Who are the Real Charlatans?

According to an article in the TimesOnline, from the UK, there have been 150 cases of measles over the past three months documented in a city outside of London. Ten have been admitted to hospital with pneumonia with high fever, the hacking cough, the sore eyes, and a blotchy rash. You really should read the entire article...be prepared to scream.

It's author, Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, a GP in Hackney, East London, went on to say,

"Anti-MMR campaigners are critical of the many MMR safety studies: yet there are no studies whatever of the safety or efficacy of the program of separate vaccinations (though it is certain that the inevitable delays in giving the vaccines will leave children vulnerable to these infections)....The rise in measles is a combination of extreme skepticism towards established sources of authority in science and medicine and anxiety about environmental threats to our well being has led many to put their faith in self-proclaimed mavericks and alternative healers and charlatans...The choice to refuse MMR to avoid an entirely speculative risk of autism results in children being exposed to the real risks of measles."

COMMENT: Wow. Where to begin?

First: Let's ask about the 6 percent (10 children) who were admitted to the hospital. Did they have underlying conditions that made them more susceptible to a severe case of measles? Obviously, the other 94 percent had the infection and recovered uneventfully. Did any of the ten who were hospitalized have an adverse outcome? And since measles is a viral illness, other than hydration and possibly oxygen, what other truly helpful agents were given? Antibiotics would not treat a viral pneumonia.

No one wants their child to become ill or be admitted to the hospital. However, ask this question to any parent who observed first hand their child develop autism after the MMR: Would you have preferred a few weeks of infirmity and "inconsolable misery"-- even if it included a hospital stay -- to months and years of daily, untreatable illness?

Second: The "established authority of medicine" is exactly why parents have chosen to challenge and distrust it. Medical authorities have refused to listen to the eye-witness accounts of parents. They won't even acknowledge that autism may be the result of the MMR in at least some children.

Instead, pompous, "we know best" physicians declare the connection between the MMR and autism "impossible and unproven." Their insolent assertions are based on large epidemiological studies, similar to the ones used by the tobacco industry to "prove" that there was no connection between cigarettes and lung cancer.

Third: I should be accustomed to the insulting arrogance of conventional, dogma-loving practitioners, but it continues to nauseate me. Name calling was something we were told to stop when we were in kindergarten. Does the act of wearing a white lab jacket and dangling a stethoscope around one's neck make one a "self-proclaimed" expert and more correct than any other "self-proclaimed expert" who prefers plain clothes to a white coat? Why do we allow Established Medicine to claim to have the only answer? Why is a challenger of the drug-funded status quo a "charlatan"?

Fourth: (I'll stop here but I could go on and on) Do parents who have seen the MMR damage their children consider the risk "speculative"? Do those who are 40+ years of age and remember having measles during their childhood recall it to be a "disasterous event"? Even this small outbreak of 150 children demonstrates that 94 percent recover uneventfully. Is the "speculative risk" worth the risk of a life-time disaster?

I encourage everyone to read the book, "Bodily Matters," by Nadja Dubach. It is a history of the anti-vaccination movement from 1853 -- the date the first Compulsory Vaccination Law was passed in the U.K. -- to 1907, when "conscience objection" was allowed to stop the revolt against politically motivated vaccination. Conventional "wisdom" and its dominance has been challenged and resisted from its first embrace of vaccination. Vaccination was considered then --as now -- scientific experimentation. Doctors were able to carry out their "delighted torment" on patients in the 1800s by keeping the public both ignorant and in awe of their scientific expertise. The Internet had pulled back the curtain and the "awe" has mostly stopped.

Threatened physicians are left with name calling as a defense.

Who are the "real charlatans" ? Those that harm people for a living, using psychiatric drugs, vaccines and unproven chemotheraputics calling it "Science," or those who work to heal the body using whole foods, nutrients and agents that eliminate known poisons, such as mercury and lead, from the body?