Exactly. It’s important to note that there are several wings of the anti-vaccination movement. One wing is the “autism=vaccine injury”. Another is…I don’t know what to call it — the “vaccines are unnatural and they harm health” wing, most often found on chiropractic sites.

Indeed. There is a continuum of thought (if you can call it that) among antivaxers, from those who think that vaccines are dangerous beyond all belief to those who think they are unnatural and that it’s better to get the disease naturally to achieve immunity (good luck with that for the more harmful diseases!) to those who think that vaccines just don’t work to those who concede that some vaccines work but just don’t like The Man telling them they need to vaccinate themselves and/or their children. She probably doesn’t realize it, but Dr. Zilberberg’s rhetoric echoes that of the last category (at least in other posts), where she concedes vaccines are “useful” for highly infectious and dangerous diseases but pooh-poohs them for diseases like chicken pox or preventing HPV infection.

She’s also referred to vaccine defenders as “rabid” and accused them of “hysteria,” likening them to antivaxers :

http://evimedgroup.blogspot.com/2009/10/are-vaccines-safe.html

I think we both agree, since there is really no reason to think that something like homeopathy has anything that can help, by the same token we do not believe that it have anything that can hurt.

Tell that to Gloria Sam. Oh wait, you can’t: she’s dead.

I also do not oppose adult individuals doing whatever they want when it comes to their own health. Forcing quackery on children who have no choice – that’s different.

The burden on a working mother who has to stay home to care for an ill child is especially heavy on the working poor, who may not have vacation time as an employment benefit.

My kids got chicken pox the year before there was a vaccine. Because it was passed from one child to the others with a two week delay, it meant a whole month of misery.

I remember being miserable with it when I got it as a kid… and being miserable for the month I took care of three kids. One of them being only a baby, who could not sleep because of the pain.

It also swept through the school, where we did get the notice to not let sick kids go to school. There was at least one immune compromised child attending who had to stay away (I was helping the nurse when she let out her frustration about a loony parent who sent a kid with a fever to school with a bottle of Tylenol!). One kid from the school did end up in the hospital with a very real chance of losing a leg due to a secondary bacterial infection (and no, I did not find out what happened through the mom network).

I don’t understand why anyone would rather have a child go through a disease that involves open pustules in the form of very itchy pox, instead of getting a vaccine. With the added bonus of a real chance of shingles later in life. It boggles the mind.

I’m not sure that they make that product anymore (the zinc nasal spray). Zicam seems to have a whole line of OTC medications mixed with homeopathic “remedies.”

I abhor the way that companies are allowed to “market” their products in homeopathic and OTC land… using brand names that are confusing and making it difficult to see what ingredients are actually in products… and being able to change in the active ingredients while using the same brand name. Go look at a website for an OTC product and see how hard it is to actually know what you are taking. Zicam itself is now 20 different products, some “homeopathic” and some with pharmacologically active ingredients.

Yep. Zicam was a 2X dilution of zinc. Typical homeopathic products tend toward the 12C-30C range (i.e., dilutions into 100 parts water/alcohol, vs. 10 parts for X dilutions).

That was me. I wrote about the FDA recall of Hyland’s Homeopathic Teething Tablets that are labeled as containing Belladonna 3X, but which were found to contain varying amounts of nightshade. The danger was made worse by the product not having child-proof caps for the bottles.

3X belladonna sounds like to me that there isn’t even enough dilution for there to be a true homeopathic drug (IE. can’t have a physiological effect.) It sounds like part of the problem is what occurred with ziccam.