Breath Spa for Kids: Homeopathy, Vaccination, Misinformation and Infants

Immunisation images, advertising and commemoration

Dr. Ben Goldacre of Bad Science recently participated in a public debate about homeopathy. The audience was heavily pro-homeopathy and their point of view was well-represented by Dr. Peter Fisher who is a rheumatologist and homeopath. Dr. Fisher is very much the respectable face of homeopathy in the UK.

Listening to this long piece has been likened to having your brain put through a liquidiser. It is interesting for many of the incidentals rather than the quality of the debate; e.g., the rhetorical skills of Dr. Fisher and his use of techniques that resemble NLP and Eriksonian Hypnosis. Dr. Fisher's obfuscations concerning trial size and blood tests were disappointing, as was his reluctance to engage with the issue of water memory.

I was particularly intrigued by Dr. Fisher's tap-dancing around the issue of vaccination. I have transcribed Fisher’s answer to the question of whether or not Homeopaths are anti-vax and opposed to immunisation. The following is from around about 1:21 on the video: the punctuation is mine and any transcription errors are mine.

If I could just put the record straight on the vexed question of vaccination.

It is true, regrettably, highly regrettably in my view, that many homeopaths recommend against MMR and this is quite clearly not part of the homeopathic tradition, it is absolutely clear. Homeopathy, actually, was invented in the same year as vaccination, 1796, and Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, is on record, absolutely clearly, unequivocally, he wrote a lot, so if you really want to find him contradicting himself you can, but on one thing he never contradicted himself on vaccination, he was 110% in favour. So let’s not, you know, get, you know, be quite clear. Homeopathy is not anti-vaccination. It has become associated with anti-vaccinationionism but this is not part of the authentic homeopathic position.

Oddly enough, the answer sounded far worse even than it reads. There has been some discussion as to whether or not the lexical ambiguity and the circumlocutions were intentional as they would allow different listeners to hear whatever agrees with their own point of view. If the ambiguity wasn't intentional, was it beyond all realm of possibility, than in support of clear communication, Dr. Fisher might have remembered that so many of his audience had English as a Second Language. It is not that unusual a question for a leading homeopath to hear. Could Dr. Fisher not have said:

Hahnemann wholeheartedly endorsed vaccination. Authentic homeopathy supports vaccination. We can not accept responsibility for the anti-vaccination beliefs of those who call themselves homeopaths but who are not accredited by us.

Unless the answer isn't as clear as that. Unless, possibly, there would be little support from other homeopaths for a denial of an anti-vax stance?

Some of the anti-vaccination rhetoric is grounded in accusations of financial interest and Big Pharma selective marketing that callously ignores the wellbeing of children. Interestingly, Orac has posted a piece about Brian Deer's article in the Sunday Times that discloses that a researcher who was prominently involved in the discrediting of MMR, Dr. Wakefield received far more funding from various lawyers than he acknowledged.

In response to Orac, there is a remarkable comment from a parent in the UK:

...deciding to go with MMR, and taking my son to be vaccinated was still one of the most terrifying things I have ever done. I think there is little that is more horrifying to a parent than the idea that your own actions could directly and irreperably harm your child. I am a rational individual, and a strong proponent of the scientific method, and all that I had read on this subject could still not completely eradicate that fear.

How did we get to the point where the preponderance of coverage of vaccination issues has resulted in parents feeling that a routine medical procedure is "terrifying". As Dr. Crippen and Medgadget's follow-up on Google rankings says, this imbalance in information needs to be corrected.

The significance of this was brought home with great force by an email that Dr. Flea received from a mother who thanked him for quieting her anxiety about the risks of immunisation that she had developed from her awareness of media sources and her excursions into parts of the internet.

Read Dr. Flea's posts. Arthur Allen has written a well-reviewed book about vaccination and describes the improvements that have made immunisation safer. Allen also discusses why social media such as the internet have a role in distorting our understanding of risk. v. danger.

The government’s growing openness and vigilance about vaccine injuries coincided with the appearance of a new technology-- the Internet. Suddenly, people could get all the information they wanted about disease at the touch of a mouse. But the Internet did something weird to the instinctual math that we use for risk perception. Assume, for the sake of argument, that autism rates really haven’t changed in the past 20 years–assume that, then as now, roughly 1 in 200 people, or 1.5 million Americans, have autistic syndromes. Now if you had an autistic son born in 1986, you probably wouldn’t meet too many other autistics--how easy, pre-Internet, was it to meet 200 other people? Now, overnight, almost everyone was wired, and almost everyone with autistic children looked for answers on the Internet. Suddenly, the parent of an autistic child could instantly find tens of thousands of people in similar circumstances. Many people noticed their child’s problem shortly after a vaccination--at 9 months, or 12 months, or 18 months or whatever. Autism research has found that about a quarter of all autistic children’s symptoms follow this pattern–and have since long before thimerosal was an issue. But tell that to someone with an autistic child. Their doctor can’t explain what went wrong. And there are ten thousand other people on the Internet, in their family room, and they all agree that it was the vaccines. The Internet has created a huge, bitter echo chamber for people who desperately need explanations.

The Internet can also be used to promote another view. Many of us have lost touch with the devastation that is caused by vaccine-preventable childhood illnesses. However, for the sake of children and the public health, we do need to ask for better information about risks v. dangers.

1. Mass Vaccination Ouch!, 2. Double ouch, double vaccination, 3. Polio outbreak campaign, 4. 065 Norwich Historic Plaque (Green)

Created with fd's Flickr Toys Mosaic.

Labels: Allen, Deer, Fisher, Goldacre, Hahnemann, homeopathy, vaccination, Wakefield