Risk factors for severe measles - Page 9

[ema-adama]

Originally Posted by shuttlt

Originally Posted by ema-adama
I do however think that with all the problems that do exist with study design and bias and ethics - there has to be a starting point for trying to establish just what is happening with vaccines and the vaccine schedule. Active survelliance seems to be a good start. A Case control study on unvaxed versus vaxed might be nice. I know RCT is not possible, and has it's limits too.
But I think it is obvious that the system as it is now is a bit of a farce.
What gets me , is that children are essentially being experimented on and the public health and safety are being experimented with. By people who are too arraogant to realise they do not know what they are doing.

That's pretty much the history of medicine right there. There was a Horizon documentary 15 or so years ago called The Courage To Fail. I like the phrase and I think it sums up one side of what you're talking about. Arrogant people taking risks with other peoples lives is probably the other side.

I have been thinking about this post and I am not satisfied that I completely understand you. In what way is my previous post a history of medicine?

[shuttlt]

Originally Posted by ema-adama

Originally Posted by shuttlt

That's pretty much the history of medicine right there. There was a Horizon documentary 15 or so years ago called The Courage To Fail. I like the phrase and I think it sums up one side of what you're talking about. Arrogant people taking risks with other peoples lives is probably the other side.

I have been thinking about this post and I am not satisfied that I completely understand you. In what way is my previous post a history of medicine?

I was probably explaining myself badly, and maybe didn't have a point to begin with. I think I was observing that a lot of medical advances have been delivered by people who were prepared to risk killing their patients if they got it wrong. Medical advance seems to me to be a process that is necessarily full of arrogance.

[ema-adama]

Originally Posted by shuttlt

I was probably explaining myself badly, and maybe didn't have a point to begin with. I think I was observing that a lot of medical advances have been delivered by people who were prepared to risk killing their patients if they got it wrong. Medical advance seems to me to be a process that is necessarily full of arrogance.

OK, that is clearer to me. And I think is a very large part of why I personally am having a hard time trusting my doctor when no honest communication is allowed. It makes the argument for me injecting my child with an unknown drug a very hard argument to make.

Do you have any thoughts on how a study could be designed that would at least start looking at the other side of the impact of vaccines beyond triggering an immune response to develop antibodies without the clinical disease?

[shuttlt]

Originally Posted by ema-adama

Do you have any thoughts on how a study could be designed that would at least start looking at the other side of the impact of vaccines beyond triggering an immune response to develop antibodies without the clinical disease?

I think one thing that needs to happen is that we need to clear about what question such a study is supposed to answer. For me there are two important questions....

1). Does the current vaccination policy save more harm than it causes?
2). Given the current vaccination policy, does vaccinating my child increase or decrease the risk of something bad happening to my child?

I think the first question may not be definitively answerable, the second one is tricky and hugely time consuming, but I think probably is answerable.

One of the problems as I see it is defining sufficiently accurately what we mean by harm/something bad. Do we mean hospital admissions? Do we mean just death? Do we mean any condition in a list that we all agree in advance. Right now there seems to be a lot of debate as to what the harm is that we should be looking for, so I don't think this is a trivial thing to define at all.

What questions would you want the study to answer?