.../13_09_25_-_Seasonal_flu_letter_o...
Jobcentre Plus
Sep 25, 2013 - We write to urge your active support to increase flu vaccine uptake among frontline health ... disappoi

Re:We are VERY VERY disappointed with YOU!!

[Anonymous Coward]

TL;DR. From now on, please remember that sometimes, less is more.

And 50% have below average IQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Proof evident (some latin mumbo-jumbo here)

49% of the population believes the government lies

[BradMajors]

The survey shows that 49% of the population believes the government lies. When in fact, more like 90% of the population believes the government lies to us. The problem is we are not sure when the government is telling the truth.

100% of non-morons KNOW there are such conspiracie

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yes. Here is another one. What this whole thing comes down to, primariliy, is that most of the people who are saying: OMFG, your theory is a conspiracy theory! have no idea what a conspiracy is. If you do not believe in government conspiracy facts and you read Slashdot, you are none too bright. Here is an example of a State run facility with documented facts of a conspiracy. The staff, who are State employees conspired to keep the facts about the deplorable conditions and outrageous treatment secret.

Anybody who knows anything about the War Against Americans knows that the US Government conspired to keep hemp out of the country at the behest of the textile industry. Now, I guess it's time to see who the first idiot will be to pop up and proudly announce their complete inability to Google with a citation required .

Medical costs in the US

[Anonymous Coward]

are the only real conspiracy theory in the medical industry:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...

We are hard-wired ...

[PPH]

... to seek patterns in what are random events.

What is actually at work in many cases is the invisible hand of the marketplace. It doesn't take a bunch of industrialists plotting in smoke-filled rooms. The overall structure of the market and underlying regulations is set up to push things in the direction of higher profits for the major players.

There's more profit in proprietary drugs. And the much of the FDA staff is involved with processing the trial results and paperwork. Everyone just works in their self interest.

Re:We are hard-wired ...

[Anonymous Coward]

We are hard-wired to seek patterns in events.

Whoosh

Re:We are hard-wired ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the probability that everyone does not collaborate to promote their interest at the expense of someone else.

Re:We are hard-wired ...

[PPH]

What is the probability that everyone does not collaborate to promote their interest

Their as in their own as opposed to the interests of a group? I'd say pretty high. That's the essence of a free market. But then, this is logically inconsistent. Collaboration implies making ones own interests subservient to those of the collective.

Not a conspiracy theory

[Anonymous Coward]

"37 percent of respondents fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures."

Is that really a conspiracy theory? What about medical marijuana?

Not a conspiracy theory

[Anonymous Coward]

"37 percent of respondents fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures."

Last time I checked, U.S. regulators were still suppressing access to marijuana, which is arguably a "natural cure" for several ailments.

Conspiracy Theorists going out of business

[tompaulco]

I've got a friend who has always been well known (in our circle) for his conspiracy theories. Over the last 5 or 6 years, though, he hasn't been able to come up with anything outlandish enough, off the wall enough, invasive enough, impossible enough.Every time he comes up with something new he thinks the government is doing, all we can say is "Yep, they even admitted it on $NationalNewsNetwork last week."

Actually not as bad as I had feared

[damn_registrars]

I hear various connotations of the conspiracy of the government (or other agents such as collaborations between big pharma and the AMA) preventing people from accessing treatments to protect the profits they get from expensive drugs all the time. Frankly considering how often people allege that I am the crazy one for not believing in it, I really expected the percentage of people buying into that conspiracy would be much higher.

Hell, that survey reports that conspiracy to be accepted at only around 37%. Last I heard more than 37% of the GOP believes President Obama was born on Mars to Atheist Muslim Hippie Fascist Leftist Anarchist Extremists.

Related Statistical Fact

[the eric conspiracy]

A recent study revealed the startling conclusion that 50% of US residents have below average cognitive abilities.

Pharma Lobby

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the wealthiest lobbying groups in the world could in no way have any influence on government policy, now could they?

Not all conspiracies are equal.

the problem for the medical community is.

[strstr]

The conspiracy theories are always partially truth and the medical model does not have any method for scientifically proving the public wrong. They rather use discredidation tactics and speculation like calling it all a conspircy theory even though they do not really know if something is true or not. They generally overlook government abuse and classification of information that might prove the public right on things like the government or corporations withholding information about natural cures and functional treatments, or the allowance of public genocide and medical based injuries. The real conpiracy is exposed because doctors have an aligned interest with pharmacutical industry to push drugs and treatment for condition that either should not be treated or do not get better with medications, get worse, or have little to no effect, like many drug based cancer treatments and psychiatric treatments. The industry also effectively lies about all the harmful effects of drugs and covers up their ineffectiveness. Often times medical professionals even have ties to military, CIA and other government operations, using the public for genocide and weapons experimentation like they did in MKULTRA. For evidence of the psychitric drug abuse/cover up, look up the psychiatric affidavits of Robert Whitaker and Dr. Grace E. Jackson on this page for example: http://www.oregonstatehospital...

It says that not only do people with schizophrenia recover at higher rates without medication but those who take medication never recover. Medication users also get heavy brain damage and 10% brain shrinkage, and die 25 years sooner as a result. Antidepressants also cause such permanent damage that people can never withdraw from them, cause mania and are not significantly more effective than placebo, whereas excersise is 80% effective by itself and doesn't require taking an ineffective pill.

The industry has also been proven to lie about chemical imbalances causing mental illness, as no chemical imbalance has ever been shown except in people on medications.

Finally, the medical model treats real issues and expected human responses as something to be drugged out of people, even when they in fact are not diseases. They might say a traumatized women who is afraid of losing her newest baby after multiple miscairages should be drugged and has mental illness rather than trauma, for example. A person legitimately attacked or set up by government operatives might also be labeled schizophrenic and paranoid despite it really being real, because medical professionals do little to validate government abuse or whether others are lying about the situation, leading to treatment with force of deadly brain damaging drugs.

Re:the problem for the medical community is.

[david_thornley]

You're clearly on the wrong drugs. Your statements are extreme, and the ones I know something about are definitely wrong. You're referring to affidavits of two individuals as evidence, disregarding all the other evidence. Antidepressants do not cause mania. It is true that they are often as good as a placebo, but that's because they're prescribed for people who don't have the chemical imbalance they're designed to treat (and there's different families with different effects). Exercise does help, but it's a lot easier to have a depressive take meds and go to therapy (the combination is more effective than either individually) than to get the depressive on an exercise routine. Those take some level of determination and discipline that a depressive is really going to have trouble supplying.

I did a lot of research on how to get out of depression. If there was an easy cure, I would have used it.

Underlying reasons

[jmd]

"said people may believe in conspiracy theories because they're easier to understand than complex medical information."

I'd be willing to guess the reason people believe in conspiracy theories has more to do with content on talk radio and other mainstream media than an inability to understand complex medical information. Show me a mainstream media outlet that actually distributes sound complex medical information. There is zero profit in this information.

I visited my cardiologist the other day. All he spoke of was statin meds. Never once did he mention diet, exercise, or stress. There is profit in statins. No profit (for them) in healthy living.

Re:Underlying reasons

[gzuckier]

Has your cardiologist mentioned diet, exercise, stress before?
Most doctors have the same experience; talk to the patient about heart disease, patient waves off meds, promises lifestyle changes. Next year, repeat. Meanwhile, the patient's circulatory system has suffered another year's cumulative damage from cholesterol and high blood pressure. At some point, the responsible thing to do is tell the patient to take the damn meds, and if he/she should get going on the lifestyle changes, then great, we'll reconsider then.

Maybe because there are real medical conspiracies?

[rs79]

Revealed: secret plan to push'happy' pills
http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

Big Pharma Could Win International Price Monopoly, Unlimited Profits in 'Free Trade' Deal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

US patent moves are 'profoundly bad' in leaked TPP treaty
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade agreement under negotiation between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Leaked documents show the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is pressuring TPP countries to expand pharmaceutical monopoly protections and trade away access to medicines.
http://www.citizen.org/TPPA

The medical industry the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Big Pharma Shamelessly Shills Dangerous Bone Drugs You Don't Need
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

The H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic: Manipulating the Data to Justify a Worldwide Public Health Emergency
http://www.globalresearch.ca/t...

"Somewhere in Rayong or Chon Buri on the coast of Thailand, a young woman may at this very moment be baring her arm for a shot of an experimental Aids vaccine that many of the leading scientists in the field say categorically has no hope at all of working.

She will be one of 16,000 volunteers recruited for the second large-scale Aids vaccine trial, a $119m exercise many scientists believe is a farce."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie...

Fraud has become so endemic in this country that it's woven its way into America’s DNA. 2). Big Pharma Fraud.
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

Drug Makers New Targets for U.S. Fraud Inquiries, Report Says
http://prescriptions.blogs.nyt...

Merck drew up a "hit list" of doctors that needed to be "neutralized" because they criticized the now banned drug Vioxx.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Merck invents its own journal to publish bogus research findings to promote it's own products.
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009...

Why Aren't These Fraudulent Papers Retracted?
http://truth-out.org/news/item...

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

A National Survey of Physician–Industry Relationships
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Next up

[rossdee]

A survey on how many americans believe in the Easter Bunny

The date of easter changes every year - thats got to be a conspiracy too.

Some interesting points you made

[Paul Fernhout]

See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
----
About a book by Jeff Schmidt, a previous editor of Physics Today magazine:
http://www.disciplined-minds.c...

"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline"."
From Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...

"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
From the Atlantic from a few years ago:
"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/pas...

"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies..."
Also from the Atlantic, just recently:
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science"
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
---

Or where US medicine began to go greatly wrong a century ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"When Flexner researched his report, "modern" medicine faced vigorous competition from several quarters, including osteopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, electrotherapy, eclectic medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy.[11] Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including electromagnetic field therapy, phototherapy, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all complied with the Report or shut their doors."

Article has been gutted somewhat like many Wikipedia medicine articles. It used to have stuff on how women and minorities had also been disenfranchised by that takeover, so that only rich white guys who could afford college could practice medicine.

Anyway, I may not agree 100% with all your points, an

Re:Some interesting points you made

[gzuckier]

1) Pharmacology actually paved the way for Big Medicine; before anesthesia and antibiotics, going to old Doc Sawbones was not much better than just toughing things out. And the quality of many of the doctors at the time matched that status. And the unregulated patent medicines sold from medicine shows... well, we don't call them snake oil for nothing.
2) As soon as effective drugs began to be developed and they became regulated, the "practice of medicine" became the gateway to prescription pharmaceuticals, which made one huge change in the status or doctors. Meanwhile, with anesthesia now available, surgery became something that could possibly be not worse than death, and technical developments were rapid.
3) "Western" medicine prides itself on being scientific as distinct from alternative medicine, but again and again we see how treatments are based on nothing more than "just common sense". Surgery for back pain, for a giant example. So now there's a newer movement that has to call itself evidence-based medicine.
4) The whole vast field of mind over body, psychosomatics, placebos, hypochondria, biofeedback, etc. is about as unexplored at this point as the bottom of the ocean.

Re:Some interesting points you made

[strstr]

What about like, my friend Ron, who had severe back pain but did a ton of exercises and physical therapy, and ended up overcoming his pain and disabling condition? From what he told me, they originally wanted to do some surgery, but he went the more natural route and literally had to go against his doctors advice to do it. In this example he would have been sold unnecessary surgery for something he didn't need, with no mention of alternative or "fixing" the problem another way, more natural, through internal mechanisms or any other mechanisms.

And unfortunately this is going on routine. Also, when it comes to tooth issues other than cavities, there are like no natural treatment modalities. For example I recently had my tooth get infected from lack of flossing in jail; the infection spread through gum tissue to the root, and the tooth remained alive as indicated by all the "cold" and "heat" and "electrical" tests they applied. I felt pain, boy I was glad; but the only treatment they have for removing an infection at the root? Fucking giving me a root canal, removing all the issue, getting rid of the nerve and all. But what I believe is proper is not to remove the still alive tissue, and instead engage in same therapy to treat the infection, naturally, with chemicals, with electromagnetism, whatever, cleaning it out and letting it heal,.. See I want them to treat the problem which is the actual infection, but all modern treatment modalities and all the developments in the field have taught them and left them with only the ability to remove the tooth or do a root canal. What a waste, what a fucking mother fuckering waste, .. Because that's how they make money I guess. lol.

And advanced treatment methods that could save the tooth with basically no surgery necessary don't even exist today, when the tooth is healthy otherwise and just infected with some bacteria. The same problem exists all over the place leading to all sorts of unnecessary and invasive tooth destroying surgeries that make the practitioners a ton of money. :(

Natural Cures Aren't "suppressed"? Right.

[Redmancometh]

So I'm not someone who thinks "the man" or something is trying to keep everyone down. I don't think that the medical industry (most likely) would intentionally cause harm to people. I don't think that there are super foods out there to make us lose weight, and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the medication out there IS beneficial.

I only mention the last one because someone people think there being a pill for everything is some kind of conspiracy. It's not...it's pretty simple..they can identify a need for something, and gain a captive market for X amount of years, and most of the time they make back their research costs.

However, recently I had a fairly bad medical issue. You may have heard of it: MRSA. I got MRSA lesions on the back of my neck, in my nose, and on my chest. One of which was nearly the size of a half dollar. I spent thousands of dollars having them lanced and treated..and they just kept coming back. My doctor says "carrier" isn't the right word, but it's pretty close..I'm apparently very susceptible.

I was prescribed mupirocin, doxycyclene, and a sulfa-based antibiotic whose name escapes me. They were effective that much isn't up for debate, however the effectiveness diminished over treatment. At one point one of the lesions was barely hurt by mupirocin.

Since I'm a reasonably intelligent human being I naturally became curious about the effectiveness of "alternative treatments."

MRSA is really bad, and getting rid of it becomes an obssession. At one point for all intents and purposes I couldn't walk, and at another I could barely sleep due to a lesion on my tail bone.

I came across 2 specific remedies: one was tea tree oil. I saw a study on ncbi from it. When I asked my doctor about it he said
"ohh yes it is absolutely effective as a supplement to your current medication though we generally don't formally recommend it as a primary treatment.

Mixing it 80:20 tea tree oil:canola oil (for penetration and to keep myself from getting chemical burns) resulted in a highly effective treatment which bolstered my original treatment.

Later on I found another study on nibh that seemed rather promising. It involved using garlic extracts to treat SRSA. All I can do is thank whatever higher power may or may not exist that I could get past the pay wall.

Despite their fantastic results their methodology was highly flawed. They were using a non-polar substance to extract the allicin salts from the garlic, and it was being stored before use. I remembered learning from a food chemistry book that allicin salts are highly unstable, and form entirely different salts with polar compounds as opposed to non-polar compounds.

After doing research I learned the alliinase-alliin reaction when the garlic is exposed to oxygen creates the maximum amount of allicin at roughly 6 minutes and 45 seconds. So at 6:45 I put half into water, and half into oil (small amounts) and used it.

It was the best treatment I have ever used. My doctor was blown away.

 

Re:Natural Cures Aren't "suppressed"? Right.

[dave420]

Sample size of 1, with no control. Your point?

Re:Natural Cures Aren't "suppressed"? Right.

[Anonymous Coward]

His point, in a round about way, is that people do not need the approval and consent of the authorities to explore and experiment in the world. He came back with results which were entirely real and meaningful to him. That's his reward for being courageous and curious and alive.

Skeptics tend to be sufferers of low self-esteem who have had any internal sense of their own authority beaten out of them as kids, (or are perhaps just naturally weak in self-determinism), and thus rely heavily on alpha-figures telling them what to do with their lives and what to think while doing it.

The word "Science" carries a slightly different definition depending on whether or not you have a genuine spiritual core.

Conspiracy Fact

[istartedi]

Google "Colcrys" and get back to me.

Regulators DO suppress natural cures.

[mysidia]

No conspiracy theory required.

It is an unintended consequence of rules that are meant to protect people, plain as day.

three times as many people believe U.S. regulators prevent people from getting natural cures

EXPLANATION: US Regulators (the FDA) work to suppress ANY and ALL marketing of any product as a Cure for any disease, unless the FDA has approved it as a cure with an indication for that disease, on the basis of application, Clinical studies up to their standards, and an approval process.

However, naturally: these standards are very high, and likely to forbid marketing anything as a cure that has not been through such a rigorous process --- inherently means there will be cures That are legitimate cures, which cannot lawfully be marketed as treatments for disease or condition, because the FDA didn't approve them as treatments for that disease or condition.

Also.... application and study are expensive processes, that only occur if funded.

With artificial cures: the inventor gets to patent it and claim exclusive rights --- so there is a lot of money to be made, AND the pharma company can justify the massive expenses required to navigate the bureaucratic processes.

With natural products there is no exclusive right via patent, since the product is just from nature, IN FACT: It may be so common that people don't need to buy your product at all.

It doesn't make sense to make the investment required for all these FDA studies, since you probably won't recoup the money --- and, once you get the certification, a hundred other companies can market the natural product and undercut you on price.

So what is really happening is Creation of synthetic cures is subsidized via IP law. Marketing of natural cures is blocked by the same barriers, but they are not subsidized, so if you have limited resources, it makes more sense to develop synthetic cures.

Also, a natural cures could cannablize your market for a synthetic cure.

Therefore.... it is not rational for pharma companies to pursue natural cures, or any cures they can't patent.

Re:Regulators DO suppress natural cures.

[RightSaidFred99]

Bingo! I've identified an anti-science kook! Do I win something?

Name a "natural cure" I can't get that actually works.

Re:Regulators DO suppress natural cures.

[Evil Pete]

No. I think he is correct. The only real conspiracy theory with big pharma is that they are companies and only want to make money. They aren't in it for altruistic reasons. Natural cures are irrelevant to them unless they can extract and patent any active component. The US FDA also has a government mandated conspiracy to forbid people to peddle 'cures' if they haven't been fully tested whatever their actual merits. This isn't rocket science. Did you actually read what he/she said?

Re:Regulators DO suppress natural cures.

[mysidia]

Bingo! I've identified an anti-science kook! Do I win something?

Your argument is weak and unsubstantiated.

Name a "natural cure" I can't get that actually works.

I am not saying the FDA is going out of their way to block natural remedies known to work. But, due to a BIAS in the system, the science doesn't get done on the natural remedies in the first place. If my argument is right, then THERE ARE legitimate effective natural treatments ---- BUT, for at least most of them, nobody can say that they actually work. This means that If I am right: an inherent conclusion is that it is probably impossible to 'name a natural cure' that definitely works 100% which can't be marketed.

With very high confidence, there are many, BUT I cannot tell you with confidence which ones actually do work, since they are lacking the basic research ---- that pharma companies would only be willing to pay to commission - if they could profit from the result of their studies moreso, than their work on treatment formulations containing synthetic active ingredients.

Best example would be: penicillin being discovered today, as a mold found in nature. Since it was a discovery of something in nature -- nothing to patent. The FDA would crack down anyone trying to sell this silly mold product, in principal. To get it approved to FDA standards; a sponsor would be needed. The sponsor would have to be able to profit. They profit by patenting the result so nobody else can make and sell it for cheap. If they can't patent it..... they are better off, forgetting about it --- and continuing to sell their less-effective remedies that do not actually cure the disease, only mask some symptoms.

There are plenty of natural formulations that the FDA has cracked down on, without evaluating the effectiveness of these treatments.

I am in favor that science be done, but I am also in favor of free choice from buyers. Let's be realistic about it ---- if there's not money to be made; it would be stupid for a business to spend money on the science: when another company will free ride -- just use the results, to compete with them, without the substantial capital required to do have hired the scientists and paid the expenses to commission the studies.

If there's a natural remedy; it makes more sense, to figure out a synthetic formulation that does what the natural remedy does.

Either the product had to be discontinued, or the marketing had to be changed, so it no longer claimed to help with any disease; products like Genzyme, various anti-bacterial soaps containing materials such as Tea Tree oils, Article: Under pressure from pharma lobby, US cracks down on Ayurvedic diabetes medicines, other ayurvedic products.

Name some natural formulas that have been approved by the FDA to be marketed as a treatment for a disease.

Re:Regulators DO suppress natural cures.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

You do know a vast majority of research is conducted with money from public sources right? And the National Center for Complimentary and alternative medicine has studied, in depth, a lot of "natural" cures and none of the studies have ever come out positive right?

Re:Regulators DO suppress natural cures.

[mysidia]

You do know a vast majority of research is conducted with money from public sources right?

Research in general yes. Research into pharmaceuticals with a mind towards FDA approval... not so much.

And the National Center for Complimentary and alternative medicine has studied, in depth, a lot of "natural" cures

Yes.. well... I am not so sure the Center for Complimentary and alternative medicine has been particularly selective and judicious in choosing what treatments to study.

Do you suppose they have investigated Coffee as a possible treatment for 9AM sleepiness or ADHD?

Or have the center just been looking at the most complicated serious diseases, hoping there is a natural magic bullet matching folklore?

Caused by hostile Government and Medical community

[sunyjim]

I think this happens for the same reason people join a union at work The employees view their employer as treating them all unfair, and abusing their position, so to even the odds they bring in a union. Happy workers don't go looking for a union to come to their work place. Unhappy ones forced to work long hours, and overtime constantly for poor wages do. In the same way the American medical system is amazingly hostile to it's citizens. HMOs do everything in their power to drop their patients if the treatment is expensive, or really they not take them on in the first place with rules against pre-existing conditions. When everything is SO MUCH about being money grubbing like this and not about really curing the patients how can you blame people for thinking the medical system would hide a cheap and effective cure that they could not patent, and instead offer an expensive less effective drug that will keep the patient a customer for years? A healed customer is not a return customer.

A charismatic Obama is leading that parade

[Anonymous Coward]

President Obama went around the nation pushing the conspiracy that doctors amputate the feet of diabetics because that pays better than properly treating them.

Of course, he also told America that doctors choose to cut out patients' tonsils because that pays better than treating a sore throat.

I could go on with other examples of the warped and conspiratorial medical conspiracies he pushed, but I believe I have made the point sufficiently with these two examples. He was so convincing a public speaker that most American voters elected him and then re-elected him, so it's only logical to conclude that his medical conspiracy theories have penetrated a large portion of the public psyche.

   

Disinformation Disinformation

[EvilSS]

One of the conspiracy theories, that the US created the AIDs virus, was created for an active disinformation campaign by the Soviet Union against the US as a form of political warfare during the Cold War, and still gets repeated."

Oh sure, that's what they want you to believe. The truth is the Soviet "disinformation campaign" was part of a US disinformation campaign to make the Soviets look bad while covering up the fact that the US created AIDS in the first place to take focus away from decades of mounting evidence that we faked the moon landings with the help of the Hollywood Illuminati Jewish Italian mobsters from Boston as a reward for their unions help in getting Kennedy elected!

Welp ...

[BrianPRabbit]

... That explains Kevin Trudeau.

How many believe everything they read on Wikipedia

[keithglidewell]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... There are some gems here, like one Dr. Leo Stanley, with a strange obsession with transplanting testicles.

Lets try this again

[s.petry]

Apologies for what appears to be ranting, I'll rewrite my statements with a keyboard that I can type on and a screen I can see better.

Wait, are you claiming that the only valid medicine is man made synthetic compounds? Surely that is what your generalization is implying. It is cheaper to make pain killers than harvest tree bark, but there are at least two I can think of off the top of my head with proven pain relieving properties in their bark. We know of natural anti-biotics, antiseptics, antistringents, blood thinners, coagulants, etc... You really need to fix your generalization.

Re:Lets try this again

[david_thornley]

The claim is that regulated compounds are better medicine than their natural forms. If chewing bark that contains some sort of salicate (?) alleviates pain, then one selected for good results (acetylsalycilic acid (sp?)) delivered in a known dose is going to be better. Natural medicine does exist, but when we understand it we can make better medicine.

Re:Lets try this again

[s.petry]

If we spend time to mimic natural compounds, claiming they don't exist is a false statement correct? I'm not saying Rhino horn powder gives you virility, I'm talking about proven and known natural remedies of which there are a great many. Further, a great many of these are being studied this very day so that we can determine methods of mimicking them.

Why do you have to go to an absurd method of claiming man made is better? This is exactly what you did by claiming that a person has to chew bark. 2,500 years ago we knew how to process Willow bark and leaves into a powder that worked as well, or better, than any man made compound today, which we call "aspirin".

We don't end up making natural medicine "better", we make it more cost effective to produce, process, and distribute. This is absolutely not the same thing as making it "better", because you are providing a subjective view from only one participant in the chain. Better for a company is not necessarily better for a consumer.

Looking at the harm these low costs have caused, such as abuse of antibiotics reducing their effectiveness, or organ damage from consuming man made compounds, the "better" is not just subjective but wrong.

Where we may come to an agreement is whether or not certain made man made drugs do not exist in nature. I'll agree with that point without too much fuss.

Re:Lets try this again

[david_thornley]

I still don't get it. What evidence do you have that willow bark powder is superior to the aspirin in my medicine cabinet? I really doubt people using that did proper clinical studies and kept decent records.

What we can do by making artificial willow bark is come up with something that's cheap and a convenient known dose, and we can check various similar compounds to see which works better. People knew that salicylates (sp?) were useful for pain relief before they knew that acetylsalicylic acid was a good way to take them. This is a level of knowledge you simply aren't going to get with willow bark preparation.

Similarly, St. John's Wort is an antidepressant, but it's hard to tell how much you're getting with the herbal remedy. Antidepressants that are used nowadays come in convenient regular doses.

It is possible that a natural remedy will work better than the synthesized one, in which case we haven't analyzed the natural remedy enough. That's been known to happen.

I don't understand your argument about low cost being bad. I'd rather see more people have access to effective medicines than fewer people, and it's just as easy to misuse or OD on something natural.

Re:Lets try this again

[s.petry]

I still don't get it. What evidence do you have that willow bark powder is superior to the aspirin in my medicine cabinet? I really doubt people using that did proper clinical studies and kept decent records.

I think you missed a huge set of statements, so let put those in Q&A form.

Has the low cost and ease of distribution lead to abuses in antibiotics which have reduced their effectiveness? Has the abuse of antibiotics further helped to breed viruses that are immune to those same very cheap and common antibiotics?

Those are two very simple yes/no questions, and you can verify factually that the answer to both of these is "yes". If you answer "yes" to either of these questions, then you should have no problem also agreeing that mass production of medicines is not "better" in all view points.

Antibiotics are just one example, but we could also get into pain relievers and narcotics also being "not better in all cases". We could further use aspirin and similar non narcotic pain relievers. "Better" is subjective, is it not?

Now back on your first point, willow bark is exactly what aspirin mimics. Compare the two molecular structures and you will see that aspirin was made to be similar to salicin, mimicking it's behavior in the body.

This goes to your last point, and I'll say you need to study. I have yet to see a person OD on marijuana, because there are limits on the natural product that do not exist with a man made synthetic compound. Willow bark would be similar, because it would be impossible for me to eat enough willow bark to OD on salicin, but yet I could take enough Bayer aspirin to kill myself.

Man made pain relievers and antibiotics are nearly all made as synthetic compounds mimicking a naturally occurring molecule. This is a fact, read up on how these things are made. Mass production has some benefits, but is not always beneficial. You are choosing to ignore the negative impact of mass production and cheap. Ask someone with permanent damage to their liver from Tylenol how beneficial it was for them to take Tylenol "as recommended". It happens, and can happen, because it's so easy to access and cheap. Often it's cheaper to mask a problem with aspirin than it is to fix the root problem, which leads to further medical problems and deterioration of health.

So in the case of Aspirin, I would claim it's "better" than man made for several reasons. First, it is the molecule that synthetic compounds attempt to mimic. Second, natural limitations reduce the chances for over use. Third, the human body tends to handle natural products much better than synthetics (I.E. reduced chances of allergic reactions). Third, mass production of this 'natural' remedy would be ecologically sound. While it would increase the cost of aspirin the amount of increase would be difficult to guess, but trees tend to be 100% usable with very little ecological damage (ecological damage occurs in processing in almost all cases).

Re:Lets try this again

[rubycodez]

so big pharmy profit margins and their giving gifts to your doctor have nothing to do with it, it's all just superior tech documented by unbiased researchers and studies not done under any infuence?

This happens whenever...

[Applehu Akbar]

Low-information anti-science numbskulls encounter a secretive, monopolistic industry. Medicine is very slow to disgorge any information about its inner workings, so conspiracy theorists find it easy to respond with their personal version of "because aliens!"

Re:Maybe because there are real medical conspiraci

[Anonymous Coward]

mod up!

oh my

[GlennWakers]

It's quite amazing to witness just how many sheep there are in the world. Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess ;)

Re:Maybe because there are real medical conspiraci

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest is the AMA monopoly. Restrict the supply, drive up the cost.

The American Medical Association
A Sordid History

Thanks to this central committee of the medical cartel, the number of medical schools and medical students is drastically restricted, state licensure further obstructs the supply of doctors, fees are largely secret and controlled across the industry, alternative treatments and practitioners are outlawed, pharmacists and nurses are hamstrung, and the mystique of the profession rivals the priesthood, although priests have a somewhat lower income.
http://www.healthe-livingnews....

Lot of fucking kooks out there.

[RightSaidFred99]

You can usually easily identify them. If you know someone who uses any of these phrases/ideas then you know a kooky nut-kook.

Big Pharma

Western Medicine

White Coats

Allopaths/Allopathic Medicine

Cancer, easily treated with magic supplement X

Chemotherapy/Radiotherapy are scams and don't ever work.

Lyme Disease

The list goes on.. It's some sort of personality disorder IMO, because I know otherwise intelligent people who buy into this nonsense.

Conspiracies are NORMAL.

[bussdriver]

Politicians do it as part of their job, the FBI investigates more criminal conspiracy than any other kind of crime, and the health care industry along with the health insurance industries conspire to screw sick people out of their money and their political influence. Don't forget what the CIA does or the NSA either...and that is only what has been confirmed they are doing. African Americans were medically experimented upon unknowingly up to the 1970s, it's a proven FACT. Sure they may have no evidence and can take it too far but it is not like they are just imagining the impossible with some of these conspiracies. Some of the conspiracies are rooted in history; which is likely why some last so long despite having no evidence.

One doesn't need to be be crazy to see conspiracy all over the place, because it IS all over the place. It doesn't help anybody when we distract and degrade legitimate conspiracies with false characterizations of conspiracy. Also, I don't find the UFO stuff half as crazy as Religion... a UFO doesn't have to be alien but you are a nut anyway... while a religious experience that has zero evidence, THAT is more reasonable??

Me, I think there are conspiracies that are sensationalized as a conspiracy to distract from legitimate problems (which are loaded with their own actual conspiracies.)

Well past disclosures indicates some are true.

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't really surprising considering the revelations over the last 50 years.
When you consider the research, testing and practices in the list below (all verifiable with even a cursory search) it is not surprising that people believe in medical conspiracies. What would be surprising is if all of the "whacky" conspiracies were false.

Gonorrhea studies (African Americans, prison inmates and the poor)
Syphilis (African Americans, prison inmates and the poor)
LSD (Fucking everyone, military and non military personnel )
Ergot (An entire French town. FOI indicate this coincided with domestic LSD trials)
MK Ultra - that it existed is no longer up for debate , its extent however is.
Multiple birth control chemicals and IUD Trials (studies performed often without consent in India during the 80s by US Pharma in co-operation with the US government. Women were told they were receiving free checkups , vitamin injections or inoculations)
HIV Tainted blood plasma. After being detected in the US and Canada tainted plasma and drugs were taken off the market. Knowingly tainted stockpiles were then transported and sold in the developing world.

You do know there is an INACTIVATED flu vaccine, r

[Anonymous Coward]

As in the one you're probably declining? FFS, inactivated means there is no disease causing component in the vaccine. What you get is probably rhinovirus or some other circulating virus for which there is no vaccine, or perhaps you do get the flu and it is, in fact less severe on average than if you had forgone the vaccine.

Also, you don't get the rabies vaccine unless you're a f*cking dog (at least not in the US; Rabies may be on the adult immunization schedule in other parts of the world where the epidemiology is different).

Just because you're smart in at least one area of life doesn't mean you know wtf you're talking about here. I'm happy you manage to receive at least some recommended immunizations but please don't try arguing in favor vaccines with Anti-Vaxxers, you're likely to make such a fool of yourself as to re-assure them of their correctness. Also, get your damn flu shot and protect the very old and the very young.

Re:Took me a bit to find thisAnd yet 3 decades aft

[aepervius]

"The 40-year study was controversial for reasons related to ethical standards, primarily because researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin as an effective cure for the disease they were studying."

The problem were NEVER the first 8 years, but the 32 afterward.

That said , I am part of the (apparently small) population which think evidence based medicine is the way to go, and the "natural cure" "homeopathy" bullshit should be regulated to hell the same way normal medicine is. Why should they have a apss right if they CLAIm to have an effect. They should get the 10 years study phase I,II,III,IV , and all the burden of following side effect and adding them etc... But when researcher/doctor blow it up, then it should not ever be minimized. Again , with the tuskegee study the ethical problem were that 32 years after a cure was found , it was not sued to help those people, and in fact they were not even told they were contaminated, potentially spreading teh disease to other. At the latets by 1947 when penicillin had become a standard treatment something should have been done. And the next 25 years ? NOTHING was done.

In addition, scientists prevented participants from accessing syphilis treatment programs available to others in the area.[5] The study continued, under numerous US Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press eventually resulted in its termination on November 16.[6] The victims of the study included numerous men who died of syphilis, wives who contracted the disease, and children born with congenital syphilis.

Do not EVER minimize the impact of malicious blunder (it cannot be unintentional when treatment and help and information was *withdrawn* when it was made available in other area so forget the "do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity" it was intentional and it was done to study effects forgoing the health of the patient. Pure malice). As soonas you minimize malicious blunder, you give ammunition to the idiot anti vax, natural cure, homeopathic crowd.

Another conspiracy theory

[Anonymous Coward]

... in no way have the level of skill, organization and attention to detail

Is that another conspiracy theory? How often has the safety of American citizens been ignored because it reduces profits, negates the 'free' market, or simply is not the responsibility of corporations? Most companies have the cash reserves to make sure people, especially politicians, think what they're told to think.

The word is

[Anonymous Coward]

... "burglarized" ...

The word is burgled (past participle): it's been in the British language for decades.

Re:The word is

[Tablizer]

I rarely hear "burgled" used. Perhaps it's a UK or east coast thing.

Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

I get it, you hate Baptists. You are perfectly free to have that view, and your hatred is no-doubt honestly expressed.

Other than that, your entire post is junk.... I'm not a Southern Baptist but your post outraged even me for its sheer dishonesty. This is particularly exposed by your use of the long-debunked lie that STD transmission rates and teen pregnancy rates are highest in areas that teach abstinence-only sex ed. It's well-known that certain southern regions of the country, for example, which have high occurrences of more-conservative Christian churches (and church attendance) are ALSO regions with high poverty rates and high out-of-wedlock sexual activity NOT because one leads to the other and NOT because these are the same individual human beings, but because these populations live in overlapping areas. The history of the south has lead to certain historic and cultural realities that are different from the north (and not just along racial lines, as you probably assume I mean). The same southern town with a bunch of very religious people (black, white, etc - race is NOT the important factor) can often ALSO have a bunch of people who have VERY different beliefs and behaviors (no, NOT all blacks, there are plenty of poor and dysfunctional whites, hispanics, etc) ... but when you compare that place to some northern town with only moderate religious activity and few dysfunctional poor people, that northern town shows up as both less-religious AND less dysfunctional. This is like the pregnancy claim, where more-religious people are less-likely to abort (and therefore more likely to carry an unintended pregnancy to term) which leads to the lie that they have more out-of-wedlock pregnancies (since the aborted pregnancies among the less-religious are not counted). You are playing the age-old dishonest game of comparing regions containing conflicting extremes with regions containing moderation.... then lumping-together the opposing extremes of the region that has extremes and pretending those extremes are linked.

If you knew ANY history (or even at least had functional eyeballs and at least a minimal degree of curiosity) you would realize that the very religious in the US CANNOT be anti-science or anti-medicine since they are the ones who started most of the nation's hospitals. Did you never notice how many hospitals have names that include "Baptist", "Episcopal", "Methodist", "Saint", etc??????? Like many of the nation's most famous non-government colleges, most of America's early hospitals were begun by churches as charitable institutions.

Please cite the "Religious institutions" (significant ones, not some back-alley 12-person snake-handler "church") that are "willfully spreading misinformation" relative to innoculations against measles (the specific disease you cited). I asked for only "significant" institutions, because you chose to use the word "institution" with the obvious implication of size and respectability.... using an example that was only a hole-in-the-wall "church" with a handful of members, in this context, would be like a "pro-lifer" tarring all hospitals by citing the behaviour of a tiny back-ally abortion provider (i.e. a small, shady, wacky and not-recognized-as-legit example being used to slander a large reputable institution).

Perhaps you have confused the frequently-naked-and-with-a-staple-in-her-navel Jenny McCarthy with the leader of a Baptist Church in your area???? AFAIK she's been one of the most-vocal anti-innoculation activists in the United States. I support her right to be naked (with or without staple ;-) ) and to spout-off against innoculations (no matter how wrong she is) and I support the rights of churches to teach what they want (even the stuff I think they are wrong about), and I even support your right to shovel loads of complete bovine excrement - because I support free speech - BUT I also reserve the right to respond with some corrective comments. Given that Slashdot comments tend to skew anti-Christian, I've decided (as probably a lone voice) to address your comments and leave attacking the nonsense of ms McCarthy to (probably plenty of) other commentors.

Calling BS

[buybuydandavis]

Of course the government is suppressing natural cures. If you have to get *approval* from the government, they're restricting access.

Hello! Anyone home? Pot is a powerful medicine that is not just suppressed, it's *criminalized*.

The depressing part of the poll is that at most only half of Americans know this, and that bozos can get away with calling it a "conspiracy theory".

was trying not to sound crazy

[globaljustin]

Does fluoride cause cause the calcification of the pineal gland?

maybe!

I don't think there's anything to it, but it's one of those "I wouldn't be surprised" kind of things. I'm a 9/11 truther, so that's some context for you.

I live in Portland and we just rejected flouride recently. I used to be an activist & I noticed through social media that there was indeed such a thing as "big flouride" and they were not above hiring local agent provaceteaurs to disrupt hearings and put out disinformation.

I saw "tradecraft" which doesn't mean it calcifies the Pineal Gland but it shows that there's money behind it.

I'm much more apt to believe that part of marijuana prohibition was that it disrupts MKULTRA-style conditioning b/c of the short-term memory loss ;)

Re:was trying not to sound crazy

[Nephandus]

They're openly considering actual psychoactive dosing now. Lithium might still be in testing, but they're certainly planting the rhetoric for future handwaving of dissent at least. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Re:Maybe because there are real medical conspiraci

[Anonymous Coward]

Start here for the obvious ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States

Yes, but...

[wonkey_monkey]

Survey Finds Nearly 50% In US Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories

How many of those started believing in the conspiracy - or, in fact, had only heard of the conspiracy - the moment they were asked about it in the survey?

Re:Yes, but...

[wonkey_monkey]

To whit:

Bart: A conspiracy, eh? You think they might be involved in the Kennedy assassination in some way?
Homer: I do...now.

"Chemicals"

[Anonymous Coward]

If only those people opposed to chemicals would stop the intake of chemicals, especially that horrible, nasty O2, for five minutes then all their - and some of everyone else's - problems would be solved.

being young

[Anonymous Coward]

In 30 years of experience with Kaiser I have nothing but disappointment to express. The feeling I get is that they purposely ignore the young so that they will have better customers later, with more expensive problems to fix. Kaiser also has some of the dumbest, least empathetic corporate drones I have ever had the misfortune to meet, with a few bright spots here and there...if I were to be completely honest. I doubt Kaiser management had anything to do with the quality of those few good ones, although.

Great for children and old folks, you are on your own for everything in between. And god help you if you are between 20 & 30 and you end up in their ER.

This is coming from someone who pays close to 12$/hr for the privilege of being ignored.

What percentage of doctors believe in them?

[swb]

I think as others have pointed out, "conspiracy theories" is too loaded, I would prefer a broader category of something like "medical myths" or "unproven truisms". If you use that kind of idea as the definition of untrue/unproven information, I would bet the number would be fairly significant.

Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

How about we talk about why there is so much distrust of the medical industrial complex? If my wife and I were going to have kids (not in this fucked country!) I probably wouldn't have them vaccinated, simply because I wouldn't be able to afford it. And I'm also on the fence about the autism theory. One of my co-workers had a kid a couple of years ago, and she refused to have him vaccinated. She said the doctor's office treated her like she was a criminal.

There sure is a lot of money to be made in treating cancer, not so much in curing it. AIDS, go ahead and tell me they didn't create that in a laboratory. $4,000 for a simple gall bladder stone diagnosis! The whole hospital pricing scheme is why most Americans don't have health insurance. They try to blame it on litigious patients. We don't need ObamaCare, we need price controls. We need hospitals that are not run for-profit. We need doctors who know what they are doing. We need politicians who aren't a bunch of self-serving greedy power hungry fuckers. We need citizens who aren't idiots, that vote for these twats.

My wife and I have chosen "genealogical suicide", no more generations of our families will suffer this world full of idiots. And I sure hope reincarnation is not real. Here's a prayer for you.

Confusion rather than conspiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that I believe the conspiracy theories. It's more that I don't know that I can trust either the naysayers or the doctors. It's the same as changing the oil in my car... the manufacturer says every 5000 miles, but they want to sell more cars so have an interest in mine wearing out sooner. The service places say 3000 miles, but they want to do more oil changes. We just don't know who to believe because there are so few organizations we can actually trust not to have self interest at heart.

Peak Theories Delayed, Then

[Anonymous Coward]

They're preserving a vital resource. The sheer volume of Conspiracy Theories that have been destroyed by their general confirmation as established, documented fact - such as LIBOR and all the other "top" rates, - is absolutely appalling. Are we reaching a Peak Conspiracy Theory point? Would the dreaded turning point to alert consciousness be that far behind?

Other than that, a few thousand score extreme - sometimes crippling - allergic reactions should not deter from unquestioning and mindless protection by corporate mass produced medication. It's not like corporate mass produced has ever hurt anyone, has it? Don't look there! Just look at the kooky healer remedy types! After all, science beats mass empirical observation every time - since long before the day the ignorant peasants feared being forced to have children at the Imperial Hospital, instead of at home - because they thought they died more there. They even decided to sponsor and patronize that young quack "doctor" that claimed (not) washing hands had something to do with the childbearth deaths in the Hospital. He even was so deranged as to suggest it might be higher than having children non-scientifically at home with those supersticious midwives. Preposterous, foolish peasants!

Quarantine!

[DarthVain]

"Have you been vaccinated for the following..."
"No, because of some crazy reason..."
"Admission to Country Denied, please put your clothing into the fire receptacle on your way out."

When the plague zombies eventually die out, a new and fertile land will be ready for colonists...

Half

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of how dumb the average person is, now think that half of them are dumber than that.

They're wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think the conspiracy theories are wrong?

For a government like the US to raze the middle east for oil, kill hundreds of innocents in collateral damage fighting terrorists, spend billions bailing out billionaire bankers and car makers, support well-publicized NSA and CIA tactics (too many to mention), and a for-profit (very profitable) healthcare industry, why is it such a stretch of the imagination to think they'd do something bad for your health? If there's a dollar in it, there's several guys with no ethics trying to get your money, and many of them are very good at it.

Re:Maybe because there are real medical conspiraci

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib

From Wikipedia about Vioxx: "the confusion over the clinical safety of Vioxx was due to the sales team's overzealous behavior." Yea, that sentence makes sense.

"The panel voted 17 to 15 against banning Vioxx (rofecoxib) entirely." 15 people voted to keep a drug on the market that has killed 500,000 people. Yea, that makes sense too.

It's actually simple...

[Captain Sarcastic]

... using herbal remedies causes people to believe in conspiracy theories.

Re:You do know there is an INACTIVATED flu vaccine

[slackware 3.6]

I occasionally trap/destroy wild animals like skunks, raccoons, coyotes etc damn right I got my rabies shot.

Flu Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

The Flu vaccine is for the best guess at what the really bad flu (the kind that kills) will be this year. You are not vaccinated for the more common strains so you can still get the flu.

Re:Maybe because there are real medical conspiraci

[Anonymous Coward]

Advertising a product that the consumer may or may not need is now a conspiracy? Wow. That means everything from Captain Crunch to injury lawyers to K-Tel records is a conspiracy.
 
And Coca-Cola? Damn... where could I even start.

No, we did used to die at 40.

[Anonymous Coward]

Low infant mortality affected the average life span. If you take that into account, people have always lived past 50 or 60, even to 100.

That being said, we didn't have this problem before. We also didn't have tests that screen as well as we do now. The definition of autism has changed and is probably more readily recognized. This is true for any condition. If in the 1980s you had a fasting glucose of 145, you weren't considered diabetic. Slowly that number has gone down and, lo, more people are diagnosed as diabetic. As Jenny said, "we didn't used to have this problem," but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

If you ask me it's the quality (or lack thereof) of our food. In the US anyway, fast food mentality has taken over even the unprepared markets. We need to grow vegetables are aren't nutritious as much as vegetables that can stand to travel 1,000 miles. Beef grow too slowly or not getting enough milk from your cows? Pump 'em up full of hormones. I need glow in the dark oranges so let's engineer some.

     

Low Fat vs Low Carbs

[Mister_Stoopid]

Does "the diets recommended by the FDA and ADA (diabetes association) are about as close as you can get to a diet specifically designed to cause heart disease and diabetes, and the people responsible know this, but the recommendations aren't changed because the agencies get too much lobbying money from the grain and sugar industries" count as a conspiracy theory?

Harvard fluoride study

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/

Impact of fluoride on neurological development in children ...
Choi and senior author Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at HSPH (Harvard School of Public Health), and their colleagues collated the epidemiological studies of children exposed to fluoride from drinking water. The China National Knowledge Infrastructure database also was included to locate studies published in Chinese journals. They then analyzed possible associations with IQ measures in more than 8,000 children of school age; all but one study suggested that high fluoride content in water may negatively affect cognitive development.

The average loss in IQ was reported as a standardized weighted mean difference of 0.45, which would be approximately equivalent to seven IQ points for commonly used IQ scores with a standard deviation of 15.* Some studies suggested that even slightly increased fluoride exposure could be toxic to the brain. Thus, children in high-fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-fluoride areas. The children studied were up to 14 years of age, but the investigators speculate that any toxic effect on brain development may have happened earlier, and that the brain may not be fully capable of compensating for the toxicity.

“Fluoride seems to fit in with lead, mercury, and other poisons that cause chemical brain drain,” Grandjean says. “The effect of each toxicant may seem small, but the combined damage on a population scale can be serious, especially because the brain power of the next generation is crucial to all of us.”
---

Developmental Fluoride Neurotoxicity: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3491930/

Methods: We searched the MEDLINE, EMBASE, Water Resources Abstracts, and TOXNET databases through 2011 for eligible studies. We also searched the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, because many studies on fluoride neurotoxicity have been published in Chinese journals only. In total, we identified 27 eligible epidemiological studies with high and reference exposures, end points of IQ scores, or related cognitive function measures with means and variances for the two exposure groups. Using random-effects models, we estimated the standardized mean difference between exposed and reference groups across all studies. We conducted sensitivity analyses restricted to studies using the same outcome assessment and having drinking-water fluoride as the only exposure. We performed the Cochran test for heterogeneity between studies, Begg’s funnel plot, and Egger test to assess publication bias, and conducted meta-regressions to explore sources of variation in mean differences among the studies.

Results: The standardized weighted mean difference in IQ score between exposed and reference populations was –0.45 (95% confidence interval: –0.56, –0.35) using a random-effects model. Thus, children in high-fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-fluoride areas. Subgroup and sensitivity analyses also indicated inverse associations, although the substantial heterogeneity did not appear to decrease.

Conclusions: The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children’s neurodevelopment. Future research should include detailed individual-level information on prenatal exposure, neurobehavioral performance, and covariates for adjustment.

our forefathers ...

[Anonymous Coward]

were kicked out of every decent country in the world. John (Bill Murray's character in Stripes)

Ipso factso, we are crazy.

At least one of these is true

[mr.mctibbs]

"37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures,"

Cannabis, anyone?

It's the truth

[gzuckier]

Doctors are stealing our foreskins and appendixes and selling them to rich Arab sheikhs.

How about marketing?

[Coop]

Surely most ads are at 'the grey borders of "truth"'. "Coke adds life" -- yeah, right. The marketing for pharmaceuticals and plastic surgery can't be expected to follow higher standards than the rest of society, can it?

Re:Maybe because there are real medical conspiraci

[ToddInSF]

The point, anon-troll, is that the term "conspiracy" is used specifically as a disinformation tactic to dismiss valid observations about illicit and unethical activities.

Now crawl back into your disinformation hole.

revolt of the plebs?

[AapWatch]

"Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished."

"Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible."

"Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton."

- Bertrand Russell, "The Impact of Science on Society"

Off-topic but....

[Twinbee]

Off-topic but.... Regarding room temp super conductors you said: "You could store electricity in giant coils instead of chemical cells, making loading and unloading the electricity much faster"

Do you think high energy (on par with LIon batteries) ultra capacitors would be much easier to create as a result?

Flouride as "gateway drug" !!!

[globaljustin]

I checked out that link, and about lost my mind for a second when I read this:

...if low-dose lithium proves as good as its promise, we should not allow abstract arguments about our "freedom" to drink unadulterated water to prevent us from undertaking a mass fortification effort. If we are willing to ingest fluoride to prevent tooth decay, surely we can tolerate a trace of lithium to prevent suicides.

Lithium may actually be the tip of the fortification iceberg.....

Damn! You're totally right man...

They *absolutely* are using flouride as a "gateway drug"...this is Big Pharma's new revenue stream...can't make Heroin pills anymore (Oxycontin) so we'll just dose everyone.

watch this

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they? I really recommend you to watch this: http://articles.mercola.com/videos.aspx

and see how a flu vaccine damaged a life of one woman and how many more such damaged lives her daughter knows about

people believe the government will do awful things

[Anonymous Coward]

Minority STD infections , steaming up and down San Francisco bay releasing toxins to see the results in local clinics, plots like Operstion Northwoods to shoot down a passenger plane in sight of another by a us military jet painted cuban to provide an excuse to invzde Cuba.... Those are what we KNOW happened.

And you think the government wouldn't add an unwanted hard to dispose of chemical like Flouride In water if it also promised a little less rebelllious citizenery?

Who's illogical again?

Some facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Food: The Ultimate Secret Exposed (1/2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSpkLk0vYmk
(2/2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B9MeO3SRxU

Conspiracies

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't comment on what I think of medical conspiracies or doctors and the present medical profession, except to say they're stuck in late 19th century physics. Whether medical conspiracies are nonsense or not, part of the reason people believe in them is because conspiracies, REAL ones are as American as apple pie.
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy and four people besides John Wilkes Booth were hanged for it. (If you want to see before and after pictures of their hanging, go here):

  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2162460/Lincoln-assassination-conspirators-Grisly-moments-Civil-War-era-prisoners-convicted-conspiring-kill-president.html.

In the early 1930's there was quite a real plot to overthrow the US Government by a group of millionaires. It's call the November plot, and it was exposed by a retired Marine Corps general named Smedley Butler. But don't believe me, I'm just an Anonymous Coward. Go here:

http://beforeitsnews.com/blogging-citizen-journalism/2013/01/banker-plot-to-overthrow-the-government-the-day-the-army-turned-on-the-veterans-2445144.html

Also, General Motors, Firestone, and several oil and other companies were responsible for the demise of the streetcar in US cities. There were convictions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

And of course all this doesn't include the Burr Conspiracy, the fact that Lincoln conspirators' trial records were intentionally destroyed in the 1880's, and the fact that virtually nobody in the United States believes the official version of the Kennedy Assassination anymore.

How much of this did you learn in your high school history classes?

Is it any wonder that people are willing to believe conspiracies, especially about an industry where prices are going up faster than the rate of inflation?

Anonymous Coward? I'm proud to be one, for I join the likes of Ben Franklin who frequently posted anonymous letters to the editors to tweak people who were full of themselves.

PROUDLY ANONYMOUS COWARD