Anti-Vaxxer Sympathy

[Thumpalumpacus]

You can disagree all you want, it's not "my view". It doesn't matter what the reason is, you cannot blame patients for not achieving a healthcare goal. Expecting patients to conform automatically is a form of assimilation.

Here is an example: "A deep mistrust of hospital systems means that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to delay treatment." (Best & Dredericks [Ed.]. 2014. Yatdjuligin. p. 230.)

Here's another example: "Health promotion focuses on achieving equity in health. Health promotion action aims at reducing differences in current health status and ensuring equal opportunities and resources to enable all people to achieve their fullest health potential. This includes a secure foundation in a supportive environment, access to information, life skills and opportunities for making healthy choices. People cannot achieve their fullest health potential unless they are able to take control of those things which determine their health. This must apply equally to women and men." (Ottawa Charter, 1986).

The way that healthcare is delivered determines its accessibility. Here's another example:

"We define non-clinical aspects related to the way individuals are treated and theenvironment in which they are treated as responsiveness1. WHO’s review of the patient satisfaction and quality care literature2 led to the identification of eight domains of responsiveness. These domains or broad areas of non-clinical care quality are relevant for all types of health care including personal and non-personal health services, as well as the population’s interaction with insurers and other administrative arms of the health system. There is empirical evidence to suggest that there is a positive association between health outcomes and responsiveness.  Notwithstanding this relationship, human rights law argues that these domains of health systems are important in their own right3." (WHO 2005).

And you can continue reading to your heart's content.

And yet the anti-vaxxers here have this for your perusal:

http://www.vaclib.org/basic/basicfct.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_....27s_death
http://naturematters.info/




... and so on. I could link you to scores more sites demonstrating a positive antipathy to the medical establishment, in many cases (as in Messenger's child's death, linked above) driven by personal pain. Now, if you think they will respond to outreach from the medical community, I'd suggest you lack insight into a significant proportion of the antivaxxer community here in America. Your comments may well be pertinent for Australia; I don't know, and because I don't live there, I'm not really interested.

You haven't even established to me that a significant proportion of people who fail to vaccinate their children do so because they are "anti-vaccine", and you haven't even provided a coherent mechanism for determining who really is "anti-" and who isn't among people who don't vaccinate.

The latter first: it's very easy to tell the difference in motive between someone who says, "I didn't vaccinate my child because I can't afford the cost" versus "I didn't vaccinate my child because vaccines are filled with poisons which cause autism."

Now, I don't have exact numbers as to how many people who haven't vaccinated their kids have decided upon inaction based on their pseudoscience, but here in America, their media presence is large, featuring Jenny McCarthy, Joe Scarborough, and Rob Schneider, amongst others, and as the websites linked above (and the many more that I frankly don't have the time to hunt up simply so you won't read them) demonstrate, there is a sizable proportion of people who are expounding this claptrap that, as you yourself have noted already, has been discarded as unsupported claims. Those people are the antivaxxers to whom I refer -- the term "anti" should have been your clue, because a parent too poor to vaccinate their child is not necessarily against the procedure, obviously. This is why I am specifically using the terms I have, and your continual muddying of the waters by insinuating that I am railing at all parents for holding these dopey views is irritating, yet you insist on not reading what terms I'm using.

Therefore it is illogical of you to target an extreme sub-group of this group which you haven't even established actually exists in any meaningful capacity. And even if you had, as I've pointed out to you, it's not their fault they have the "wrong view". They have been misinformed, and it is the healthcare services that have failed to communicate the message effectively to them.

You clearly are ignorant of matters here in America. I suggest you read more about the movement, loud as it is here, before you take me to task for anything further. This subgroup needs to be shown wrong, because they are harming others by their obdurate ignorance. This is not to say that all unvaccinated children have irrational parents. As you can see from the sites above and elsewhere, they are not interested in what the medical community has to say because they do not trust it -- and that is because of things like the death of a child to a genetic disease that the medical community couldn't prevent. That sort of irrationality cannot be reached by an outreach program in most cases. You may as well be an atheist in a religious forum, for all the good your outreach will do.

Again this isn't "my view". I'm stating the conventional wisdom of the healthcare professionals. In the past there was patient-blaming, and that viewpoint is being stamped out. In many places it is not tolerated under any circumstances, and you would have your employment terminated without notice if you behaved that way. For example, if you receive a person who has overdosed on Ice is isn't your place as a nurse to judge their condition as "self-inflicted harm" or "patient stupidity" or anything else, and if you were caught behaving that way you would be fired. That kind of attitude from doctors is one of the things that can cause patients to lie to their doctors about their conditions, or delay treatment, etc.

That is an entirely different subject and quite irrelevant to the point that antivaxxers are deliberately ignoring the science of vaccinations. If you as a doctor tell a patient that they stand a chance of dying of overdose if they don't stop shooting smack, and that patient goes on ahead shooting smack, whose fault is it? The doctor has spoken in plain simple English; the patient has ignored him in plain simple English.

People who deliberately ignore the information about vaccinations aren't reachable.

It doesn't matter. Patient-blaming is not tolerated in health services. You can blame organisations that spread misinformation, but you can't blame people who read that information and become persuaded by it.

I don't work in the health services. What that means is that my opinion doesn't have the same deleterious consequences you are wringing your hands over, and that means that I'm not really worried if Jenny McCarthy gets butthurt over my opinion.

Or you, for that matter.

The lady in the OP's link had a mistrust in the health system because of a previous negative experience, which is exactly consistent with what I said.

Her "negative experience" was simply a feeling that her doctor was treating drug use with drug prescriptions. Now, that could have been the doctor's fault, it could have been hers, but automatically assuming that it's the doctor's fault has no basis in evidence.

It started with a drug-induced psychotic breakdown. She grew up in something of a broken home, with an absent father, an addict mother, and a violent stepfather — an environment where drugs were easy to come by and hard to ignore. At 17, she smoked something weird and felt herself quite literally losing it. Hallucinations. Panic attacks. Nausea and heart palpitations. After a grueling week of recovering from the episode, she did the normal thing and took herself to a doctor.

She got out with a prescription and an unshakable feeling that this doctor, and his clinic, and the government that paid for his services, did not care at all about her concerns, her needs, and her fears. That she was a problem that could be solved with a couple of pills. That the fear she had felt for her sanity was not respected, not even considered. That the solution to her drug problem was more drugs.

She was the drug-using child of an abusive home environment, and she felt alienated? And somehow the doctor must connect to someone who is alienated, despite the fact that he isn't a psychologist?

This does not demonstrate your point.

The fact that she is willing now to have her child vaccinated - but not in a school - should tell you two more things. 1. That you can't just expect people to accept the service method you provide. It's perfectly reasonable that parents don't want their children receiving medical care in a school, or they want to be more involved, or they want to see their family doctor.

Which is nothing I ever touched upon, so why you're highlighting this is a mystery to me.

2. That somebody should be following up with her to arrange an alternative arrangement for her child's vaccination. Again you cannot and should not expect patients to automatically recognise what they need to do. Ideally the school should be following up with this and ensuring there is access to an alternative option - after all in some places in the world (such as the USA) you cannot access health services for free and this is a well know access barrier to low income people (I won't provide any more links in this post, but you can easily look this up on WHO or in journals).

Actually, in America, poor parents can receive vaccinations for their children, free of charge. You assume knowledge that you don't have in your possession, and this is one reason why we seem to be talking past each other.

I notice that you still haven't answered my point about that 5% uninoculated providing a substantial reservoir to allow for microbial evolution. At this point, I don't honestly expect an answer from you on it, so I'm going to leave this conversation, with this being my last post. You have a nice day, now.