• shalafi@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Next pandemic? We’re more fucked than that right now today.

    Fuck me, we got measles making a comeback. Y’all, I’m 53 and honestly don’t know what measles is. For us kids, it was ancient history like smallpox. We didn’t care.

    “Be thankful you’ll never have to suffer that!”

    “OK dad. Can I play Atari or I gotta rake leaves first?”

    Grandparents raised me and I remember mom, who hadn’t a clue or care about science, extolling the virtues of the polio vaccine. She told me how fearful parents and children were and what a godsend Jonas Salk was. Can’t remember what she said, but it stuck in my little mind. Kids didn’t dare go swimming together for fear of being paralyzed, or landing in an iron lung. I’d seen pictures of those things. Fucking shoot me.

    Had my first kid at 42, well before the pandemic, but well after these nimrods got traction. Everywhere we went we were bombarded with vaccine advice and posters and pamphlets. Honestly, it was annoying as fuck.

    Yet another nurse was bugging about vaccinating our daughter, talking about “evidence-based medicine”, cut her off midsentence, “Hit her with everything ya got, on schedule. Just let us know when.” Wife was smiling and nodding right along. LOL, nurse literally had her mouth hanging open.

    Jesus Christ on a flaming kayak, can you imagine a nurse trying to talk my mom into vaccinating me in the 70s?! Mom with a puzzled look, “That’s fine. Can we do this today? Wednesday is my grocery shopping day.”

    And don’t start me on “evidence-based medicine”. I’m mad as hell such a phrase exists. “You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”

    • JoBo@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      And don’t start me on “evidence-based medicine”. I’m mad as hell such a phrase exists.

      You shouldn’t be. Its origins have nothing to do with distancing medicine from ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ medicine. Those can be evidence-based too, if someone does the trials. The problem was (and still is) that medicine in general was not being tested properly. And even when it was, the designs were too biased and sample sizes too small to say anything useful.

      Testing Treatments is a decent explainer which includes some of the history. And AllTrials is an initiative to try to force Pharma to publish all its trials, not just the ones that are good for profits.