The Dangers of Following the Party Line
[Note: this was originally published in April 2016, long before COVID-19 stole the news cycle]
Sally vaccinated her bull terrier pup in December. It was easy to remember the date, as it was right between Christmas and New Years, and Skipper was eight weeks old that week.
What happened in late January made Sally swallow hard, and realize she’d caused what could be a life long problem.
Skipper, the happy go-lucky pup, had started chewing his feet.
And his rump. And he was now scratching his ears and his armpits.
Damn.
Allergies? In a 12 week old pup?
Who was now “due” for another round of the distemper-parvo-combo-wombo vaccine?
Some of Sally’s friends did this with their pups, and it was just understood that Sally would, too.
She never thought much about it.
But now she was digging through Google furiously, and the word “vaccinosis” kept popping up.
And “vaccines and allergies” brought up a bunch of pages.
Gulp.
Proof? N = 1
Sally began to see that she was far from alone. Others wrote about having similar experiences.
Skipper had followed a common pattern holistic vets had been noticing and calling out for decades: illness after vaccination, most commonly “the itch,” usually rears its ugly head about a month after vaccination.
The naysayers like Dr. WhiteCoat would say the vaccine had nothing to do with the allergies that followed.
So-called skeptics (who are actually misusing that word, meaning open minded and questioning norms) are quick to jump into the argument.
They’ll shout “correlation does not equal causation!” and “Where are the studies to prove it?”
Sally saw it with her own eyes.
Then read and heard many others’ experiences that corroborated hers.
And she wasn’t buying scientism’s shrieking arguments.
The number of subjects in her study was 1. This is known as “n = 1” in science statistics.
But when she took into account how many she read about that had had similar experiences, including the many holistic vets’ reports, she knew in her heart that “n” was in fact many, perhaps thousands.
That’s “evidence based medicine” that trumps any number of published studies done by vaccine manufacturers who stand to profit by publishing favorable findings for their vaccines.
Scientism: A New Religious Doctrine?
We live in dangerous times.
Dangerous because a vocal and irrational faction of people, often with vested interests, seek to control how you raise your animals (and kids), and how you choose to partake in healthcare and disease avoidance.
Western medicine is now fully mechanistic.
Somehow, it’s left its spiritual/metaphysical origins and arrogantly rejects the thousands of years of wisdom that it sprang from.
The shamans, the herbalist crones, the native peoples who cured their sick and learned how to prevent illness holistically?
All of these roots have been denigrated to the trash bin conventional medicine reserves for things that don’t fit their current materialistic paradigm.
Things that can’t be patented and profited from to the tune of billions of dollars.
Ideas that counter the well-oiled machine based on ignorance and pure greed.
What is scientism?
My human homeopathic colleague, Dr. Larry Malerba defines it well:
“Scientism” is a term that has been applied to Western science’s tendency to consider itself as the only valid way of describing reality and acquiring knowledge. Far from objective science, it is riddled with a self-imposed form of materialistic and mechanistic bias. When it inappropriately and clumsily attempts to impose its restricted worldview upon domains where it has no business meddling, it can no longer be considered legitimate science that is practiced with an awareness of its boundaries. It instead begins to resemble an ideology not unlike a religious form of evangelism. Again, it is more than a bit ironic when conventional medicine attempts to belittle some alternative therapies as “faith-based.” Like any good faith, the church of medicine stands on the authority of its sacred texts. The randomized double-blinded placebo-controlled trial is the gold standard that assures the purity of church doctrine. The sacred studies are the only source of true knowledge; all other forms of knowledge are held to be inferior. Upholders of the faith frequently quote from the sacred texts in order to disprove and discredit heretical viewpoints. The conspicuous incongruity here is the ever-changing and fickle nature of medical research studies, which frequently contradict one another and are commonly sponsored and funded by the very corporate interests that stand to gain from that research. Hence the true authors of the modern sacred texts increasingly turn out to be the underwriters of the medical-industrial complex. [emphasis mine -ed]
How Scientism Fails Society
This short sighted deeply biased view expects you to ignore the long history of healing that was responsible for our very survival as a species.
Much like fundamentalist religion, scientism attempts to shut out opposing views and does so, ironically, in the name of science.
Science has its roots in inquiry. The attempt to understand how Nature works.
The open minded inquiry that brought us to understand the earth was neither flat nor the center of the universe. (Though Galileo was roundly censured for such heretical thought, even way back then).
Scientism argues that, without double blind studies, nothing is real or can be trusted.
So, when your dog or cat starts to show allergy symptoms a month after a round of vaccinations, the vaccine is exonerated as there are no studies to “prove it.”
When your bright, precocious child who has met or exceeded all of her developmental markers suddenly withdraws, starts rocking in place and no longer interacts with you, and this came after a vaccine event, you are told “research proves vaccines don’t cause autism.”
It’d be one thing to have to suffer these illnesses alone and learn from them for your future health decisions, but scientism goes much farther and, with the blessings of Big Pharma, goes on to make vaccinations mandatory!
God help those California citizens trying to take back their rights as parents to decide whether they want to allow their children to be vaccinated or not.
Paul Offit, MD argues for more vaccines at younger and younger ages, and has well known ties to the vaccine industry, clearly profiting for his outspoken stance.
It doesn’t stop with medicine.
Globally, Big Oil industry backers like the Koch brothers have been called out for seeding doubts about climate change for the past decade!
The media no longer seems interested in digging for the truth of the stories they cover, instead taking the easy road of buying into and supporting scientism’s harsh stance.
How to Think Critically and Take the Path Less Traveled
You know the saying airports have now? “If you see something amiss, report it to the authorities.”
Well, you may not have authorities to report it to, but if you hear something that just doesn’t fit for you, don’t accept it at face value. Especially if it’s coming from main stream media or those with financial interests in what they espouse (like Dr. Offit).
One of my favorite “thought bytes” from Dr. Malerba came after the Disney measles outbreak was spun into a frenzy by scientism’s media tools:
Let me see if I can follow the logic here. The supposed reason fully vaccinated individuals are getting measles is due to exposure to unvaccinated persons, and the solution is to vaccinate them with the same vaccine that has failed to provide protection to those who have already received the vaccine. And to top it all off, those who question this logic are dismissed as selfish people who don’t really understand science. Is it me, or is this just a lot of crazy talk?
The best advice I can offer is to hang with those who aren’t buying scientism’s false arguments. There are many more of us than you might know.
Subscribe to their email lists, join our pack, so you are regularly dosing yourself with another reality besides that of Fox News and Donald Trump and the so-called skeptics (who are anything but open minded).
When you are a lone voice amid the media fed chatter of our day, it’s very hard to make sound decisions for your animals or your kids. Both, of course, depend on your healthy choices.
Refusing to Support the Machine
Finally, as always, vote with your pocketbook.
If you are still taking your animals to a vet in the 60% of my profession who are recommending annual revaccinations, take your business elsewhere.
Why fight that battle?
Decades of research by immunologists without a profit to make from it have revealed that the annual vaccination nonsense neither works nor is safe for your animal.
Same with your pediatrician.
Getting pressured to vaccinate your kids amidst your awareness of the parallel rise in childhood vaccination and the twin growing epidemics of autism and allergies?
Take your dollars elsewhere.
None of my kids were vaccinated, and our physicians were either chiropractors or homeopaths.
They got out and played in the dirt (without the curse of antibacterial soaps) and they ate natural food and stayed healthy, compared to many of their peers.
Who to Believe?
I’ve had a few emails and/or comments saying, in essence, “I read so many opposing views, I just don’t know who to believe.”
My best answer: take your time, dig in and learn all you can, but don’t neglect your gut feelings.
You rarely have to make a quick decision when it comes to healthcare for your animals.
Anything short of a life threatening injury or disease (rare) affords you time to explore and talk to others to get a feel for what sits right with you.
Remember, common sense is getting less and less common as the years go by. If you’re only hearing one side of any story about what you should do for your pets and horses, start seeking out other opinions.
There are people in the comments on this blog who have been walking the Natural Path for years now, some on their second or third generation of dogs who’ve seen both sides of the “prevention” question.
If people are urging you to partake in more of the “prevention machine,” be sure to ask them how long their animals have been living and in what state of health.
Another eye-opening question: “How much do you spend a year on veterinary fees?”
Those are great questions to help you decipher between these very different realities:
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“Hey, be like me because I feel threatened by those who are choosing a different path!” VS:
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“I’ve been there, done that, and my animals paid a horrible price for following Dr. WhiteCoat’s recommendations. We are so happy now and our animals have really bloomed from following a more Natural Path.”
Let us know in the comments if you’ve run up against scientism and had some good answers and experiences from choosing to do things differently.
