Op is probably talking in terms of how to reach a person that has shown already they do not understand science (e.g. they are an antivaxer), not in terms of how to do good science. I suspect they are right in this case, albeit a bit optimistic.
To take this a little further, this framing effect/appeal to emotion has been shown to affect a large segment of the general population, not only those in the anti-science, antivax extreme.
Granted it's not exactly the same thing, but Oxfam uses campaigns which hilight the story of a single child suffering extreme poverty rather than attempting to move people with statistics which express the scale of the problem.
When someone has a closed reasoning system, even an emotional story will not sway them. It will be waved away as a rare outlier, or something God wanted to happen to that person, or fake news ginned up by Big Pharma, &c.
People like anti-vaxxxers don't just have strong beliefes, strongly held, they have integrated their beliefs into their personal identity, they have integrated their beliefs into their tribal membership, and they have converted them into a persecution complex.
Those three things--personal identity, tribal membership, and persecution complex--brush truth aside like chaff in the breeze.
Yes, except I am not "just" talking about someone following an ideology, I am talking about someone who engages with others who follow the same ideology, and thus gets emotional support from "belonging to the tribe."
This is why the internet changes everything about radicalization: It makes it nearly frictionless to find a critical mass of other people who share your ideology and engage with them all day long.
Problem with this HN entry is it's doing exactly this.
I understand that the BBC might want to play the "statistically irrelevant but emotionally moving" card from time to time, as it's provably more efficient and, at their scale, could even save a sizeable number of lives.
But I still had hope that the comparatively much smaller population reading HN was into science as opposed to this kind of "argument".
Is it really important to have a real life illustration of the possible consequences of the feer of vaccines? I doubt it. Can you convince anyone to question his own irrational thoughts by resorting to irrational arguments, or do you actually help the bad habit to grow longer roots?
As the saying goes, the most pernicious way to damage a cause is to argue for it with dubious means.
Right, and then they'll point you at an equally poignant story about a kid who was vaccinated and then was diagnosed with autism.
If the hypothetical anti-vaxxer didn't already know that life-threatening diseases exist and can be prevented with vaccines, that's probably where you should have started your argument.
> They tend to believe that the body naturally heals itself. If I had a cold, growing up in New Zealand, I was told, "Eat a cucumber," or, "Have a drink of what the neighbour made."
Well, the body does heal itself, most of the time. But her description of a cold puzzles me - is it normal to take medicine (as opposed to just tea or soup) for an ordinary cold? Because taking drugs for something as minor as a cold is utterly alien to me.
Anecdotal of course, but in the case of a common cold (as opposed to one where symptoms are unusually severe, or lasts too long) no-one in my family takes medicine (other than tea with honey and lemon), and the cold goes away just fine. I get the strong impression this is true for most of Europe.
A little less anecdotally, a cold is a viral infection, so medicine will mostly target only its symptoms, not the underlying cause. If the symptoms are bearable, then this looks like a bad idea to me - I'm inclined to think the symptoms are there for a reason.
The symptoms are caused by the virus reproducing. At least take cough suppressant.
The rest just makes you feel a little less awful. All the studies show the current OTC remedies don’t shorten illness duration (which conversely means they don’t lengthen it either).
The “evolutionary response” hypothesis is a lesser form of “smart people going with their gut instead of science” - which is partly how we’ve gotten into this mess in the first place.
Smart people seem to get important things wrong quite a lot.
Erik Naggum used to say something along the lines of "if you dull your ability to feel sick, you also dull your joy of feeling well, and your ability to spot the difference".
The “symptom” is an immune system response to a pathogen.
To me, it seems rational to default to assuming the symptom has an evolved purpose, a mechanism in fighting infection, and not counteract it unless absolutely necessary.
"The commonest form of cough is caused by upper respiratory tract infection and has no benefit to the host. The virus hijacks this natural defence mechanism in order to propagate itself through the population."
Recovery is greatly enhanced by getting good sleep, and taking medication at night to suppress symptoms so you can get a good night’s sleep is far better for your recovery than toughing it out. It may not entirely reduce the duration of the illness, but it will certainly help reduce the severity.
If I have snot running down the front of my face and down the back of my neck then I'll take a cold/flu tablet to dry me up. otherwise... just deal with it
Good, because antibiotics do nothing for a cold which is viral. Antibiotics only work on bacteria. Anyone who demands antibiotics because they have a cold is completely unqualified to make even the most basic decisions about their own treatment.
Aside from D3 most of the world that doesn't regularly eat lots of fermented foods regularly lacks in K2. This results in calcium building up in arterial walls rather than being shuttled into bones and tissues.
In France I've heard it's popular for doctors to say that "a cold one do not treat lasts for a long week, while if one takes medication then it only lasts for seven days".
Depends how rotten I feel, but decongestants to clear the sinuses/nasal passages and aspirin or paracetamol to help control body temperature definitely help make it suck less.
Why not? There's no nobility to suffering if you don't have to.
There are a few reasons beyond pride why the line for when to use paracetamol etc differs among individuals.
Propensity to take or avoid unnecessary medication is something that probably aligns to certain psychological traits, as well as being picked up from parents and peers in childhood. Also, some people suffer more than others in treatable ways (my mother regularly had headaches, I rarely do).
I personally avoid unnecessary medication (not in any active sense, but more like "ehh it's not really bad enough and it'll be over soon") whenever possible and could probably count on one hand the number of times I've taken any in the last 10 years, but on the other hand I have friends who take great joy in having something (or things) on hand for just about any ailment which someone might mention in passing.
One possible reason is that some people weigh the tax on their liver and/or stomach more strongly than a brief temperature. These medications, although amazing and broadly safe, aren't altogether without tradeoffs.
I guess for me it's that I don't suffer very much from the symptoms of minor illnesses, and possibly that I want to save my liver damage for alcohol.
The tax on ones liver is a temporary affair, AFAICT, rather than any sort of cumulative damage.
You may make your choices, and I shall respect them. It was the implied criticism in the original post that I responded to really (confirmed in other posts when the same poster called any other habit "over medicating").
For me the symptoms themselves can pose problems - if I get inflammation of the nose and ear canals during a cold, and they block up, I seem to be prone to ear infections. Decongestants etc are a good preventative measure for that as well as making the whole thing less crappy.
Truthfully, ever since I started walking a few miles a day outside I very rarely get colds or "minor" illnesses.
In the past I would get a cold maybe once every year or 2, and then it would suck for about a week while riding it out. I used to get bad colds too. To the point where when I was kid they wanted to put tubes in my ears to drain liquid out. But the last time I had a cold was ~5 years ago.
I remember last year I spent 6 hours sitting directly next to someone on a plane who looked severely ill with cold-like symptoms. Sniffing every 20 seconds, clearing his throat often, looked super pale, major bags under his eyes. Overall looked miserable. I thought I was done for, but somehow managed to not get sick in potentially one of the worst situations possible for getting sick.
I don't know what to make of it but I remember my dad telling me that often times the kids of a farmer are the healthiest people around and the moral there is they were constantly around things that might not be considered sanitary so their bodies built up a natural immunity. Basically, mild exposure to non-ideal things helps you out a lot (which includes vaccinations for more serious non-common germs of course).
I agree that the author's mom did a horrible thing to him by not getting vaccinated. But the whooping cough and tetanus are on him -- he describes being aware of the importance and need for vaccines well before he contracted those diseases. And even after contracting whooping cough, he still failed to get his tetanus vaccine, which would have saved him from his painful and life-threatening case of tetanus he contracted soon afterwards.
Sorry, but if you're 36 years old and you don't have a tetanus vaccination, you don't get to blame your mother anymore. You're supposed to get a dip-tet or TDAT booster every ten years, and if you're 36 you've only failed yourself. This article is full of examples of failure by the subject. Contracting whooping cough in her 30s as well? And that wasn't enough motivation to get the tetanus vaccine?
It's fine as a cautionary tale, but the subject is still a walking disease vector as she is taking her time getting vaccinated.
Theres a reason things are made opt out, rather than opt in. Humans are really bad at doing things if it requires them to go even a little out of their way.
Plus if you had a mother like that, wouldn't there be at least some worry about vaccines, despite rationally knowing they are ok.
Walking disease vector is harsh. When do you stop? I havent had the chicken pox vaccine, or a flu vaccine, or anthrax...
You ask a doctor what vaccinations you should get... Are you visiting a foreign country? They have a list of additonal recommended vaccinations for all of them.
This person was taught to fail herself by her mother. Only when the problems actually start did she realize that her mother was the one who failed her.
I also think 'poorly attached' to healthcare. Which is in part a system failure. Healthcare in the US tends to fail the single point of responsibility principal.
If you want tasks accomplished coherently then someone has to be in charge and have authority. In US healthcare we've decided that person is the 'patient' despite their lack of knowledge, skill, training and authority.
Had the same thought, once you are 18 you are responsible for yourself. During your annual medical exam you should probably ask your doctor whether there are any outstanding vaccinations. If you fail to do that, it is entirely your fault.
Prevention makes problems and their solution invisible. People then start believing that the problem never existed in the first place and that the solution is actually harmful or wasteful.
Society owes it to children for laws to be made protecting children from parents being medically negligent. Children should be able to communicate freely to medical professionals and receive treatment if healthcare favours the outcome. Humanity is failing when it comes to morals if we cannot even have a child reach adulthood in good health because of negligent parents.
We all have to survive our parents to grow up. And our schools. And even our own government.
As great as vaccines are, they are not perfect. I've had a few conversations with people who are frightened of vaccines or don't trust them. One perception I've come away from those conversations is that vaccines are touted in a way that is too good to be true. This actually lessens the ability of many people to trust the authority doing the touting. It makes them wonder what other agenda the authority has.
>When I was 11, the school gave us MMR vaccinations. When any injections happened, the school typically sent out paperwork and parents would fill in the permission slips. Mum would always send back, "No, choosing not to."
MMR vaccination is for young children. At 11 it's probably TB?
> Despite the pain, I felt angry towards my mother, because she deliberately didn't get me vaccinated.
Tetanus isn't a routine vaccination. You have it if you need it.
Could be BCG (TB) but that's usually a couple of years later. I was 13 but I was a year ahead, so for most kids it would have been 14 at that time in New Zealand. At 11 it's even more likely to be TDaP, which is a booster for the better known DTaP typically given earlier.
> Tetanus isn't a routine vaccination.
The T in DTaP and TDaP is tetanus. It's very routine.
> MMR vaccination is for young children. At 11 it's probably TB?
If the child hadn't had any of his/her MMR series, a doctor would absolutely want to get the child started on the series if possible, regardless of the age.
> At 11 it's probably TB?
Few countries routinely administer the TB vaccine. It's too low efficacy.
> Tetanus isn't a routine vaccination. You have it if you need it.
In the US, and in most western countries, a series tetanus vaccines is absolutely given as part of the TDaP/DTaP childhood combo series, and then boosters are administered later as needed. In the US, it's a series of 5.
And indeed, it appears as it's given routinely to children in the UK, as well:
70 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadGranted it's not exactly the same thing, but Oxfam uses campaigns which hilight the story of a single child suffering extreme poverty rather than attempting to move people with statistics which express the scale of the problem.
When someone has a closed reasoning system, even an emotional story will not sway them. It will be waved away as a rare outlier, or something God wanted to happen to that person, or fake news ginned up by Big Pharma, &c.
People like anti-vaxxxers don't just have strong beliefes, strongly held, they have integrated their beliefs into their personal identity, they have integrated their beliefs into their tribal membership, and they have converted them into a persecution complex.
Those three things--personal identity, tribal membership, and persecution complex--brush truth aside like chaff in the breeze.
This is why the internet changes everything about radicalization: It makes it nearly frictionless to find a critical mass of other people who share your ideology and engage with them all day long.
I understand that the BBC might want to play the "statistically irrelevant but emotionally moving" card from time to time, as it's provably more efficient and, at their scale, could even save a sizeable number of lives.
But I still had hope that the comparatively much smaller population reading HN was into science as opposed to this kind of "argument".
Is it really important to have a real life illustration of the possible consequences of the feer of vaccines? I doubt it. Can you convince anyone to question his own irrational thoughts by resorting to irrational arguments, or do you actually help the bad habit to grow longer roots?
As the saying goes, the most pernicious way to damage a cause is to argue for it with dubious means.
If the hypothetical anti-vaxxer didn't already know that life-threatening diseases exist and can be prevented with vaccines, that's probably where you should have started your argument.
Well, the body does heal itself, most of the time. But her description of a cold puzzles me - is it normal to take medicine (as opposed to just tea or soup) for an ordinary cold? Because taking drugs for something as minor as a cold is utterly alien to me.
A little less anecdotally, a cold is a viral infection, so medicine will mostly target only its symptoms, not the underlying cause. If the symptoms are bearable, then this looks like a bad idea to me - I'm inclined to think the symptoms are there for a reason.
Being unable to breathe through your nose serves little purpose I can think of.
Your 'most of Europe' doesn't really fit with my experience of the UK.
As a generally healthy Dane, when I get the cold or the flu I generally don't take any medications for it, and neither does most of the people I know.
The rest just makes you feel a little less awful. All the studies show the current OTC remedies don’t shorten illness duration (which conversely means they don’t lengthen it either).
The “evolutionary response” hypothesis is a lesser form of “smart people going with their gut instead of science” - which is partly how we’ve gotten into this mess in the first place.
Smart people seem to get important things wrong quite a lot.
He knew a lot about being ill.
Some people do find it virtuous to suffer a little, but that's another matter.
The “symptom” is an immune system response to a pathogen.
To me, it seems rational to default to assuming the symptom has an evolved purpose, a mechanism in fighting infection, and not counteract it unless absolutely necessary.
E.g. quick random Google: https://bmjopenrespres.bmj.com/content/3/1/e000118
"The commonest form of cough is caused by upper respiratory tract infection and has no benefit to the host. The virus hijacks this natural defence mechanism in order to propagate itself through the population."
https://youtu.be/1w3QJjpwJhA?t=242
People ask me what “I’m taking” for a cold but there’s not much you can do about a viral infection other than take ARV’s (which is quite extreme!)
The whole Vitamin C thing is a total myth although I do believe a good diet helps.
Also important for bone health. Most people would benefit from vitamin D3 supplements in the darkest months.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166406/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4566462/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5613455/
Why not? There's no nobility to suffering if you don't have to.
Propensity to take or avoid unnecessary medication is something that probably aligns to certain psychological traits, as well as being picked up from parents and peers in childhood. Also, some people suffer more than others in treatable ways (my mother regularly had headaches, I rarely do).
I personally avoid unnecessary medication (not in any active sense, but more like "ehh it's not really bad enough and it'll be over soon") whenever possible and could probably count on one hand the number of times I've taken any in the last 10 years, but on the other hand I have friends who take great joy in having something (or things) on hand for just about any ailment which someone might mention in passing.
One possible reason is that some people weigh the tax on their liver and/or stomach more strongly than a brief temperature. These medications, although amazing and broadly safe, aren't altogether without tradeoffs.
I guess for me it's that I don't suffer very much from the symptoms of minor illnesses, and possibly that I want to save my liver damage for alcohol.
You may make your choices, and I shall respect them. It was the implied criticism in the original post that I responded to really (confirmed in other posts when the same poster called any other habit "over medicating").
For me the symptoms themselves can pose problems - if I get inflammation of the nose and ear canals during a cold, and they block up, I seem to be prone to ear infections. Decongestants etc are a good preventative measure for that as well as making the whole thing less crappy.
Truthfully, ever since I started walking a few miles a day outside I very rarely get colds or "minor" illnesses.
In the past I would get a cold maybe once every year or 2, and then it would suck for about a week while riding it out. I used to get bad colds too. To the point where when I was kid they wanted to put tubes in my ears to drain liquid out. But the last time I had a cold was ~5 years ago.
I remember last year I spent 6 hours sitting directly next to someone on a plane who looked severely ill with cold-like symptoms. Sniffing every 20 seconds, clearing his throat often, looked super pale, major bags under his eyes. Overall looked miserable. I thought I was done for, but somehow managed to not get sick in potentially one of the worst situations possible for getting sick.
I don't know what to make of it but I remember my dad telling me that often times the kids of a farmer are the healthiest people around and the moral there is they were constantly around things that might not be considered sanitary so their bodies built up a natural immunity. Basically, mild exposure to non-ideal things helps you out a lot (which includes vaccinations for more serious non-common germs of course).
The subject is a she not a he.
It's fine as a cautionary tale, but the subject is still a walking disease vector as she is taking her time getting vaccinated.
Plus if you had a mother like that, wouldn't there be at least some worry about vaccines, despite rationally knowing they are ok.
Walking disease vector is harsh. When do you stop? I havent had the chicken pox vaccine, or a flu vaccine, or anthrax...
If you want tasks accomplished coherently then someone has to be in charge and have authority. In US healthcare we've decided that person is the 'patient' despite their lack of knowledge, skill, training and authority.
FA's experience is the direct result of that.
As great as vaccines are, they are not perfect. I've had a few conversations with people who are frightened of vaccines or don't trust them. One perception I've come away from those conversations is that vaccines are touted in a way that is too good to be true. This actually lessens the ability of many people to trust the authority doing the touting. It makes them wonder what other agenda the authority has.
>When I was 11, the school gave us MMR vaccinations. When any injections happened, the school typically sent out paperwork and parents would fill in the permission slips. Mum would always send back, "No, choosing not to."
MMR vaccination is for young children. At 11 it's probably TB?
> Despite the pain, I felt angry towards my mother, because she deliberately didn't get me vaccinated.
Tetanus isn't a routine vaccination. You have it if you need it.
Could be BCG (TB) but that's usually a couple of years later. I was 13 but I was a year ahead, so for most kids it would have been 14 at that time in New Zealand. At 11 it's even more likely to be TDaP, which is a booster for the better known DTaP typically given earlier.
> Tetanus isn't a routine vaccination.
The T in DTaP and TDaP is tetanus. It's very routine.
If the child hadn't had any of his/her MMR series, a doctor would absolutely want to get the child started on the series if possible, regardless of the age.
> At 11 it's probably TB?
Few countries routinely administer the TB vaccine. It's too low efficacy.
> Tetanus isn't a routine vaccination. You have it if you need it.
In the US, and in most western countries, a series tetanus vaccines is absolutely given as part of the TDaP/DTaP childhood combo series, and then boosters are administered later as needed. In the US, it's a series of 5.
And indeed, it appears as it's given routinely to children in the UK, as well:
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/
In New Zealand as well:
https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/preventative-health-well...