subject: Vaccinations And Their Role In Medical Care [print this page] There is a public ignorance about medical care. This is unfortunate but unavoidable. Medicine is complex and many doctors aren"t good educators. Despite the protestations of Neil DeGrasse Tyson learning to talk to people isn"t easy for everyone. As such there are some panics in the public over long accepted tenants of medical care. One recent example is the vaccination. The amount of young lives that vaccinations have saved and changed is astounding, but because people don"t understand a lot of medicine, nor statistics, people has managed to demagogue against vaccinations. This typically is more of a problem in the affluent parts of California, than something common in a place like Austin Texas, but vaccinations are an important part of medical care. In some contexts they"re even required of people. However, there remains some public fear and concern over vaccinations as a form of medical care.
A vaccination is (this is very simplified, if you want an in-depth discussion talk to a doctor face to face) a dead or severely weakened form of a disease. It"s injected into the body; the body reacts to it and creates antibodies. The next time it runs into that disease the body already has the defenses to defend against it. Many of the chemicals used in vaccinations are designed to weaken and hold the disease in a stasis; as such they can be scary sounding chemicals. It"s understandably where people can over react and think that vaccinations are causing autism, it seems to make no sense to give your child a disease to make them healthy, and some of the chemicals in there sound like poison.
There are two counter arguments against the connection of autism to vaccinations being a scary thing. The first is that quite simply there is no scientific or medical evidence to support such a link. Medical care is heavily tested and very regulated, mistakes happen but not often and not on large scale. We don"t continue forms of medical care that carry too much risk and we test every form of medical care a lot before it"s released to the public at large. There was one test that came out in the UK a while ago that supported a link, but the test was so poorly performed that it was scientifically refuted, and was actually illegal. The other issue is that we"ve gotten used to how safe our children are today, but it wasn"t long ago that kids in Austin Texas, and the rest of the States were getting polio, or mumps, etc. These diseases used to kill or maim children, now they"re almost unheard of. Autism isn"t fun for the child or the parents, but it"s infinitely better than death or serious physical and mental injury caused by the diseases we inoculate against.
