Western Medicine, Western Problems

Years ago a friend of mine told me of her refusal to vaccinate her two young children, then aged around 5 and 8. She told me about links to autism and other mental and physical abnormalities associated with childhood vaccines. It sounded to me then like one of those goofy conspiracy theories that people come up with, but ever since then I’ve kept an eye out for evidence one way or another about vaccines and health.

Also along the way I’ve subscribed to the newsletter of Dr. Mercola, a doctor and natural health advocate near Chicago. While I don’t follow his advice to the letter, I enjoy the hints and suggestions he provides each week. I think his wisdom could be summed up in three key points:

1. Diet – eating non-processed organic foods will keep you healthy from head to toe. The more processed/chemical-ridden junk you put into your body, the more damage you do, ranging from lower energy, damaged teeth, hair, and skin, to heart disease and cancer.
2. Exercise – Humans evolved as movers (hunters and gatherers, farmers and herders, etc). It has only been in the last 100 years that we’ve begun to sit around all day banging away on computers (like me now!). Humans used to be physically active 8, 10, 12 hours a day! Now it’s more like 1 or 2 and for some people it can be almost zero many days. A couple hours at least of moderate cardiovascular work (walking, yard work, playing with kids, etc) is a must to maintaining health. Get the heart pumping and keep it up for at least 30 minutes. For best results, do it outside (get sun!).
3. Nature – We live in a man-made world too much these days, boxed in by 1001 demands of modern ‘life’ that literally suck the real ‘life’ out of us. Nature returns us to who we really are – natural beings, tied to nature’s cycles, free of conceptual boxes and demands: free. So get out there!

And I will. But before I do, I wanted to post a word or two about vaccines from Mercola’s latest newsletter. First, he posts this clip of the head of the CDC on CNN. I recall recently anchors on CNN calling the vaccine-autism link ‘ridiculous’ – now we see the spin that can get them there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh-nkD5LSIg

“No one knows what causes autism, but federal health authorities say it isn’t childhood immunizations. Some parents and a small minority of doctors and scientists, however, assert vaccines are responsible.”

That is from a huge recent study of an interesting coincidence between over 30,000 children in the Chicago area and a major Amish community in Pennsylvania: none received vaccines and NONE developed autism. Given the rise in autism cases, currently at 60 in 10,000 children, this is statistically AMAZING. There should be around 200 autism cases in the Chicago children and hundreds more among the Amish – but nope, zero.

Now, that’s not to say that many vaccines aren’t safe – there may be just one or two that are ‘triggering’ autism in certain children who otherwise would have grown up happy and healthy. It may also be – as the story above notes – that parents who reject vaccines also follow other healthy practices (longer breast-feeding, less exposure to drugs/medicines in general, etc.) that protect their children from autism.

And of course many children who get all of the vaccines do fine. But that’s no reason to trust the vaccines! That’s like pointing out the people who smoke their whole life and still live actively well into their 80s (like my paternal grandfather). The fact is that smoking is linked closely enough to heart disease and lung cancer that it should be avoided. You have to ask yourself the same question for vaccines: (based on the above data) your child will have a 1 in 166 chance of having autism if you vaccinate him/her, or zero chance if you don’t.

How many of those unvaccinated children got sick from measles, mumps, etc? We don’t know. How many had life-debilitating illnesses that could have been prevented by vaccines? Again, we don’t know. The debate will likely go on. My own hope is to move ever-closer to naturopathic and holistic methods of health and away from the patchwork of allopathic Western medicine.