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‘My mum didn’t vaccinate me – this is what happened next’
- PaulAJ 7y agoIf you ever find yourself arguing with an anti-vaxer, point them at this page. One personal story beats a thousand medical statistics.
- lez 7y agoOne personal story NEVER beats a thousand (correctly orchestrated) medical statistics.
- krastanov 7y agoOp 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.
- jddj 7y agoTo 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.
- braythwayt 7y agoGood luck with that. --Georges St. Pierre 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.
- jimhefferon 7y agoI have found the Debunking Handbook of some help (it was written about climate science but applies more widely). https://skepticalscience.com/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-available-download.html https://skepticalscience.com/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-a...
- sysbin 7y agoBasically like a person following a religious ideology?
- braythwayt 7y agoYes, 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.
- deogeo 7y agoProblem with personal stories is you can find one to support any viewpoint.
- ajuc 7y agoProblem with internet is that people look for the stories that support their view and ignore data and science as conspiracy.
- rixed 7y agoProblem 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.
- deogeo 7y agoSounds like we all agree.
- simondw 7y agoRight, 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.
- everdev 7y agoSo construct a worldview based on a small sample size of personal stories? Sounds like what antivaxxers do.
- deogeo 7y ago> 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.
- Firerouge 7y agoDayQuil/NyQuil (acetaminophen, antihistamine, cough suppressant) are fairly commonly used to address common cold symptoms.
- deogeo 7y agoI have to say this reeks of overmedication.
- orhmeh09 7y agoCan you explain why you feel this way?
- deogeo 7y agoAnecdotal 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.
- Nursie 7y agoNobody is taking medication to cure the cold, just make it more bearable. 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.
- jnbiche 7y agoI 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.
- Digit-Al 7y ago> but eventually Meredith (not her real name) The subject is a she not a he.
- caymanjim 7y agoSorry, 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.
- benj111 7y agoTheres 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...
- orbifold 7y agoYou 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.
- JetSpiegel 7y agoMaybe she never left their country.
- imtringued 7y agoThis 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.
- Gibbon1 7y agoI 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. FA's experience is the direct result of that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- imtringued 7y agoPrevention 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.
- hagreet 7y agomy mom told me about clickbait titles - this is what happened next
- sysbin 7y agoSociety 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.
- tomohawk 7y agoWe 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.
- amazingman 7y agoVaccines actually work in a way that seems too good to be true. And yet they still work, imagine that!
- etrautmann 7y agoWrd
- DanBC 7y agoThis article is a bit all over the place. >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.
- notacoward 7y ago> At 11 it's probably TB? 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.
- jnbiche 7y ago> 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: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/ In New Zealand as well: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/preventative-health-wellness/immunisation/new-zealand-immunisation-schedule https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/preventative-health-well...