A friend of mine, who just had a baby, recently sent me a link to an article titled: Why Dr Suzanne Humphries, an anti-vaccine activist, is lying to you about measles and asked me for my opinion about it.
I have had a few conversations with him about the risks of vaccinating or not in the past and obviously he was doing some of his own research. So it was exciting to review a article biased more towards the pro-vaccine side to see if their arguments made any sense.
Source
My own opinion is that parents should be able to make their own informed decision about what goes into their child's body and then be willing to accept the consequences of that choice. I very much dislike it when people are given half-truths and then manipulated into making a decision based on the practitioner's bias. Hopefully I am not also guilty of this when explaining treatment options to patients in my own practice.
There is no 100% safe choice in the vaccine debate.
There are risks to both sides. It is just a matter of figuring out what risks are worth it for you to take with your child's health and let you sleep at night.
What gets lost in the debate is what those real risks are and the most appropriate ways to mitigate these risks.
The target of the article, Dr. Suzanne Humphries, is a large voice in the anti-vaccine movement and someone who I have tremendous respect for. Having watched a number of her youtube videos, (this one is my favourite) I have come to appreciate her passion for the well referenced information that she gives.
Dr. Humphries was a medical kidney specialist before she started speaking out about vaccines so has a solid background in science and is as evidence-based as they come. The fact that she gave up such a high paying job (I think I remember her saying she was making $350,000 in a video) voluntarily to do what she is doing now should give her a lot of credibility for what she has to say and explains the passion for which she delivers it.
Being that the above article is obviously an attempt at character assassination of Dr. Humphries I figured that I would go through the article claim by claim to see if the author, Isabella B, has found any holes in the message that I had been hearing from Dr. Humphries.
The article hons in on Dr. Humphries's book Dissolving Illusions. It just so happens that I have read this book and have a personal copy so it should help me get context for the claims being made against Dr. Humphries. The article makes 11 different claims so I think that I will use each of those claims as a post and thoroughly examine them to be able to come up with a consensus on where the facts are in this part of the vaccination debate.
Hopefully you will be able to stick with me through the series and I promise I will get onto a different topic once finished.
If you are interested in hearing my thoughts on how to create more high quality accounts on steemit please read my last blog post, My solution to fight spam and increase quality content on Steemit.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned.
