crazy medical practices

[justice'smom]

I'm not sure if this has ever been talked about. If so I'm sorry.
Sometimes I wonder if in the future people will be saying, what were we thinking? When you read back through history you read about all kinds of medical practices that we were told were just fine for us and now we know how wrong they were. I wonder if we will get to that point with vaccines. I have never really thought a lot about if vaccines cause autism or not. I thought it was possible and very probable, but just wasn't sure. Now that I have heard from so many moms now that their child showed signs of autism immediatly following immunization I believe them. I think far to often we just think a mom is crazy because she is not a medical professional. I have been in too many sitiations though where I knew my kids and I knew what was wrong with them, but the drs. did not agree. I believe those moms now. All that to say, I wonder if the incidence of autism is going to rise so high that the medical community is going to have to REALLY start questioning vaccines. Not even just autism because I don't not vaccinate due to just the possibilty of autism. I just wonder if we will get to a point were we will say what were we thinking? Do any of you think about that too? What are your thougts?

[peainthepod]

I think about this all the time, and not just in regard to vaccines. We are at a point where pharmaceutical companies are holding the allopathic medical establishment hostage. I think lots of current medical practices will be widely questioned in the future.

At least, I hope so.

[Pariah]

I've wondered this myself.

I'm really into history and photography, which has taken me to old TB hospitals. I went on a tour of Waverly Hills (a former TB hospital in KY), and some of the practices there to treat TB were absolutely horrifying. And that wasn't even that long ago...maybe in the not so distant future, the same will happen with vaccines.

[bluedaisy]

I think about this a lot too, especially when things are "assumed" to be safe. There are so many medical procedures/drugs that we "assumed" to be safe for years before people realized they were harmful.

Plus, I have no faith in the drug industry which I believes hides or minimizes the risks of procedures until so much evidence has come out that they no longer can ignore it.

This was one reason I decided to decline prenatal rhogam (although i do plan to get the postnatal shot) - everyone assumes that it's safe but there have really been no studies done at all to see its effects on the fetus.

I think there are other things too like convenience inductions, skyrocketing c-section rates, etc that people will look back on in the future as being harmful.

[Deborah]

You know, "they" are getting pretty good at just sliding stuff out of sight.

My mother gave birth in hospitals. Her first two, both born in the 40s, she labored in a big ward with no support, then was toted off to the delivery room, strapped down and forcibly anesthetized. Except in alternative birthing books, none of this nonsense is mentioned in regular birthing stuff. I've never seen an apology for these dangerous and unnecessary procedures.

Sometimes you'll see particularly idiotic stuff critiqued, (lobotomies) but an awful lot just slides gently out of sight with no discussion and no apologies. They were doing their best, ya know?

[In Exile]

Nobody ever mentions that "Doctors" thought women are "hysterical" because the uterus is climbing around inside of them-the remedy was to hang the woman upside down by her ankles- I am not kidding you.

Gays and Lesbians were (and still are here in the US) treated as sick people that need treatment, electric shocks anyone?

How many women lost their uterus at the first sign of a "problem?, no matter how benign of nature- waking up from anaestesia only to be told, "well, we decided to take it out" etc, still happening.

Schizophrenics being posessed by the devil or anything mental health related, I would'nt want to have lived back then.

Medicine had some very bizarre thoughts-and nobody ever says loudly, yeah.
Try telling a Pediatrician in Europe that the male forskin is a dead and useless, dirty thing-most will ask, gee, you must be American if you believe that.(some bad exceptions who want to be American)

Vaccines in today's form are rare despite the idea of vaccinating having been around for a long time, but we and our kids are kind of the big, open ended trial mice of the lab-and that stinks.

I do think, a couple hundred years from now stuff like that will be "on display" in modern museums and people will chuckle at the thought of injected yourself with 5 or 6 different disease cultered on monkey kidney cells, chicken eggs with a bunch of heavy metals added to it- sounds just a stupid as a uterus climbing around in woman making her hysterical...

[justice'smom]

I'm so glad I'm not alone in my thoughts. I think most people trust in vaccines because the medical professionals say it's okay and we, the non-vaxers are crazy for questioning them. I think also that even if it all comes to light it will just be hidden for the random few to learn about. Many shocking things like that have already happened like you ladies have said and noone seems to remember them. It just amazed me how the public trusts so much in the same people that have hurt so many already. I don't understand why people don't question the fact that they took mercury out of vaccines. I mean they don't just do things like that for no reason.

[Sheryl1678]

I think medically managed childbirth is another modern medical practice that is going the way of the dinosaur and the lobotomy (along with unsafe vaccines and other practices). Here's hoping!!

[Swirly]

Maybe there will be an enlightenment regarding vaccination in the future, but I tend to think b/c it is a sacred cow, that too many will never see it as anything but a miraculous godsend.

[Deborah]

there have been some really bad vaccines in the past, some dangerous, some ineffective, some both...

has anyone ever heard about them?

for example, there was a vaccine for scarlet fever...but it turned out to be very dangerous...so they tossed it...and scarlet fever doesn't seem to be a major cause of childhood death anymore

and the BCG vax for tuberculosis doesn't seem to work very well, but a lot of countries still require it, not the U.S., though

[Turquesa]

Originally Posted by In Exile

I do think, a couple hundred years from now stuff like that will be "on display" in modern museums and people will chuckle at the thought of injected yourself with 5 or 6 different disease cultered on monkey kidney cells, chicken eggs with a bunch of heavy metals added to it- sounds just a stupid as a uterus climbing around in woman making her hysterical...

I've thought about this, too! Tina Cassidy's book, Birth, isn't about vaccines, (obvious by the title). But her history of childbirth practices really put the practice of medicine into perspective for me. I wonder all the time if practices the Western world takes for granted today won't seem backward and barbaric to coming generations, (although they already seem that way to a lot of us here ).

[justice'smom]

Originally Posted by Deborah

there have been some really bad vaccines in the past, some dangerous, some ineffective, some both...

has anyone ever heard about them?

for example, there was a vaccine for scarlet fever...but it turned out to be very dangerous...so they tossed it...and scarlet fever doesn't seem to be a major cause of childhood death anymore

and the BCG vax for tuberculosis doesn't seem to work very well, but a lot of countries still require it, not the U.S., though

I have heard of a vaccine they created for the swine flu that killed many and injured a lot. I wish I could find the info again. Anyone else heard of that one? Apparently the maker of the vaccine said it had killed every pig they tested it on, but they went with it anyway and it hurt a lot of people.

[momofmine]

Yes, I think about this all the time. Daily. Multiple times a day. I think what is so scary about it is how LONG it takes to get new information out there, and how LONG our society will collectively hold on to belief systems that do not work. Every single one of the crazy, ludicrous medical practices of the past, like doctors not washing their hands after autopsies and then helping women in childbirth and infecting them with childbed fever....and the first person to suggest, "maybe we should wash our hands", was dismissed and condemned and ostracized. It's only when it gets really really bad and tons of people finally see, that they start to say, "Oh, gosh, maybe we should change how we are doing this."

I just don't get how it is that modern medicine does not take a clue from history. They KNOW that we know a heck of a lot more than we did even just 50 or 100 years. So do they think, "Oh, but now we know everything, we've figured it all out." Of course they don't, no doctor would consciously say that. Of course they know that we will know a lot more in 50 years than we know now. But most of them subconsciously act like the stuff that they've figured out already must be true. They think what they know, and what they were taught in medical school, must be true. I'm not talking about arrogant doctors. I mean even well-meaning, good intentioned doctors. I thiknk they just subconsciously hold onto the status quo.

I mean, does it strike them at all odd that they get most of their information about pharmaceutical drugs, from a sales rep of the pharmaceutical company????? Why does that seem perfectly okay and normal to them, yet in any other industry it would be a horrible conflict of interest?

Change comes slowly, it seems. But hopefully, as the pace of information exchange speeds up daily in our current world, hopefully that will speed up too.