Quote:
Originally Posted by LolaSonner
Well there are a lot of things that people do or put into their bodies that defy scientific supportive evidence. For instance, drinking alcohol to get drunk has no benefit to the body scientifically, yet we allow people to choose to do this. Same with smoking tobacco. No evidence that it's beneficial, a lot of evidence that it's not. But we allow it.
Science indicates healthy and proper diets, but we are allowed to choose to eat and drink sugar and other scientifically harmful things, anyway.
Science is not law, and it's not emotional or philosophical. People can and do act every single day against the information that science has provided as being optimum for our survival.
Are you asserting that we should have our lives dictated by science? Would you be willing to never get drunk again or speed, or eat anything that isn't optimally nutritious, and always sleep the optimum hours and work the optimum hours and walk the narrow line of what you can and can not do in order to keep yourself alive for the longest period of time, including not living in areas with high rates of radiation or environmental hazards?
Insisting that "science" should govern people's minds and lives is just as bad as insisting religion should. Everyone gets to choose, unless you would like to lose your freedoms, too.
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So when Jenny McCarthy comes out against vaccinations - is it science?
If you truly understand science, you understand it is ever changing. You cannot let it rule you but it is 100% summa summarum of human knowledge at that point in time. Most of the vaccines today are perfected and improved versions of something that has been around at least for decades and has had the benefits of testing on millions and millions of people. Will there always be someone who reacts unfavorably to a vaccine? Sure - but put these numbers into perspective to get a clear picture of what is going on.
Many people claim all sorts of vaccine connections - autism being the most prominent. However, do these same people live in homes that are chemical free, do they eat chemical free foods, do they know what they ate when they were pregnant was chemical free? How about the air that they breathe? How about the interplay of the two? There are many, many variables that go into modern disease, vaccines are, I think, the most studied actually. Much more than the effect of the 10,000+ chemicals that go into the building of your typical American home, for example. But you don't see Jenny McCarty waging a war on modern cement.
As for drinking and getting drunk - we "allow" people to do it because it is their own business, so long as they are not affecting others in adverse ways. The moment a drunk man beats his wife or kills someone while driving drunk, they are taken to jail and lose a lot of their privileges, including drinking. However, for purposes of health insurance, smokers and drinkers are penalized by the insurance companies and society at large - they do cost more in the long run to keep alive than people who drink moderately and do not smoke. This too is a scientific fact
The problem is that in United States (much more than in Europe), science is ruled by commercial interests. Commercial interests fund "research" that is injected into the mainstream science with the purpose of obscuring the full truth. Most of these commercial interests also actively oppose publicly funded science. To understand the "full truth" you need a knowledge base that takes at least a MSc in the scientific field in question, more probably PhD. Most people in this country are undereducated even as to the basics of life like interest rates or just basic critical thinking skills (owing to an education system that is basically an exchange of money for a piece of paper and has as much in common with education as our health care system has with health). They have no capacity or time or interest to pursue a topic that is important - instead they rely on the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Jenny McCarty to digest the research for them and simply repeat what was said.