ASM234 Weighted Blankets, Asexuality, and Science

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weighted blankets asexuality and science all that and more on this week's episode of ask [Music] sciencemic [Music] well welcome back to ask science mike this is a weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm mike mccarg the science mike of the title and this is a show where we explore curiosity together we believe that learning is important especially in those times when our questions might be taboo or go against you know some ideal of a given community it is important that we are able to learn because learning helps us to grow and as we grow as people we're not only able to live more satisfying lives but we're able to help create a better society together so that's what this show is about and i'm just so glad that you have joined us this week um and what you know not a lot of announcements this week we are in pandemic land uh so i don't have any events to share with you as that is not a thing right now uh but i do want you know i do have a new book out it's called you're a miracle and a pain in the ass that has really been doing well especially as an audiobook i've loved getting your cards and notes and letters about your experiences with the book uh it was very hard to launch a book in a pandemic but this book ended up being so accidentally timely and helpful for all that we're facing right now together because it is a book not only that encourages you by helping you understand everything that's wonderful and amazing about you as a person in you as a human being but also helping us to understand and cope with thoughts and feelings and behaviors that we don't want that we don't desire and that frustrate us and so you can learn all about that book by going to ask sciencemic.com new book and that'll take you to information about uh about my my new book uh just came out in april you're a miracle and a pain in the ass so we've had a couple weeks here talking about covid 19 in a row so this week take a deep breath we're not doing any covet talks this week so um you know that's a good that's a good thing another thing if you're not on my email list think about going to my website uh asksciencemike.com or mikemcark.com either one and signing up for my email list because i have some news i'll be sharing there soon either there or on patreon and if i'm saying news and you're feeling a tightness in your body and it makes you nervous don't worry what i'm talking about is uh the impending launch of a new project that i've been putting together that has really come along i'll let you in on a little secret i did a show pilot for a new video program that would air on youtube and other platforms and did a test run a pilot episode for the patrons learned a lot got a really got a lot of great notes and great feedback from the ask science bike patrons and so we've taken those insights and retold it and we're going to launch a new show very soon that i'm just i'm just totally psyched about i have been studying and working and learning all about cameras and lights and all the things that i'll have to do myself because we're in a pandemic and you know it's been really fun to figure out how to collaborate on a show together with people while social distancing and physical distancing i'll have lots of stories to tell there i'll tell you one really fun one was working with a director over a video chat to try to figure out how to handle the lighting and camera setup um that was a wild time i'm telling you we will have lots of stories all of us about covet 19 and what this has been like for all of us and some of those stories are fun not all of those stories are sad or difficult and i wonder if maybe sometimes it would do us well for our own mental health to simply remember those things that have been fun or interesting or unique in this very difficult period in history so related to that there will soon be a new thing you can do on ask sciencemike.com and that will be sending in video questions and we will need your video questions uh because you know people want to see your face when you ask a question now they'll listen uh i i i can hear the panic because sometimes people ask questions they don't want people to know they're asking on this program we're always going to take email questions we're always going to dig into difficult topics on any program that i make so don't worry that'll be there too but if you're asking a question that like you don't mind putting your face on it certainly would be a fun way to contribute so watch out for that and continue to send me your questions as always via ask sciencemic.com where you can send in today a voicemail question or an email question and then soon in the future a video question as well ooh so fancy okay well what do you say let's get it started hey mike i'd love to hear what you've got for us on the topic of weighted blankets my light googling suggests science supports their usefulness for folks with sensory processing conditions but has less to say about their usefulness for folks with mental health conditions like you i live with cptsd and like so many of us these last few weeks i find myself without access to a lot of my usual sources of comfort and that's led me to consider this option as a possible tool in my collection and i know that you like to stick to studies and facts where you can but i thought given your various health issues this might have been something that you'd given a try so if you've got some i'd be so happy to hear your anecdotal evidence as well thanks so much for your work which has been really meaningful and valuable valuable to me for years now y'all are just so smart because and it's a problem it's a problem that you all are so smart because you your questions you take all the stuff i would say in an intro so because you've already done some googling you have a lot of insight on weighted blankets well maybe we could catch everyone else up but um that's what i guess what we'll have to do here's the here's the takeaway for weighted blankets i'll go straight to the takeaway and then give the support case after that the takeaway is people who have weighted blankets love them and they feel like they are highly effective and that means something that's adults and children that's people who need them for sleep that's people who need them for physical health challenges and mental health challenges they are well loved and that's supported by studies when people have them they like them they feel like they help it's also true that there's a very clear hypothesis about why weighted blankets should work and the hypothesis is that they work similar to deep touch pressure therapy that is a type of physical therapy that's often used in occupational therapy especially for people with autism that has been demonstrated to be an effective treatment for some aspects of autism and perhaps adhd as well and based on the findings of deep touch pressure therapy weighted blankets have been used by occupational therapists for some time especially for children with autism but other other case profiles as well but that's where the good news kind of ends because although we understand why they should work we do not have studies about whether they work or not and it's not that we have studies that are uh say they're bad or they don't work we just don't have studies really at all we have a few studies funded by weighted blanket manufacturers now immediately when we see a study funded by a manufacturer of a product about a product category any discerning science loving person should look at those studies with a long eye and say i'm not so sure about that because obviously there's a high chance for bias there so gosh what do we do well if there's very few independent studies we look at what are the potential risks and the risks of weighted blankets seem to be to small children blankets that are too heavy for very young children 10 or under can be dangerous there have been a couple of deaths from weighted blankets involving uh children under 10 and infants so there's our risk which means if uh you know you have a small child in your home you want to be careful letting them what play with or he's a weighted blanket for adults gosh they they're just we cannot i could not find any any possible downside so where i'm at with different interventions that aren't yet don't don't have the science behind them yet if they're harmless and people like them they're great so what have i seen we do have studies these things are wildly popular people who have them swear by them i do not have a weighted blanket i have thought about it absolutely i just haven't gotten one yet because you know me i'm science mike i want some studies and they're expensive but gosh if they're if they have no risk and people who have them enjoy them then enjoy one you know because here's the thing enjoyment is an effective treatment option for mental health challenges right one of the ways i have been coping with my cptsd is making cocktails um that is not a low risk coping strategy oh we understand that there's it elevates my risk for diabetes and unhealthy weight gain and also uh frequent alcohol consumption is associated with increased cancer rates like that's not a good coping strategy i enjoy it it's something to do but it's not a good coping strategy it has what very very potential very serious potential health consequences but a way to blanket doesn't have that so i would say like the anecdotes are enough here because what you don't have to like believe woo to to use a weighted blanket um which is one thing i look out for and there's there's no downside i'm kind of that way with essential oils by the way essential oils are based on total woo like there's not good science there but as long as people don't buy into the like diluting in essence makes it stronger part of an essential oil if essential oils make you feel good man use your essential oils all day long you know like great i love it um i don't personally love it they make me sneeze but if other people like essential oils enjoy your essential oils and i would certainly put weighted blankets in a category above essential oils in terms of the theory of action uh it is possible at some point we could get studies that show what that weighted blankets work as well as people believe that they work or even they don't work as well as people believe are still effective um you know it's not just the public that loves their weighted blankets i've seen doctors and and therapists and occupational therapists also say that these are invaluable tools and they're arsenal so as long as it's not putting you in dire straits financially to get one and as long as you're controlling for the risk factor for small children and infants then absolutely i think a weighted blanket could be a great tool in your mental health toolbox [Music] what if i told you that there was a way to get the mental health support that you need to thrive from the comfort of your own home well then my sponsor better help would mean i could tell you absolutely there is i'm so proud to have better help be a part of this program and making it's possible because pedro is an online counseling service with over 10 000 licensed therapists where over a million people have signed up to get online therapy i love it i don't have to find a parking space i have to drive across town and in this time when we're social distancing i can continue to get the therapy that helps me face my life challenges better hope is affordable it's a low flat fee for unlimited counseling via text and regular phone or video chat appointments with your therapist it's effective because because it's actual therapy here it's convenient because you get to be a time and place of your choosing and a pace of therapy that works for you and it is professional you are working with licensed accredited professionals uh the way it works is you go to betterhelp.com sciencemic where you get 10 off your first month's uh service and they'll after you fill out a little questionnaire the team at betterhelp will connect you with a counselor that you're going to love and if for some reason it doesn't work and it doesn't always work not every patient is compatible with every therapist betterhelp can assign you to a new therapist for no extra cost and no extra effort on your part so why not join the over 1 million people who decided to get help and feel better by going to betterhelp.com sciencemike today [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hello science mike i have a question that has been on my mind for quite some time but i've not been able to find many books or articles talking about it maybe i'm just bad at searching but i feel confident that my question is safe here so i decided to send it your way i have recently realized that i am asexual but i have trouble finding pride in embracing that identity because i wonder if my orientation is mostly a result of my traumatic upbringing i was raised by extremely fundamentalist parents my father was our pastor and my mother homeschooled us sexuality was not talked about ever it was so taboo that it was treated as almost non-existent anything remotely connected to sexuality was simply silenced for this reason i came to the realization of my orientation in a backward fashion first in college bible study groups hearing that other people struggled with sexual feelings and later coming to believe that sexual feelings were natural and healthy but knowing i still not did not have them the fact that my childhood friend who comes from a similar background also considers herself asexual adds to my theory that we may have been somehow conditioned to be this way i mean what are the chances that we would both just happen to be asexual so my question is do you know of any studies or other writings about asexuality and trauma and how they may influence each other can your orientation come about as a reaction from external sources or is that not how it works could it be some of both i guess this boils down to a nature versus nurture question so there may be no answer to my question however i so appreciate your work and insight into human stories that i would love to hear any thoughts you may have thank you so much for just being you ellen well ellen the first thing i would like to say is that i am sorry for what you faced in your life the challenges in your family system and in the culture that you grew up in that has caused the process of you growing to understand yourself and your sexuality to be challenging and fraught with difficulty another thing i'd like to say before we dig into your question is that you're not alone here there's not only a lot of lgbtq plus folks that listen to ask science mike there's a lot of specifically asexual people and so you might i saw in your question this notion of how likely could it be that this friend and i both just happen to be asexual well i would tell you that i've talked to hundreds of people in this audience who identify as asexual that it's common that a lot of people identify as asexual it's not bad or wrong or strange and so as we kind of dig through these questions that you've asked can asexuality be related to trauma absolutely sure does that mean asexuality is not real or always related to trauma absolutely not i think maybe let's talk about orientation in general before we return to some of your specific questions because when we talk about nature versus nurture number one those questions are always complicated and number two they are irrelevant in matters of our sexuality i believe they are utterly irrelevant why because our orientation the label the ideas the metaphors we use to relate to the ways that we experience sexual arousal sexual attraction and sexual intimacy it's our orientation is the way we relate to our sexuality it is the means by which we understand and know ourselves your sexuality is about you it's about you understanding you it's about you being empowered by you so guess what you get to label yourself in the way that feels best or most right or most accurate for you regardless of how it works and guess what else you and anyone else can change the label they apply to their sexual orientation at any time for any reason research tells us that people's sexuality is fluid and changes over time and so why wouldn't the labels we use to describe our sexuality also change over time if that feels right to us now i have a caveat i do believe it's best and important that we are sincere and not performative with our usage of orientation and gender labels as an honor to everyone right i wouldn't take on a a label of orientation or gender to be trendy if i were to call myself trans for example and i'm not trans and i would be minimizing and erasing the experience of people who genuinely have gone on a life journey to arrive at their transness and so again i think sincerity is important but that aside anyone can change their orientation at any time and so of course of course our orientation has to do with our upbringing because our upbringing is part of who we are as people both the things we loved and the things that we overcome and ellen in your question i hear that you overcame challenges and good for you i am so proud of you and so naming and owning your orientation today is part of you taking agency regarding your sexuality and it is perfectly okay for that agency to include what you have overcome so sometimes when people are asexual if we look at for example aedp accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy psychotherapy's model of emotionality then yeah it's possible one could experience the world as an asexual because of emotional regulation strategies that you've used to survive and that's fine good for you some people who identify as asexual they go through trauma therapy and they find what there's a lot more arousal and sexual feelings there than they ever thought possible because they were stigmatized or shamed over notions of sex and sexual arousal as children and so their nervous systems learned to suppress that and so those people might move into some other orientation label they might not they might remain asexual they might figure out that they're not interested in sex with other people but they do they are uh they have sexual feelings on sexual arousal other people don't other people are just asexual that could be psychological or origin it can be biological in origin it can be both what matters what is important is not whether your orientation comes from a reaction to external sources or not what is important is that your sexual orientation makes you feel empowered it makes you feel in control of your body it makes you feel like you have ownership over your feelings and sexual arousal is one of our feelings you're okay ellen you're good like every person of every sexual orientation the way you relate to your sexuality is just fine as long as you do not violate the consent or body autonomy of other people that's it that's the boundary so if you identify as asexual today do so powerfully and if you still identify as asexual 70 years from now i celebrate that and if you realize at some point later oh gosh there's more to it of course there is nobody perfectly conforms to even the myriad of sexual labels for orientation that we have created today we are all so different you know i am a cisgender man but i'll tell you the truth i've read every i think every possible label for orientation none of them feel like they fit me just none of them and i've read hundreds none of them seem just right for me and the way i experience the world and so i've learned that these words are just metaphors that we use to navigate our life experience that's it and this to me is the beauty of the lgbtqia plus community because in their exploration of who they are and their advocacy and their right to be who they are we all learn that our older ways of speaking of sexuality they're limiting confining for everybody they're limiting and they're confining for everyone i mean my gosh what is it what is a straight person what is what even is that i just i don't understand ellen i just celebrate you being you owning you and caring for you and as you come to terms with your childhood the main thing i want you to know is that you are okay there's nothing wrong with who you are or how you relate to your sexuality and the other thing i want you to know is you are not alone take care friend [Music] [Applause] hi mike my name is rebecca and i love the show i was wondering if you've spoken before about the limitations of science as i became scientifically literate in the last years and simultaneously deconstructed my faith i came to put a great deal of trust in science however in the last couple of months i have come to realize and understand the limitations of science it's both liberating to not have to serve science as my new god but it's also a little disappointing to not have something more solid to rely on learning about my enneagram sixness helped me notice how i wanted science to be something i could blindly rely on oh well i guess i just have to continue to use my imperfect judgment anyway i was wondering if you have talked about this before thanks so much bye i am almost certain i've talked about the limitations of science before on this program but i don't know i don't know the back catalog all that well i just talk every week and then forget about it uh and regardless it's at least been long enough that it's worth leaning into again what a wonderful question what is a timely question for the world we are in today thank you because there are two things that concern me number one is the anti-intellectual anti-fact miasma we find ourselves in where we've utterly rejected the findings of science that's my main concern epistemologically in the world today but second to that is the reaction which is this strange kind of scientific fundamentalism that let us be clear is not as big a deal as scientific denialism but still a problem because both fundamentally entail a misunderstanding of what science even is as you have so eloquently stated in your question science is not a worldview it is not meant to be a worldview it is a terrible worldview it doesn't function as a worldview so gosh what do we do with that well we understand science is not a moral philosophy and science is not a world view and it isn't supposed to be and also science isn't perfect so many people are raised in world views as children where their world views are described as perfect to them by their caregivers that certainly happened to me growing up as an evangelical christian i was told that my worldview was perfect now i might not understand it perfectly but the bible as a way of understanding the world was perfect what high expectations took place on a world view that people use okay so science isn't perfect and science isn't meant to be science is meant methodologically to find its own flaws that's its job science also has problems around inclusion science is very white it's very male it's very economically privileged so that critique of science is necessary to name so that we can mitigate it but even with all those limitations and this is critically important science is still very trustworthy when we understand what it does and does not do when science speaks two matters that science addresses it tends to be among the most authoritative tools human beings have access to so what is science well science is a methodology science is a methodology we use to ascribe the likelihood that any given claim about the natural world is true what does that mean well it means that science does not prove anything you can prove something in math but you can't prove anything in science all knowledge that science offers is provisional and gets ascribed or assigned a degree of confidence how likely is it that a given claim is true or untrue that is the work of science how likely it's never a hundred percent it's never zero percent it'll be somewhere in between a maximal and minimal value and the way science ascribes confidence in ideas is not rational thinking it's not through debate science dis assigns confidence through observation and or experiment those are the tools of science you can use other tools like philosophy or rational thinking to come up with a hypothesis you can test the science but if you want to demonstrate something scientifically you've got to have observation or experiment so for example today in very far-flung realms of theoretical physics we're starting to veer more into the realm of philosophy because our ability to think about and mathematically model ideas has so far run ahead of our ability to build particle accelerators to test things but science is only science when we test our hypothesis via observation and or experiment notice we can test ideas with observation it does not simply have to be experiment which means science can talk about how the universe was formed we can't run an experiment and create a new universe certainly not today but we can observe the universe itself and in doing so learn about the universe's origins okay observation and or experiment now there are principally four primary widely understood limitations to the scientific method and they are these number one science does not make moral judgments it doesn't speak to what is right or wrong science does not make aesthetic judgments it doesn't say what is beautiful or not science does not tell you how you can use scientific knowledge you can use science to learn that you can split the atom but science doesn't tell you if you should make a bomb when you do that or you should make a power plant or you should make neither or you should make both science won't speak to that it will only tell you that it's possible and how to do it and finally science does not draw conclusions about the supernatural because by definition the supernatural doesn't get observed and does not show up in experiments okay now some people would then presume that the supernatural does not exist and that is a valid presumption however it is not a scientific presumption you are using a worldview and a moral philosophy and an epistemology to make that ruling and that's an important distinction now i'm a person that tends to be pretty skeptical about the supernatural but my skepticism although based in science it is not a scientific claim and i want to be really clear about that and i don't think that's like science pr i actually think that's really really necessary um because it's the same grounds by which i say science you know hasn't made a ruling or ascribed effectively a probability to something like m theory of a modern variation of super string theory because what there's no experiment or observation there yet there's just mathematically informed philosophy and i think that's what lets science work so well is tightly confining science to that which can be observed or revealed via repeatable experiment i hope that answer helps [Music] okay one more question this week here it goes hi mike and team long question here sorry about that in advance but it's about taking a second detailed look at vaccines i know you answered an anti-vaxx question way back in 2015 which was great and i also know that anti-vax movement seems very easy to scientifically dismiss i hold that view and agree with your previous episode on the subject however today a friend of mine made some alarming claims about vaccines that had me scratching my head things that i'd never heard before and that are not the typical anti-vaxx arguments he said things like there have never been proper double-blind studies done on any vaccine that only one percent of vaccine reactions are reported by doctors that two to ten percent of vaccinated people still don't make antibodies that vaccinated people can still carry and spread the disease they were vaccinated for and the studies are not being and that studies are not being done to look into vaccines causing inflammation or increased aluminum in the brain potentially causing alzheimer's he gave this video as a source and then there's a link to a youtube video which i will not have in the show notes about science mike this week because conspiracy theories is precisely how they spread anyway back to the question it seems to me that the main issue here is trust my friend and the doctor in the video both seem to look at personal experience of patients and certain statistical correlations and have decided that the mainstream medical community must be corrupt and are hiding some big conspiracy yet when i look up pro-vaccine documentation all i see is the words there is no evidence but i've never seen any documentation of the details of the studies so a source like the new york times or bill nye or even you on your shore your show say there is no scientific link there is still the question of can i trust that source so after all my question is this how can we trust that every vaccine is as beneficial and effective as another i think this is especially important in an age where nuance is often ignored in favor of general statements and when legislation is beginning to crop up that would mandate all vaccines where can i find detailed scientific data behind the widespread acceptance of vaccines where can i find the detailed data that would refute the claims of the doctor in the video thanks love you and your show dan in illinois well i say that every sincere question gets an honest and non-judgmental response and dan you are making me stick to that here as are the patrons who voted for this question to be on this week's program because listen to me folks we talk about sex and sexuality on this program we talk about religion we talk about race we talk about people ask me about psychedelic drugs and illegal substances i answer all those questions and when i answer all these questions everybody's cool i don't get a lot of hate mail not anymore i did very early in the program but that's all kind of stopped and we seem to have a an easy time sharing different viewpoints and different ideas among this audience which is amazing because this audience is wild we have people we have 19 year old people listening and we have 90 year old people listening we have uh literal marxists and anarcho communists listening and we have uh conservatives of all stripes political religious and economic we have libertarians we have straight folks we have queer folks we have christians and atheists and muslims and buddhists i mean it's just it's a cornucopia of human beauty in this audience and the only time my inbox both digital and physical explodes is when i touch anti-vaxx questions and so guess what i'm going to answer this question and i'm going to get a lot of mail and i'm going to get a lot of newspaper clippings and i'm going to get a lot of links to youtube videos and here's the thing personal friends this week are going to call me and talk to me about my troubling views on the anti-vaxx movement so i am buckling my safety belt and strapping in because i have to offer not just a non-judgmental response but an honest one your question the issues raised by your friend the youtube video in question all of these things perfectly illustrate how conspiracy theories work because conspiracy theorists and i'm sorry that includes anti-vaxxers are often unintentionally capitalizing on our justifiable suspicions of our institutions the fact is all across the world our civic and political institutions especially governments and corporations have betrayed us and have failed us but then our scientific institutions get conflated into that mess in what is one of the great tragedies of our times and don't hear me wrong i'm not saying institutions of science are pers perfect i call that out in the last question they are not but they generally produce reliable useful and actionable information so how do you undermine science well science is hard to understand and science is nuanced and science requires a lot of specialized knowledge to interpret and so if you're a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer you use a technique often called the gish gallop which was a term coined by eugene scott of the national center for science education way back in the 90s named after the behaviors of a particular creationist named dwayne gish who in formal debates would issue so many false claims in a short period of time that their opponent spent all of their time trying to refute those claims and there were just so many there wasn't enough time basically you can make manure faster than you can shovel it right and so if i watch that video and i did i watched that whole video by that doctor and it is packed with dozens of misrepresentations or misinterpretations of scientific fact and medical literature and if i were to take the time to refute them one by one it would take weeks and in the meantime your friend and other people who are anti-vaxxers will have an avalanche of even more low quality claims for me to debunk they can produce low quality claims faster than i or anyone can debunk them and this is how conspiracy theories work this is why youtube makes them so effective because you can shovel and repeat questionable ideas and you can cite sources one you can cite sources that are unreliable and two you can cite accurate sources but sources that require technical expertise to interpret and then what misinterpret them you can hijack the the tools of information literacy and use them against themselves in a way that is truly tragic here's why it doesn't work i'm not even going to address the video i'll i'll speak to it briefly but i'll just go with the claims you put in your message claim one there's never been a proper and the word proper was all capitalized double-blind study done on any vaccine well number one that's false the earliest vaccines did have full double-blind studies known as random controlled trials or rct randomized controlled trials but once you have a vaccine that works and gets rid of a disease like measles or polio it's actually unethical to get a control group of children who doesn't get that vaccine because you potentially expose them to what death or permanent impairment from those diseases so at that point you're right once we have a vaccine that really works against a deadly disease we don't do rcts anymore but but rcts are not the only type of study that can produce statistically effective means to assess the effectiveness of a given treatment there are other methodologies that we use in the vaccine era to test for both effectiveness and for safety right well gosh the amount of precision the amount of research they said to do for that one claim is a lot and i already understand these things claim two only one percent of vaccine reactions are reported by doctors if you look that up that is excited from one line of an obscure study that even in the study was provided without context or methodology okay so we don't know it's difficult to even examine whether that study that that claim is true or not or how they arrived at that conclusion but even if it is true why might that be true because we know for example that a rash or a low fever following many vaccines is normal and something that can be reported and so doctors why would they take the time to report a rash or a fever in the context of a well understood often used vaccine when we understand that those are routine side effects that aren't quality of life impairing and don't have long-term health consequences if that statistic is true and i'm not conceding that it is it actually speaks to the safety of vaccines that doctors who specialize in what the care and treatment of patients they personally know who have devoted their lives to the care of patients they assess 99 of the time that side effects aren't worth reporting hmm interesting and by the way as i looked at one site that was an anti-vaccine that then drew the conclusions from that they made a series of unsupported assumptions and arrived at what i can only call statistical horse [ \_\_ ] because they looked at the number of reported vaccine side effects or injuries per year or deaths per year and then multiplied by a hundred to arrive at what they assumed was the real number which folks is just not how science or statistics work it is irresponsible and reckless and to be honest just plain wrong and i don't mean morally i mean factually another claim two to ten percent of people don't make antibodies when given a vaccine this one's actually true in an extreme case especially a newer vaccine yeah ten percent of people might not make antibodies in response to the vaccine which is why public health policy is giving everyone as many people as possible a given vaccine because vaccines are designed to create herd immunity not individual immunity oh gosh i mean it's just and then the aluminum in the brain causing alzheimer's my gosh why would we look that up unless we saw increasing rates of alzheimer's in conjunction with the application of vaccines right we we need our studies are expensive we need a reason to commission them this is this is only a step removed from people that tell you antiperspirant causes alzheimer's and that's related to a fundamental misunderstanding of biochemistry it's very simple sodium is a dangerous volatile substance that will kill you and chlorine is a dangerous volatile substance that will kill you but when you combine them you get table salt right so you can have mercury or aluminum as an element in a compound in a vaccine it's not going to be absorbed into your body it's not going to have an adverse effect how biochemistry works so it took me 30 minutes to look up and refute three claims about 10 minutes of claim it's not a good usage of my time because all of those claims were total unsupported garbage as is almost without exception every claim that i've ever researched that's been put forward by an anti-vaxxer whether that's a dear personal friend or a listener of the podcast or a literal rando online it's a gish gallop to flood your cognitive faculties with misinformation more quickly than you can provide quality information and i have found over and over and over when i go point by point by point in refutation anti-vaxxers never run out of misinformation to throw at me now anti-vaxxers aren't bad people anti-vaxxers are typically adults who care a lot for their children and they've been caught up in a conspiracy theory that is not only potentially dangerous for their children but for public health in general before i get to that let's talk about the doctor in the video whose name i am not going to share i'm not going to give him the credibility that doctor made claims that for me as a science educator and college dropout we're so obviously wrong that i'm surprised anyone doesn't catch it and i'm not a doctor i'm certainly not an epidemiologist one line where he talked about chemicals shown to cause problems in animal trials was so grown inducing that i laughed out loud because friends there's a reason animal trials are an early part of research before we move into human trials because it turns out different species have radically different physiologies doctors are not epidemiologists and doctors are not virologists and doctors are listen to me less qualified to speak into those matters than our virologists and epidemiologists now they're all more qualified than me any given doctor is more qualified than me to talk about vaccines and an overwhelming number of doctors support vaccination because of the medical literature combined with their professional experience here's the facts about vaccines number one they are low risk they are not zero risk anti-vaxxers prayed about some kind of like it's some big revelation that there can be side effects to a medical treatment like a vaccine we know that that was discovered in studies and trials so then why do we give vaccines knowing they have risks because the risks are extraordinarily low especially when compared to the diseases that they prevent this is the major major insight i would love for everyone to contemplate as we talk about vaccines i've got a link to an article in the show notes on this episode that looks at the effectiveness of vaccines over time i'd encourage you to go have a look at figure two which is the global annual reported cases of measles from 1980 to 2012. we used to have almost four and a half million cases of measles a year every year and now in a given year we sometimes we have less than a hundred thousand now measles has been coming back as the anti-vax movement has gained steam and that's the problem because a measles vaccine this is a scientific fact is less risky than the measles for your health and your child's health and the testing methodologies and regulations around vaccines is designed specifically to ensure that vaccine that is true for every vaccine now all vaccines aren't equally effective all vaccines don't carry the same risk profile but every vaccine that gets approved the vaccine is less dangerous than the disease this isn't hard chemicals aren't a bad word by the way water's a chemical people are a hundred percent every part of your body is a chemical there are no non-chemicals in the human body vaccines have had in the data one of the largest positive impacts on public health is any other intervention that humanity has done they're not quite as effective as running water cooking food or sewers but they're up there one of the cleanest slam dunks for medical science is vaccines and listen to me anti-vaxxers are almost universally affluent and here's why anti-vaxxers take their personal anecdotes their own life experience and elevate it above the scientific method why because they throw measles parties and their kids get sick and their kids get better why because of their resource access poor communities and immunocompromised people are the ones who benefit the most from vaccines because we're seeing it right now with covet 19 friends when people have access to good medical care diseases aren't as dangerous but not everyone has access to good medical care and so sadly the implications of the anti-vaxx movement is what classism and racism when affluent people generally affluent white people decide they're going to be anti-vaxxers who suffers poor people in their country immunocompromised people in their country and children around the world because we rely on herd immunity to protect everyone the change in outcomes from something like eliminating small box smallpox or measles is so much more dramatic in poor countries than in wealthy countries vaccines are a way that human beings can care for human beings and they only work when they allow us to reach herd immunity levels of resistance to a given disease when used well we can literally eradicate dangerous diseases from the human population entirely it is a matter of trust you're right i'm a science educator because of you all i have the time in my life to do so much independent research and so much reading and you may not have that kind of time and i understand the volume of data supporting vaccines is enormous enormous where would you find it in university libraries all over the world in many cases available in digital formats but to understand it all you'd have to be a virologist or an epidemiologist at the end of the day we are making a choice do we trust specialized knowledge or not and this is what i meant in the last question when an anti-science anti-fact bias is one of the most dangerous threats our species faces because friends is not just vaccines although that's a big deal it's whether or not we wear masks during a pandemic it's whether or not we cut climate emissions in response to climate change the anti-fact orientation so common in the world but especially in the united states potentially represents an existence threat to human civilization i know less about vaccines than virologists and epidemiologists and unless you're a virologist or epidemiologist you understand less as well so of course we should be informed and we should do our homework and we should understand that unless we're in a field of specialty we're simply not qualified to refute the claims of a virologist or an epidemiologist that doesn't mean they are people of all specialties shouldn't be held accountable they should that's why independent media and reporting is so important that's why the problems we have reproducibility and in scientific research is a massive problem the bias against producing and publishing negative results is a massive problem things that should be reformed in the science of science absolutely needs its own reformation but just because science has problems doesn't mean everybody with a camera on youtube should be trusted in matters of climate and public health and pandemics y'all listen to me this stuff is dangerous and i'm sorry i'm sorry if your child suffers from a health consequence that you ascribe to a vaccine i truly am sorry for the emotional turmoil that you face or if you have a friend who has a child who they believe is suffering severe impairment from a vaccine i'm sorry if your child has autism and you believe it is from an ex a vaccine but as an actual autistic person you're not doing me any favors and you're not doing your child any favors and you sure aren't doing poor people around the world and in your community a favor by bypassing one of the most proven and evidence-based medical interventions in the history of the human species we have got to get back to some basic shared epistemology on how we understand facts in the world and i'm sorry you can draw a straight line from telling people they don't have to trust fancy scientists about evolution and the big bang because it conflates the scriptures to climate change denial to the anti-vaxx movement to the flat earth movement it's all the same fundamentally flawed epistemology that's why i'm a science educator friends that's why the show asks science mike exists i grew up with a warped and broken epistemology and it didn't just it wasn't trivial it wasn't just some it's not just trivial the way we understand the world because the way we organize into action together has the potential to save lives or cost lives to preserve the balance of life on this planet or to disrupt it both in our lives as individuals and as part of an eco web that's why i'll be here every week to talk to you about your questions in your curiosities and sometimes those conversations are hard like when we talk about the anti-vaxx movement but i believe it is necessary and essential for us to be healthy and whole as people and as a society to have these difficult conversations and to know whether you're an anti-vaxxer or not i still care for you i still support you and i still hope that you and your family are happy and healthy and safe and well thank you for listening my friends and i'll talk to you again next week