Sticky sticking subject
I've been thinking a lot about vaccines lately and I've seen a lot of print on them, it must be because it's flu season again and those "flu clinics" keep sending me postcards encouraging me to go get jabbed.

No, thank you.

The flu sucks. It makes you feel like shit. There's usually a lot of snot involved. But you know what? It doesn't kill you. Yes, yes, I know the flu kills people, but so does slipping in the bathtub and hitting your head on the spigot. I'm not going to stop taking showers either. For the majority of us getting the flu or taking a shower is safe enough. There are always exceptions to the rule but as I am fortunate not to be one of them I don't have to consider that in my decision. Let's just hope I don't lose my footing in the bathtub.

My son will also not be receiving the flu vaccine. I don't know what my husband will choose to do, he's diabetic so his doctor always pushes it every year but it's his decision to make.

I think receiving foreign substances directly into your bloodstream is dangerous. That's the bottom line. One's lifeblood is their, well, their lifeblood, and fucking around with it is asking for trouble in my opinion.

Our son received his scheduled vaccines up until he was a year old and then we stopped getting them. It was around that time that I started reading into vaccine injury and making connections between vaccines and bigger problems. I wish I had done more research sooner, but it is what it is and from what I can tell my son is all right. That doesn't mean I don't feel a lot like we played Russian Roulette with his health, however. I feel lucky as hell every day that he seems okay. I look at him and try to imagine what I would do if one day he just stopped being him, and then if I knew I was responsible for that happening. I can't think on it too long as it makes me want to cry.

So. What to do, what to do? I don't profess to have all the answers, but then again I don't think the medical establishment is telling us everything we need to know, either. I don't trust that hospitals and doctors' offices are swayed by pharmaceutical companies to push their product in return for free equipment and monetary bonuses. I don't like hearing stories about competitions for nurses to push medications on people to win prizes. I don't like knowing that formula company representatives will sneak onto maternity wards to swap out formula samples with those from a competing company. It's all motivated by the almighty dollar, not a person's health. I know it's been said again and again but it still rings true - pharmaceutical companies make money hand over fist when people are sick, NOT when people are well. Therefore it is in their best interest to ensure people are always being treated but never cured. This I firmly believe deep in my bones.

I'm one of "those patients"...the one that will nod politely and ask many questions about a medication a doctor wants to give me or my child, take the prescription in hand, then toss it in the trash once I get home if I don't feel it's warranted. My health and my son's health are both very good. I get the occasional sniffles and other inconvenient "social" illnesses that go around (though less often than most of my cohorts) but they all go away within a day or two on their own. My only "help" for these situations are primarily homeopathic - steam, irrigation, tea, rest, a wholesome diet, the very occasional pain relief only if one is being kept from sleeping. The body is amazing, it has a delicate system of checks and balances in place to deal with illness and it works astonishingly well. Even better, we really don't know how or why it works the way it does.

That's not to say I am not thankful for medical science, because I certainly am. There are times and conditions that the body cannot repair itself, whether it be physical trauma or severe disease (though one could argue - where do these more difficult diseases come from in the first place?) and medical treatment is necessary. This has allowed us to enjoy longer and more productive lives in spite of these things. My son had to be excised from my womb, I am thankful that there was the knowledge and the facility available to ensure our safety. However, in that case the only things used were painkillers, tools, and sutures. Nothing that would cause a lasting change on my body's chemistry if used correctly. I understand how all those things work. In the case of vaccines and antibiotics, however, we're still mostly guessing.

I am a very firm believer in the body's ability to heal itself, and with each healing to make itself stronger. The body learns and changes all the time, so to rob it of its natural ability to fight infection and handle disease only makes it weaker in the long run. I see it in many ways as I do modern conveniences - gasoline allows us to travel astounding distances, giving us access to things and places that we would normally never have. If we were to suddenly not have gasoline any more, things would get very complicated. Ideally, we'd revert to providing for ourselves in the limited distance we were now afforded and do just fine. I feel the same way about medications and treatments. For the majority of people who have the option not to depend on such things, introducing those crutches will only make us dependent on them when maybe we don't have to be.

There are always exceptions to the rule. But I also wonder how many of those exceptions might not exist were the crutches not pushed on all of us so hard in the first place?

I make doctors mad because I won't give my son antibiotics for something that's not severe or is getting better on its own. We had to convince the breathing treatment people that my son wasn't a chronic case after he had one treatment in the doctors' office and they sent us home with that little machine that we never used. He didn't need it, still doesn't, yet everything was in place to sign him right up for regular treatments and a whole program surrounding it. Why is this? Because so many children actually have a problem or because a problem is created by perceiving this as normal?

Oh, I don't know. No one and nothing is perfect. I waffle every day on whether or not stopping my son's vaccinations was a good idea. I worry that deciding not to vaccinate my daughter will end in some disaster, that I'll be setting her up for the metaphorical slipping in the bathtub. Just like with deciding between attempting a VBAC in a hospital or at home, you have to choose between two choices that both pose risks. Vaccinate or not? Both carry risks. You have to decide which set of risks you can best live with. Either one could end in disaster, or not. If there were a cut and dried "right" answer there would be no debates, people would just do what was right and that would be that.

There are things that cling to my brain, however, concerning my personal experiences with vaccines. I think about how my son at two months old received four shots at one time, which would have been five only they were out of one at the time. Four. The kid weighed ten pounds, how much blood volume does one have at ten pounds? At four months he received five shots at once. FIVE. At that point he was 14 pounds. The physical ratio of foreign injectables to blood is pretty significant. I can't help thinking that thank goodness he was really healthy at both those times, that he didn't have some latent cold lurking that hadn't shown any symptoms yet. He got a low-grade fever both times. His body was reacting to foreign substances in the blood. Thank goodness his immune system wasn't already compromised. I can't stop thinking about the amount of fluid in those needles and how friggin tiny he was. How tiny and new and untested. There's something distinctly not right about injecting stuff into a body that small and new. Gut feeling.

And again with the wondering, "What would I have thought if the next day Michael wasn't Michael any more?" Ugh. Can't dwell on that, just thank my lucky stars and move on.

The next step at this point is to do some more research. I've read plenty of things online and it all gives me a "feeling" about what I think is best, but still leaves a lot of questions unanswered (plus, it's the internet ;).

I'm going to get a copy of The Sanctity of Human Blood by Tim O'Shea, the 11th edition is available on his website for a not-insignificant $25 but maybe I can pass it around once we're done reading it. There's a good excerpt from it here that at the very least makes me want to read more.

Robert Sears also just came out with The Vaccine Book, and while I'm not a die-hard Sears zealot, I find his books are informational and good as references. I don't agree with everything he's said and done (such as promoting formula on his website) but I am glad that he's become popular enough to get his views into the mainstream pool of books available on the subject. This one has been widely anticipated and has good reviews, so we'll see.

I've read a lot of good things about Raising a Vaccine Free Child by Wendy Lydall, so I was thinking I would get a copy of this, too, so I could check it out. The excerpts on Amazon are good.

In my browsing around I also found this book, Naturally Healthy Babies and Children by Aviva Jill Romm, and this is just the sort of thing I was looking for because saline sprays and chamomile tea only go so far. It got good ratings by readers and it would be nice to have a reference on-hand that I can pick up for those middle-of-the-night necessities.

I did laugh at some of the reviews, however, saying things like "This book is biased!" Well, gee, they're presenting information from the opinion that vaccines harm children, do you think they might just be non-vax leaning? Hmm. :)

More stuff to add to my bookshelf. It makes me feel a little ashamed that I didn't do this before kidlet was born, that he had to get injected for a year and is now four years old before I really started digging into it. That seems to be the way with lots of experience, though...I can talk to pregnant acquaintances all I want about medical interventions and the role I think they play in resulting in c-section surgery, but if they've never gone through the experience themselves it's still completely uncharted territory for them and they often make the same assumptions that everyone does initially.

I mention that only because an acquaintance just delivered by c-section after being in labor for 20 hours...now, I don't profess knowing what the situation was surrounding her labor, but I have suspicions as to why she "needed" surgery based on the fact that she went to the hospital with the highest c-section rate in the state (and one that is regarded as a doctor-dictated baby factory by those in the natural birthing set). Of course people can tsk in sympathy and say things like, "Well, she is a small person," and "20 hours is a long time" to excuse the fact that she very well possibly may have been routed into surgery from the get-go, but if I were to open my mouth and say, "Perhaps the doctors pressured her into it since she was getting close to 24 hours in labor, that would be a shame if they did" that would not go over quite so well. So I keep my mouth shut. All that matters is a healthy baby, right? I hope you can hear my eyes rolling from where you are.

That reminds me of something I said to Michael the other night about how it bothers me that birthing in "modern" medicine results in the baby receiving all the attention, being whisked off to a table to be weighed and suctioned and poked and prodded while the mother is abandoned on a table or in a birthing bed to try and figure out what the hell just happened. Why isn't birthing seen as a joyous transition for both the mother and the baby together? Why is the father, if attending, deletgated to third-class citizen, just the guy who holds the mother's hand until she ejects the baby and is no longer a priority? It all makes me so, so, so sad. But I'll get into that on another day, that's a whole entry in and of itself.

Edited for "That Polio Thing" (based on a comment I received elsewhere)

Ooo! I KNEW someone would bring up the polio thing. The claim that the polio vaccine "eradicated" the disease is actually not true at all.

Here's an excerpt, I've read multiple sources that all say the same thing:

According to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, childhood diseases decreased 90% between 1850 and 1940, paralleling improved sanitation and hygienic practices, well before mandatory vaccination programs. Infectious disease deaths in the U.S. and England declined steadily by an average of about 80% during this century (measles mortality declined over 97%) prior to vaccinations.

In Great Britain, the polio epidemics peaked in 1950, and had declined 82% by the time the vaccine was introduced there in 1956. Thus, at best, vaccinations can be credited with only a small percentage of the overall decline in disease related deaths this century. Yet even this small portion is questionable, as the rate of decline remained virtually the same after vaccines were introduced.

Source: Vaccination Myths © by Alan Phillips