Task 8 Blog Post

This is always the most difficult part of a paper for me; possibly it's a problem with commitment making me afraid to nail down a topic, or maybe it's like wading into a river in the late spring, hesitant to let the water touch your dry bathing suit. There are tons of expressions regarding starting, but they all seem to involve feet: jump in with both feet, getting your feet wet, etc. Feet aren't a trouble for me, it's the bathing suit that's the problem.

I'm leaning towards a topic that lies somewhere in the spectrum of pseudo-science claims and their effect on the health of both individuals and society. One specific area that interests me is in the anti-vaccination movement, both in regards to autism and separate from it. (These are two different issues, but with significant overlap as either group sees advantages of aligning with the other.) Another similar area is in the distrust of science/pharma causing a rise in non-science- based "medicine," specifically Homeopathy. While there are many things in nature that we derive medicines from, and much value to be gained from "natural cures," Homeopathy offers exactly none of them, actually contributing healing attributes to magic after it was shown that Homeopathic remedies actually contain nothing more than water. Since there's nothing in the water, it's the magical vibrations of the water that heals. Magic.

I know some about a lot of different topics in the pseudo-science area, but I'm hoping to be able to incorporate a bunch of them and focus on that harm that's done. I know there is harm done, what I'm hoping to learn is the extent of it. It'd also be interesting to include the positive aspects of medicine that has absolutely no science behind it, but I'm not really expecting to find any.

I'm not quite sure about trying to keep track of my search efforts. It feels kind of funny. Still, here goes...

Thus far, I haven't had a huge amount of time for research, so this may end up being a bit sparse for now.

Starting off with Google:

"vaccination fears" , "homeopathy deaths" , "pseudoscience deaths"

Those searches turned up a number of interesting sources, albeit with somewhat questionable credibility. Much of the interesting stats and info are found on openly anti-pseudoscience sites, so I'll need to be careful there. The list of deaths found here is both eye opening and depressing.

This account of an orthodox church whose congregation refused vaccinations, leading to a major measles outbreak is kind of interesting.

This article does a pretty good job at explaining some contributing factors in autism-specific fears.

I think I want to focus a section on the wide variety of diseases that non-vaccination has contributed to the spread of (swine flu, measles, polio, hepatitis, mumps, whooping cough, etc), and a section on the different reasons people cite for the skipping of vaccines. Perhaps a bit of faith-specific reasoning. (I.e. HPV vaccine denied by people of faith because it's an admission that their child may one day have sex.)

The CDC's vaccination page.

The next resource I checked out was Google Books:

"homeopathy" turned up many interesting-looking books, several from over 150 years ago. These could be useful to show how outdated modes of "science" continue to be followed.

Here's an article from the World Health Organization regarding the current state of vaccines.

"anti-vaccination" turned up a number of surprisingly old (pre-1900) newspaper/magazine/book articles talking about the anti-vaccination movement even then. This could be used to show how things stay the same as much as they change.

"autism vaccine" turned up this interesting report that may well have kicked off much of the modern ant-vaccination movement.

Then I checked out Google Scholar, but a fairly large number of the results didn't include any actual article, rather required you to purchase copies or pay to access article review services. It does like like a fair amount of info there, so perhaps I can find the resultant articles via other means.