Unless you are a trained medical professional in this particular area of study, you have absolutely no business making up your own mind.
Perhaps that is true, if "enough consideration" is equivalent something like 2 years of basic medical education and 2 years of clinical experience. Instead, most people have to make do with their own trusts, biases, limited information, etc. I think it's unreasonable to think that an untrained person is going to catch up enough after reading a few articles that they are going to make an informed decision. That's why we have doctors, to help us make informed decisions about our health. We can use their synthesis of education and experience to guide our values to make decisions that are not only self-satisfying but also reasonably accurate.
Any sufficiently intelligent and reasonable person wouldn't be questioning the established medical fact that vaccines provide an overwhelming net benefit. If they are, they almost certainly are not qualified to make an educated decision about it.
It's fine and dandy to play expert without a formal education in almost every situation, but in this case the lives of people, _and not just your own children_ is in play.
The problem with your position is that people still die from taking medication. Low statistical significance of harm doesn't matter to you if you're one of the statistically few that ends up harmed.
Statistics are valid over populations. Yes, if one looks simply at the greater good then vaccination to prevent epidemic is a good idea. However imagine a scenario where everyone else is vaccinated but you aren't - you're not exposed to the pathogen as the disease doesn't spread nor exposed to the risk of the vaccine, you win. This is of course not a scalable response.
Disease control requires those involved to consider the population and not the individual it would be beneficial to this end to pretend the vaccine is perfect and incapable of harm, this produces the best results for the whole population.
Looking further, you rightly say "vaccines" provide a net benefit. Of course one is being vaccinated with a particular vaccine which, by the nature of vaccines may not have been tested beyond cursory short term tests. We can't wait 5 years for the results of double blind experiments on a vaccine when it's been rushed in to mass production to match a particular strain of pathogen. Yes the variations may be small but small variations matter.
>It's fine and dandy to play expert without a formal education in almost every situation, but in this case the lives of people, _and not just your own children_ is in play.
Driving in the snow, say, would you do it without a formal education?
Admittedly this is anecdotal evidence, but ...
I have diagnosed several medical issues with myself and my wife by web research, only to have to pay to go to a family doctor, who hems and haws, then gives a referral to a specialist, who agrees with what I have already stated.
Specialists in my area will not take you in without a referral from the family doctor, so basically the family doctor is collecting a fee for being a gatekeeper, since he/she adds zero value.
Something similar occurred many years ago with an eye problem I had (tear in retinal wall) - the regular eye doctor had me coming back week after week, collecting his fee each time, until I specifically asked for a referral.
The specialist saw in 3 minutes, the tear that the doctor had missed from the beginning and on each subsequent visit - the reason - the specialist had me recline to flat on my back and used a very powerful magnifying glass, while the hack ^H^H^H^H regular doctor did not.
The symptoms (large eye blockage in one eye due to large black cloudy thing that appeared one morning) clearly pointed to only this cause.
This is basically what you have to deal with with doctors. There are doctors who are very, very good and doctors who are just barely bright enough to continue to practice. The major problem is how you distinguish between the two or, in other terms, how do you find a good programmer if you don't really know anything about programming? Honestly, I don't have an easily cut-and-dried answer. I generally rely on my family (a large subset of my family are highly skilled physicians) to use their professional expertise and circles to find a very highly respected physician in the area. Similarly, I generally help in evaluating technical issues for them.
"One New England Journal of Medicine study found that patients get only 55 percent of the care that's recommended for the leading causes of death and disability. Similar research in children showed they get just 47 percent—and a mere 41 percent of preventive steps that are proved to help."[1]
"Despite 15 years of advances about what is known of [sinusitis], the information isn't making its way to internists because it is not been published in journals or other sources often reviewed by internists, who most often treat sinusitis. For instance, many internists are unaware that chronic sinusitis can cause serious chronic fatigue, Chester says."[2]
"It’s unrealistic to expect the majority of physicians to go back to the original literature or even to go back to systematic reviews of the original literature,” said Gordon Guyatt, MD, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who is credited with coining the term “evidence-based medicine."[3]
"In a 2005 systematic review in the Archives of Internal Medicine, most studies found a correlation between increasing years in practice and decreasing quality of care."[3]
[1]http://www.rd.com/living-healthy/is-your-doctor-out-of-date/...
[2] http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/08/17/Doctors-need-more-...
[3] http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/12/doctors-stay-date-curren...
Implying that doctors do keep up to date with peer reviewed journals, and that if all you're doing is trying to read journals with none of the medical background require to understand them, you're certainly not going to be any more informed than your average doctor.
Gordon Guyatt, MD, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who is credited with coining the term "evidence-based medicine."
You quote him, yet you are so quick to discredit all evidence that you don't agree with.
This implication, assuming that really is what they are trying to imply, is nothing more than speculation. But if you have better information then by all means post it.
I can't really say I'm surprised to encounter inexplicable lapses in critical thinking and logic here though.
Most doctors get their information about medical issues by reading the marketing pamphlets from drug companies. If you actually read the relevant journal articles then you'd be significantly more knowledgeable about any given topic than the average doctor.
Why would doctors be so eager to prescribe Lexapro as late as 2009 even though they knew that the manufacturer had faked the science behind it, for which it was later fined over 300 million dollars? Especially since the drug was unambiguously shown to be no more effective than previous generic versions of the drug, which were only a fraction of the price? Obviously because they are getting most of their information from the marketing campaigns and not the science, plus the massive amounts of bribes and kickbacks. There are tons of examples like this.
As for the second statement, if doctors aren't up to date on the research about any given condition, then it shouldn't be that difficult to learn more about your doctor about any given condition. Almost all of the academic research in medicine is written for a lay audience, unlike in physics or continental philosophy where you really can't understand it unless you're an expert. Plus there are tons of other resources to help you make sense of the research, everything from wikipedia to academic search engines that show you which papers are cited by which other papers.
Heh OK why don't I make you a deal: you read this paper[1], tell me what it studies and what the consequences are, and then I'll forward your response to my father and he can tell you all the things you got wrong.
If there's one thing I've learned reading papers it's that the way the author phrases things or what the author conspicuously leaves out is worth just as much as what's there. Even in my domain area I'm nowhere near qualified to judge academic papers as an expert.
[1] http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/6/1203.abstract
Let's look at the facts of this case. The author didn't cite his financial connections, but the journal failed to catch this. The author made up data, but the journal failed to catch this. The public demanded an investigation into the vaccines, but the government refused to start an investigation or even answer their questions. When the government finally did start an investigation many years later they did it behind closed doors, and the public wasn't even allowed to read the transcript of the conversation for several more years. The scientific establishment has been in the wrong here at literally every turn, and yet you're spinning the story and trying to use it as an example of how the general public shouldn't be allowed to make their own medical decisions. Yes, the anti-vaccine crowd was also in the wrong for putting excessive weight on this study in the first place, but this apologism for the scientific establishment is completely unwarranted.
This study came out in 1998, and the media coverage didn't peak until late 2005. The vast majority of those in the anti-vaccine movement had never even read the original article, and only gave it credence because of the lack of transparency. In between when the study was released and when the media hype peaked:
* The largest companies in the world were going bankrupt because the government was encouraging them to use fraudulent mark-to-market accounting methods
* The government prevented any investigation into 9/11 for over a year, and then stonewalled and lied to the investigating committee once it was finally formed.
* The government lied about the safety of the air at ground zero.
* The government lied about Iraq having WMDs and being connected to 9/11, and started a war based on these lies.
Even if it was scientifically unjustified to believe that vaccines caused autism based on one study, there was nothing unreasonable about parents avoiding the vaccinations once they heard that the government was once again lying.
You don't get to claim that people should trust you if you are constantly lying to them. What happened with regards to falling vaccination rates was completely reasonable and predictable given the circumstances, whether scientifically justifiable or not. And it was only after an epic government fuckup of 7+ years that the issue went from being a fringe concern to a mainstream panic.
In that environment, whether medical professionals or the NHS were for or against the treatments was really not pertinent at all.
But I'm finding it hard to see an argument in your post against the original point that people without medical backgrounds really shouldn't be making medical judgements. Especially if they consider the views of medical professionals and the NHS less pertinent to their kid's health than knee-jerk distrust in anything government-approved provoked by entirely irrelevant military intelligence scandals...
The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).