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The future of inoculations …

March 2nd, 2008 · 293 Comments

 

Here’s a question that a friend recently asked of me … how could mankind have survive for millions of years without inoculations? Are they really needed?

 

This is a question that is asked more often now that some parents don’t want their children to take the forced inoculations that their schools require. Some worry about the mercury preservatives in the inoculate, others just want their children to live a natural life, even if it means getting sick.

But first off, Inoculations do work. The question is, are they necessary? Some would argue (I’m one of them) that getting sick with the flu and chicken pox is a natural process and the right way to build up the body’s immunity response.

 

Now, there is a big difference between chicken pox, flu and then diseases like smallpox and polio. Just the fact that you can waive off inoculations for smallpox or polio is a sign that we live a long way from the days when these diseases would kill hundreds of thousands of children at a pass. Thousands of children in iron lungs because of polio tends not to leave parents debating the value of inoculations. When the smallpox and polio inoculations came along, the inoculations were hailed as miracles. Certainly they saved a lot of people’s lives.

 

Back in the days before modern medicine, families typically had four, five and six children. It was possible to lose one or two children without having your hopes and dreams killed in the process. In fact, my own grandparents had four children, one of whom died from meningitis and the other from scarlet fever (I think). 

 

And it would be easy in 2008 and put down the life-saving properties of anti-inflammatory steroids, but the fact is, those steroids could have easily saved the life of my uncle that died from meningitis, and perhaps penicillin could have saved the life of my aunt that died from scarlet fever. (Both died before WWII.) Yes, I can say I don’t want to inoculate my child against some new disease du jour because I know I have the incredible safety net of modern medicine should something go terribly wrong. I mean, can’t a well-equipped hospital cure whooping cough these days? Scarlet fever? Even polio? 

 

To paraphrase every NFL radio journalist this side of the Mississippi, Modern medicine is “what it is.” And what it is is terribly effective. I hate the snot out of drugs that are not necessary for diseases that are annoyances. In fact, one of my uncles just died from having a body ravaged from the the drug methotrexate, which was given to him to help him with severe arthitis. The arthitis probably could have been treated with a variety of natural cures, but methotrexate-poisoning is something else.

 

And yet, for all of these disasters, the truth is that children just do die off en masse like they used to with the daily flavor of exotic communicable disease. That is a problem that we have solved, and for better or worse, I would like to keep it that way.

 

In the future we will inoculate against the horrible diseases, but we’ll let people get sick with things like flu as part of the complexity of life.

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