OK, so reading the rest of the thread, I think I've got a grasp on your strange freak-out.
I used the term "allopathic medicine" because that is what these people use, and (furthermore) the term is becoming increasingly common among practitioners of science-based medicine (if that's the term you prefer), anyhow. Merely using a word, especially when it has clear literary value in context, is not reason to shut someone out.
I've lived and worked my entire life around people in the medical profession: doctors, nurses, clinical nutritionists and pharmacists. Even a couple of researchers. I'm kept alive by the pharmalogical products of modern medicine. I love it. I was vaccinated. My kids will be vaccinated. (But, most obstetrics practice is still disturbed.) In practically every way, I am not prone to be empathetic to the anti-vaccine activists, and I do think the ones in media positions are causing active harm.
What mercyorbemoaned is trying to explain is that your model of why persons become anti-vaccine or whatever has little relation to the actual thought processes and worlds of the people who go through this stuff. There certainly are promoters who come at it through some misplaced desire to be iconoclastic or have minority knowledge or whatever (I would include, in here, many of the celebrity proponents), but for the average middle class lady it's because of trying to square some awful, alienating experiences with medicine to a world that places a whole lot of implicit trust and power in the hands of medical professionals (and the "God complex" is not wholly an unearned stereotype, as I'm sure you've realized if you've socialized long with many doctors). There are––and this is not controversial––areas of the standard model, especially regarding patient relations and making childbirth seem like a disease, where there are issues. For someone who thinks like, well, most people do, they don't articulate this as "oh, there's some problem with certain inherent features having gone monstrously wrong, here, likely due to the breakdown of culture and familial support", but rather as "there is something evil here, and that evil thing is the whole medical system". This is because they are emotively or intellectually incapable of the former, which is more an object of pity (the medical profession has failed them), than one of contempt.
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Date: 2010-06-25 05:29 am (UTC)I used the term "allopathic medicine" because that is what these people use, and (furthermore) the term is becoming increasingly common among practitioners of science-based medicine (if that's the term you prefer), anyhow. Merely using a word, especially when it has clear literary value in context, is not reason to shut someone out.
I've lived and worked my entire life around people in the medical profession: doctors, nurses, clinical nutritionists and pharmacists. Even a couple of researchers. I'm kept alive by the pharmalogical products of modern medicine. I love it. I was vaccinated. My kids will be vaccinated. (But, most obstetrics practice is still disturbed.) In practically every way, I am not prone to be empathetic to the anti-vaccine activists, and I do think the ones in media positions are causing active harm.
What