The Science of Mom: A Science-Based Book about Baby Care

[proverbialwisdom]

4. Oh, brother.

http://scienceofmom.com/the-book/

Paul A. Offit, MD, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia:

Alice Callahan has written a breakthrough book, combining the compassion, warmth, and angst of a mother with the measured reasoning of a scientist. She helps parents not only understand how science works, but how they can access that science to answer their questions. She’s found a way to access the scientist in all of us.

http://scienceofmom.com/2012/01/11/on-parenting-science-and-trust-and-choosing-to-vaccinate/

by Alice Callahan on January 11, 2012

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For my guest post, I chose to write about how being a scientist helps me to trust other scientists and medical professionals when it comes to my child’s health. When the scientific community overwhelmingly supports a parenting practice – like vaccinating our children – I’m on board. If you read my blog, you know that I question other decisions plenty. When it comes to the decision to vaccinate, I trust the science that it is the best thing for my child and for our community.

An excerpt… check out The Mother Geek to read the rest! (Link to Mamamia post here )

Because I trust scientists and doctors, I didn’t question the CDC’s vaccination schedule. I didn’t pore over vaccine research or agonize about the decision to vaccinate my child. Instead, I trusted that the committees of experts at the CDC and AAP carefully make the best recommendations possible based on the data available. Maybe that is naïve. Maybe I am a lazy mother for not trying to become a vaccine expert before I allowed those first needles to enter my daughter’s thigh. Or maybe not.

What would be naïve is for me to think that I could become an expert on vaccinations. It would be naïve for me to think that I could understand the vaccine field better than the committees of scientists and doctors who have made this their life’s work. I know how much work it took me to become an expert on one or two corners of nutrition and fetal physiology. It took thousands of hours of reading textbooks and journal articles, sitting in lectures, attending conferences, and struggling at the lab bench before I started to feel even a little bit comfortable calling myself an expert in any field. So I think it is naïve for a parent to think that she can become an expert on vaccines by spending some time on the Internet reading questionable sources, almost all of which have some agenda. I accept that I can’t know everything, and I have enough faith in humanity that I trust others who know more than me.

INTRODUCTION: REMOVAL OF MERCURY FROM VACCINES IN THE EPOCH OF ERROR CORRECTION

By Martha R. Herbert, PhD, MD
Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School
and Pediatric Neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital

This book is aggressively pro-vaccine. Its focus is not on vaccines in any general way, but only on one ingredient, Thimerosal, which contains ethylmercury.

Although the conversation surrounding vaccines, as with any medical issue, has many facets (especially when you consider technical issues), many people are aware of only two black-and-white opinions: you are either pro-vaccine, or anti-vaccine. If you are a reader who wishes to absorb and evaluate the information in this book, I ask you to consider that, at minimum, there is a third alternative: you can be pro-vaccine and at the same time seek to improve the vaccine program. (1)

This book advocates one specific step to improve vaccines: removing a known neurotoxin (mercury, in the form of Thimerosal) from the list of ingredients. To make a strong case for taking this step, the book presents voluminous evidence of:

* The toxicity of Thimerosal
* The ineffectiveness of even the bactericidal role it is supposed to play
* Safer alternatives to Thimerosal that are already available
* A history of the calls of scientists and high-level governmental and international agencies around the world to remove Thimerosal entirely from vaccines
* Implementation of this course of action in some other countries

It argues that removing Thimerosal entirely will improve both vaccines themselves and people's trust in them.

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(1) Poland GA, Kennedy RB, McKinney BA, Ovsyannikova IG, Lambert ND, Jacobson RM, et al. Vaccinomics, adversomics, and the immune response network theory: individualized vaccinology in the 21st century. Look it up... (first of 27 footnotes in the Introduction, p xvii-xxix).

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