Outsmarting Nature?

In a word, nope.

Humanity has a mentality that nature is something to be outsmarted, overpowered, or is quaint and perhaps obsolete. Well, nature begs to differ. Big surprise.

No, I'm not going to be one of those gleeful, raving nutcases saying that we deserve it and that this is nature bitch-slapping us back into our place. But I am going to say that we have been more than a little arrogant, figuring that nature has several flaws, and forgetting the way we evolved into what we are now.

Some examples for you: circumcision, overuse of antibiotics, overuse of C-sections, many mothers' refusals to breast-feed. The list goes on.

Circumcision has its origins in religious dogma. Society more readily accepts it when done to boys, but not when it's done to girls. The reasoning is much the same, however - to reduce sexual pleasure. Some modern physicians also believe it's cleaner to do so. However, there can be a lot of unnecessary procedures that can make one "cleaner." Hey, armpits are smelly... if we remove the arms though, no worries, right? It comes down to a body part being removed unnecessarily.

C-sections... clinics and hospitals like them for the extra money. Some patients like them for the fact that they can have the baby on their schedule. One lesser known thing however is that in a natural birth, the mother's beneficial bacteria colonizes the child as they pass through. This can mean the difference between a sickly and robust adult. There are times when a C-section can be necessary, but they are being overused.

Breast feeding... the antibodies in "yummy mummy" (thank you, Dr. House) keep the baby relatively safe for at least the first six months... and evidence is pointing toward there also being more long-term benefits.

Now, on to the big one: overuse of antibiotics. A lot of patients are in the habit of going to the doctor every time they have the sniffles.  Because the patients see fit to pay the doctor, the doctor then writes a prescription. Maybe for a cough suppressant, but often antibiotics are involved - amoxicillin, azithromycin, etc. For decades, doctors have figured this was a fairly harmless way of getting a patient out of their office.

Then more recently, we started becoming familiar with bacteria that weren't behaving the way bacteria should when they get hit with a dose of antibiotics. Enter the superbugs.

Antibiotics are basically mild poisons. If you've ever had a roach problem, you probably know that later generations tend to not be as vulnerable to a poison as earlier generations were. This is because life adapts. Before humanity came along and erected huge cities, the pests we now contend with had natural predators. We drove out the predators, and the pest populations skyrocketed.

Much the same is true of many of our immune systems. In the years to come, the ones who are going to be best off are the ones who said "fuck it, I'm not going to the doctor," and sleep off their colds with Nyquil. The ones who were born more or less naturally and had the dirty hippie of a mother who breast-fed them. That's not to say that you shouldn't go to the doctor when it's serious - you sure the hell should. But don't overuse the doctor, don't overuse the antibiotics, don't overuse drugs in general. Usually, our bodies know what we need and either produces it or guides us to it. Of course, it could be your body continually guides you to the allergy medicine as does mine.

Unfortunately however, employers are also making that more difficult by insisting that we bring a doctor's note. But perhaps express some reluctance to take antibiotics and leave it to the doctor's judgement from there. They are produced because they are necessary. Just not to the point of it being a doctor's way to get you out of the office.

Vaccines and Autism

There is at present, as many know, a growing movement opposing vaccination, saying that it causes autism. The suspicions may seem well-founded, as many parents with autistic children first noticed symptoms after a round of vaccinations. Dig a little deeper, and you find that in most vaccines, a mercury derivative called thimerosal is used as a preservative. Thimerosal does have some well-established antibacterial and antifungal properties, but the mercury it's derived from also has its own very well-known neurotoxicity. Logic does suggest that autism could easily be linked to a neurotoxin such as mercury, especially in the more sensitive bodies of infants.

Sharing a bit of medical knowledge here, it is crucial that such preservatives be added to multi-dose vials of parenteral (injectable) medications. Such things must be kept sterile, as the body simply does not have built-in defenses against things being injected directly into the blood or muscle. From a financial standpoint, the multi-dose vials are preferred because as anyone who goes to Costco or Sam's Club knows, you save when you buy in bulk. In this case, the savings is most obvious on the packaging. This of course makes it the preference of the insurance companies who pay the healthcare fees, the healthcare providers who order them, and the patients who receive them and pay the co-pays or the entire cost.

And so, considering that it's been used since the 1930's with minimal if any problems, it just seemed to make sense to keep using thimerosal. Yet we have a seemingly growing number of kids with autism.

Autism itself is a poorly understood disease. For my own part, I suspect there might be a few different diseases under the blanket term of autism. No one seems to know what causes it, and it hits some harder than others. It's upsetting to parents, as their child may never be able to live independently and achieve all those dreams they have for them, and for the children who have it and have some function, it's also upsetting. They have a harder time fitting in, and tend to have sensory issues which may prevent them from enjoying many of the same things their peers enjoy.

The thing is though that the link between vaccines and autism has never been established, and is close to being debunked, thanks in large part to a Danish Study. There are many groups who spend their time and efforts looking for flaws in the study, but it looks fairly straightforward to me. I actually rather wish that autism could be attributed to thimerosal, as then we would know and could solve the problem in short order. But so far, the evidence is stacking up against this mercury derivative in childhood vaccinations being the culprit. That being the case, one could easily make the argument that efforts and funding could be better put to use in finding the real culprit than in beating this dead horse.

It is easy to understand however the concern about any form of mercury in any amount being injected into your infant. And you are not alone in this concern. As it turns out, thimerosal is being phased out of childhood vaccines and is now absent from most, if not all, childhood vaccines. I consider this to be good news. While there is no scientific evidence thus far of the chemical causing problems in the small amounts that it's used, that doesn't mean we won't find the evidence later. If you question this however, by all means talk to your healthcare provider to verify that the vaccine your child is being given doesn't contain thimerosal.

In either case, I would say that getting the vaccinations outweighs the possible risks, unless the possible risks are a known allergy or such like. Thimerosal aside, the way a vaccine works is fairly natural. You've heard the phrase that you can't catch the same cold twice? Well, that's essentially what a vaccine does... except that you can skip that rather inconvenient "getting sick" part.

The first vaccine was created by an English physician by the name of Edward Jenner. The vaccine was against smallpox. He had noticed that milkmaids seemed somehow immune to the smallpox epidemics, and this got him thinking. If you remember your nursery rhymes and the like, I'm sure you remember some that talk glowingly of the beautiful complexions of milkmaids. Consider that this was in contrast to the faces of those who had suffered smallpox, which did leave some ugly scars on the faces of its survivors. Further, it was theorized that the protection of smallpox came from the milkmaids' having to suffer cowpox, a relatively mild disease whose victims typically fully recover. It wasn't hard for Jenner to put two and two together.

In an experiment that would have had him arrested in modern society, and perhaps justifiably so, he infected an eight year old boy with cowpox from a milkmaid's fresh, juicy lesions. The boy predictably came down with cowpox, then recovered. A couple months later, he then inoculated the boy with smallpox from a fresh and juicy smallpox lesion. The boy didn't get sick. Turned out the two were similar enough that the body's safeguards against a re-infection of cowpox also protected against smallpox.

And that's more or less the way vaccine works, the very name "vaccine" being a tribute to Jenner's work (vac- referring to a cow in Latin). Smallpox is something that's wiped out entire civilizations, and had an overall fatality rate of 30%. Notice I use the past tense. This is because, thanks to vaccinations, it has been eradicated from the world's population. It still exists, I'm certain, in various freezers around the world "just in case," and with this, there is the potential for it to be used in bioterrorism (think nuclear is scary?). But the point is that you didn't have it, and chances are, no one you know has had it. It's not killing people now. The last case in the US was in 1949, the last in the world having been in the late 1970's.

You can also thank vaccination programs for the fact that Polio (link goes to informative photo gallery) is now more often referred to in the past tense. While not eradicated, it hasn't been seen in the US for decades, and is well on its way to being eradicated.

While it is easy to forget these plagues in today's world, there was a time not that long ago where they were common. Kids with withered limbs from Polio (remember Franklin Roosevelt?), mass graves from the 1918 influenza pandemic... the list goes on. It is good to have legitimate concerns for your children, but it's also important to protect them and remember that ultimately, scientists are on our side.

Sorry about the quality of the video, it's the only one I could find of this clip on YouTube. Before the start of the video, the mother explained to House that she refused on principle to vaccinate her child, also talking about how she only gives the kid her all-natural breast milk as opposed to formula.

Stem Cell Research

Embryonic stem cell research is one of those issues where almost everyone thinks they know more than they actually do. The common perception seems to be that the stem cells come from aborted fetuses. With this, pro-lifers are kind of alienated from supporting the research while pro-choicers figure it's at least some good that comes out of abortion.

But, as it often is, the common perception is wrong. Embryonic stem cells do not come from aborted fetuses. There is, in fact, a difference between a fetus and an embryo - fetuses are at a much later stage of development. The embryos used in embryonic stem cell research are at their earliest stage of development. So early in fact that they haven't even seen the inside of a womb. You see, these embryos are leftovers from in vitro fertilization clinics. Eggs that were fertilized in a test tube or petri dishes, or something along those lines.

When these fertilization clinics do their thing, they fertilize a few eggs, then they implant only the most viable embryos - at this point what's known as a blastocyst. Between 50 - 250 cells generally make up the whole thing. So, what happens to the rest? Well, the couple can opt to preserve them for possible later use, but that's expensive. They can also opt to give them to other hopeful mothers to be, if any are in need of them. More often than not though, these embryos are simply disposed of like a prom night dumpster baby. Or, they can also (if current laws allow it) opt to donate them to stem cell research.

Stem cell research does have a lot of potential, and contrary to what some nay-sayers say ("nay"), there have been results. Mostly in using one's own (or a close relative's) stem cells. This is likely simply because there have been so many roadblocks in embryonic stem cell research. Embryonic stem cells are more desirable because they have more potential to adapt. The thing is that if you put an embryonic stem cell in with another cluster of cells, it generally will take on the properties of its surrounding cells.

Stop and think about this. You know all that stuff that can't heal or be replaced? This can change. Rather than waiting and likely dying while waiting on transplant lists, a new organ can be grown. One in which you don't need to take immunosuppressants for the rest of your life to prevent your body from rejecting said organ. Maybe this can also help repair spinal cords, maybe this can also cure or more effectively treat autoimmune disorders. Use your imagination, it's all being looked at.

As always, I encourage you to do your own research. Then come to your own conclusions based on your research rather than letting someone else do your thinking for you.

This post done, I leave you with the Prom Night Dumpster Babies!