Ask a public-health/nutrition student

[Aractus]

One of the things I find interesting is the issue of parental responsibility for providing adequate health care for their offspring. Well not so much that I find it interesting in itself, what fascinates me most is the the public viewpoints and policy on this.

We've already debated whether so-called "anti-vaxers" are moronic invalids or not. I did try pointing out that of people who don't vaccinate their children not at the advice of their doctors, the majority of them are not "anti vaccine". It's important to think about because focusing resources and attention on the actual "anti vaxers" would yeiled far less promising results than focusing on those who miss vaccinations for other reasons: the biggest reason being that the need is not seen as seriously to the healthcare consumers as it is to health professionals. Address that and the vaccination rate will increase, back to where it needs to be.

And there's another reason I don't believe in taking draconian measures to "force" people to vaccinate their children, and that is that any draconian action has the potential to create distrust between healthcare consumers and healthcare providers, and establishing and keeping that trust is far more important. Without it people will not seek the healthcare products and services they need because of their fear. In Australia this is a big problem, and in fact it would be a problem anywhere in the world that has Indigenous people, and that is that Indigenous people have a huge fear of any White-Australia institutions, whether they're schools, hospitals, police departments, or governments.

And besides, people are right to distrust pharmaceutical companies, and they should distrust the companies. I absolutely loathe them. Nurofen was ordered in December to remove the "targeted pain" products from their website as part of a court ruling against them, and yet they still display the misleading information here and here (and I've sent through a notification to ACCC about the breech). The products themselves are no longer available for sale being that they've been banned in the same aforementioned ruling. That's why people should never, ever get their information from a drug company, or a supplement manufacturer, they should get advice from health professionals. And even pharmacies can't be trusted when they knowingly put quackery on their shelves (and I'm talking other shit that gets sold in pharmacies that has no medical benefit).

But looking beyond this, we currently have people who do put their children at risk by following alternative ideas of medicine and diet. And this I think is far more serious. I was just reading about the case of David & Collet Stephan providing inadequate medical care for their child by self-diagnosing his illness. That's a gross negligence on their behalf. And it has nothing to do with their anti-vax beliefs, and I don't think that should even be relevant at the trial, the relevance is on the fact that the parents decided to diagnose the child's illness without seeing a medical practitioner. The fact they were giving a toddler a multivitamin is just beyond belief. It defies the conventional limits of stupidity. Just to clarify, I'm not alleging giving the toddler a multivitamin was a substitute for medicine.