This week both Jenny McCarthy and Kristin Cavallari, two starlets whose work I am almost entirely unfamiliar with, came under fire this week for their anti-vaccination stances. McCarthy’s assault was more innocuous, she posed a simple question on Twitter asking her fans what they seek in a partner using the #AskJenny hashtag. She was bombarded with an assault on her maligned position that links autism to vaccinations. Cavillari, I must say, was a bit more sweet in her approach asserting that she was ‘just a mom trying to make the best decisions for her kids’ to justify her refusal to vaccinate them. She cited grossly outdated ‘research’ and ‘books’ (no further articulation was provided) that establish a causal relationship between childhood vaccinations and autism.
I normally avoid as much celebrity news and gossip as I can; however, I always pay attention to such stories when celebrities attempt to engage their fan-base with pseudoscience and cannot fathom the scathing condemnation they face from actual medical professionals who rebut their nonsense with actual knowledge. In response to these celebrity positions, one doctor offered his position. “Of course, every parent wants what is best for their own children,” said Donald Burke, M.D., dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. “But failure to vaccinate children against preventable contagious diseases puts not only their own children at risk, but it increases the risk of epidemics for everyone.” [Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-cavallari-vaccinate-children-20140319,0,484158.story#ixzz2wXmGANhX%5D Thank you, Dean Burke! This should be end of story, but alas it is not.
I am a researcher in the medical humanities, a field of studies that seeks to understand how the humanities as a discipline informs the study of medicine and vice versa. I am not a medical doctor but I do have a doctorate which focused on the literary approach to the medical humanities. And in my research, I asserted that the practice and understanding of medicine is intrinsically inseparable from culture. I believe that the anti-vaxxer position is inspired by a well-meaning (though thoroughly uninformed) initiative to confront the culture of big-pharma, the sheer lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry in the United States. However, in the rejection of this legitimately powerful lobby they have run into the arms of the big placebo, a renewed faith in pseudoscience based in the rejection of clinical medicine. So we’re at a crossroads. How do we encourage parents to make the best decisions for their kids that are informed by accurate, credible studies?
Miss Chisomo | Life and Work in the Medical Humanities 