Anyone Experience Regression After Vaccinating Older Child?

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Vaccinations aren't about 'opinions'. You can appeal to emotion all you like but it is incredibly irresponsible to not vaccinate children and that isn't an opinion, it's a fact. That fact isn't going to change by appealing to my emotions. I'm also not interested in changing someone's "opinion" about vaccination. You can carry on all you like about the cause for autism and a possible connection all day long and that's not going to change the fact that autism is a genetic neurological difference, either.

I think it's because some things are life-threatening and some aren't. I may disagree with swearing in front of kids, but if I see someone swearing their head off with a toddler around, I'm not going to stop them and tell them that that is bad parenting. On the other hand, if I saw someone violently shaking a newborn baby, I very well might stop them- you bet I would shove my "don't shake your newborn baby" philosophy down their throats! I generally try not to shove things down people's throats often though. I think you are right that the "shoving" method rarely results in changed minds.

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My son has benefited from having milk products removed from his diet too (but not gluten). He was tested for an allergy when he was younger and it came up negative, but I notice behavioural changes in him when he has dairy products and when he doesn't. He doesn't seem more spaced out, but it is harder to get his attention and he cries more. I don't think we know why my younger son is how he is. I don't think we fully understand what causes autism yet either.

ominous, I have never said vaccinations are about opinions. The fact that vaccinations prevent disease is...well...a fact.

However, there are valid reasons not to vaccinate. To dismiss that is ignorant, and I don't mean that in the inflammatory way. I mean it in the way that it ignores facts. Some people will be injured by vaccines. That is a documented fact. There is actually a Vaccination Injury Act. I don't suppose they would create that if vaccines are 100% safe 100% of the time. There would be no use. It is best to know which people are likely to be injured so that we can avoid the injury by avoiding the vaccine. Your insistence that it is "incredibly irresponsible" does not take into consideration instances in which it would be incredibly irresponsible to vaccinate someone. My understanding is they don't always know why some people suffer negative reactions. Some people die from vaccinations or suffer lifelong sequelae. Sucks if your kid is one of those. Sucks even more if you didn't have a choice.

FTR, I don't believe vaccinations cause autism, at least not the kind in my family. I believe it is 100% genetic. There is sufficient evidence of that in my family tree to remove doubt. I do not purport, however, to have irrefutable evidence regarding the cause of all kinds of autism. To my knowledge no one has that.

It is ironic to me that you cannot grant to others the very same thing you demanded for yourself. I will no longer try to appeal to your emotion, nor hope that you will be sensitive to someone else's needs or perspective. My bad.

Yes there are valid reasons to not vaccinate, like allergy to egg, and a physician will explain that when you go to have children vaccinated. 'Appeal to emotion' is logical fallacy, so I thank you for not playing that with me in future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

Thanks for the link. I have a graduate degree in psychology so I am already familiar, but I was not trying to engage you in a logical fallacy. I was trying to emotionally engage you in the experience of someone else so that perhaps you could appreciate their request, since you had recently made a similar request yourself. I realize it didn't work.

I don't manipulate easily. Sorry if that is disappointing. I'm happy to extend myself to others and be kind, which I have done in a number of threads here, so your appeal to my emotion wasn't a successful manipulation. You know, you're actually arguing with Alex, so why don't you take your argument up with him instead of taking it up with me? Because I'm here and there's the possibility you can manipulate me into feeling bad about my words? You're correct that isn't going to work.

I believe it is irresponsible, for the general community, to not vaccinate children unless a qualified medical physician specifically tells them not to. I believe I was irresponsible for not fully vaccinating my own child. I am glad that I now have. I hope that everyone who chooses not to vaccinate doesn't suffer with the years of anxiety I did that my child might develop a preventable disease and suffer for my personal choices, which were 'informed' by the antivax lobby at a time when I was very easy to manipulate.

I will err on the side of graciousness and not take that as an argument from authority but just a statement of fact, despite there being no actual relevance to your making that statement other than an attempt at argument from authority.

Alex has not responded to me, so I cannot respond further to him. I would be happy to have a conversation with him, but for whatever reason, he has chosen not to. I respect that.

You responded to me. So I responded to you. Nothing more complicated than that. Had you not responded to me, we would have never had this conversation

There was no intent to manipulate you on my part. I am sorry if you have felt manipulated in the past, but that wasn't me.

Fair enough. I don't mean you any ill will, either. I didn't caveat that there are instances where children should not be vaccinated, and I apologise if that was offensive to parents who have not been able to vaccinate their children. I wasn't speaking of those parents, but parents in the general population who have been persuaded by the antivax lobby. It is hard to be burdened with a choice over vaccination, because most of us don't have anywhere near the scientific background required to truly make an informed choice over it for our children. I also understand that parents who consider the ramifications of everything for their children tend to be more thoughtful and engaged parents.

It's a statement of fact, but fwiw, I did significant study in social psychology, so I don't require wiki links to logical fallacies. One could argue that your link was nothing more than to bait me by implying that I am falling prey to illogical arguments, which I sometimes do

I imagine you may reply further, but I just want to let you know that I am not going to continue with this conversation because it is detracting from the OPs purpose. I don't want you to think I just stopped responding to you. It's because I think we have gone too far OT. This thread doesn't belong to either of us.

*Edited for incomprehensible non-grammar*

I just want to interject something, and that is intelligent, educated minds can and do disagree about nearly everything science. With vaccinations, the preponderance of evidence is clearly in one direction, but there is documented harm that has been done by vaccinations (not including any claims related to autism) and it has never been a 100%, no dispute, this-is-the-only-way-society-can-go issue. As much as I AM a part of the general pro-vaccine/irresponsible-not-to school of thought, to say it is a FACT that that is the only position to take is incorrect; intelligent and reasonable minds DO differ, even if they are only a small percentage of the fully informed, scientific community. I have a friend who is a doctor who will not vaccinate herself or her kids because of the chemicals involved. I disagree with her strongly, but NO ONE can say this woman is irresponsible, uninformed, or unintelligent. As much as I hate to admit it because of how strongly I feel about the situation with vaccines, the truth is that she was raised numerous flags about things and has later been proven right. She is the only person who can make me doubt myself, even though I also know she isn't right all the time. She also takes every precaution to insure that her choices don't become someone else's tragedy; there is nothing flippant or willfully ignorant in how she approaches issues where she clearly goes against the common wisdom.

The ways in which drinking alcohol can cost someone else's life are already illegal (driving while impaired, assault, child endangerment, etc). So if you drink alcohol in a legal manner, you will only endanger yourself.

Not vaccinating is a completely different situation. For one thing, most of these people are deciding whether to vaccinate their child, not themselves, and we already limit parents' choices when they place their child in danger. For example, if you think it's just fine to leave a 3 year old alone in your home for hours with no supervision, you're likely to have your kids taken away from you. (Granted, that's worse than not vaccinating a child, but it's just an illustration of the concept.)

Furthermore, it doesn't just affect your child. Children under vaccination age, children who have a genuine medical reason not to be vaccinated, children who've lost their immunity (for example, due to chemotherapy), etc, can end up paying the price for someone else's choice not to vaccinate their child.

Ok so the mercury in the drinking water is not the same form as the mercury in the vaccine. Mercury is an ELEMENT so Not all mercury is equal, much in the same way not all hydrogen is equal. For example... hydrogen can be deadly, as a gas it is explosive, and if you were put into a room full of it you would suffocate. Additionally hydrogen is a part of many detrimental compounds like hydro fluoric acid, which will kill you dead fast. Hydrogen is also part of water. Water isn't bad at all, is it?

Ok now mercury. Mercury gets a bad rap. In general it not good for you, I'll give it that. But, like water, it is an element and it is therefore present in many different compounds. In many of it's forms, mercury is NOT organic (it's inorganic) and won't hurt your brain, the main organ affected by inorganic mercury is the kidney because it's a tricky one to excrete so it just sits in the kidney.... for years. Plain old mercury used to be used for fillings. Not great, but got the job done, and there was no resulting surge of autism from it, which would be expected if inorganic mercury caused autism because a crap ton of people got mercury fillings back in the 40s/50s.

What is super harmful is METHYLATED mercury. Methylated mercury is Organic and there fore bioactive. That stuff is no good and that is the stuff that everyone should try to stay away from. Where do we find methylated mercury? Well, methylation is generally a biological process. However the biology of people, our metabolisms, can't methylate mercury. What can? Ocean organisms. Mercury gets methylated by critters in the aquatic ecosystems. Those critters get eaten by bigger critters which get eaten by fish... etc... which is why the big top of the food chain fish like Tuna are really bad news. They eat all those little critters and all that mehtyl mercury gets "stuck" in them and concentrates there. They aren't efficient at excreting it. So when you eat Tuna, or other big fish, you have the potential to get a whopping dose of bio active methyl mercury. That's why its advisable, in this day and age, to only eat a serving or so per week. See, we aren't good at excreting it either so it just sticks around in our systems for awhile and does it's thing.

The mercury in the drinking water? Well the limit for inorganic mercury in drinking water is generally 25 nanograms per liter. The reason for this limit is 2 fold: 1) it can over time damage your kidneys at much higher levels and 2) over this limit for INORGANIC mercury is where we might start to get really unacceptable levels of organic mercury. Here we have a threshold where if we have this amount of inorganic mercury, there is the potential for microorganisms to metabolize enough of it to really cause a problem. Drinking that level of inorganic mercury isn't, per se, the issue. The resulting potential for biological processes to methylate that mercury is the much larger issue.

So, in short, mercury in vaccines = bad for your kidneys, ok for the brain. Meanwhile the mercury in your canned tuna=bad for your brain, could be a possible contributor to neurological issues.

One-time exposure is a lot different from chronic exposure. Most people drink tap water every day, but they get vaccines months or years apart.

Our bodies have trouble excreting mercury - we can do it, but very slowly. So for anything we're exposed to on a regular basis, we should not receive more mercury than we're capable of excreting. Otherwise it will build up gradually to a toxic level.

In contrast, for a one-time shot, you don't need to worry about it building up. Just as long as it's under the acute toxicity level, they'll gradually excrete it over time with no serious effects. The only way it would cause harm is if they were already receiving chronic exposure to more than they can excrete.

Think of it like money, except you want less instead of more. Let's say you are capable of spending $100 a month, and if you ever have $2,000, something bad will happen to you. If you're getting $150 a month, then in 40 months you'll hit your limit. If you're getting $50 a month, though, you'll be fine.

Now imagine someone gives you a one-time payment of $150, while you're still getting $50 a month. Should you panic? No. In three months, you'll have spent that $150 and be back to baseline. As long as you don't get more money before then, you're fine.

Since you can't really prove a negative, your first statement is OK, but the reality is that many dedicated teams looked long and hard for any signs of a connection and found none.

That actually does meet the standard for saying it's proven that there is no such connection.

Not "irrefutably" in an abstract way, but practically, yes.

Saying it has not been irrefutably proven as if that meant it could well be true is like saying evolution is just a theory.
It really isn't.

Slight change of topic:

The more disturbing thing to me is that the world seems to be caught up in a pattern of thinking that elevates fear above reason. How can a person evaluate risk rationally? Can critical thinking help to identify reasonable courses of action from dangerous alternatives?

People have taken a few tales of coincidence between Vaccines and signs of distress and decided that this means vaccinating their children is an unacceptably high risk. But they don't know what the odds of a negative reaction are (any chance is to high, goes the fear-based argument) and they don't know what the risks of not vaccinating may be.

This trend is disturbing.

Sorry for the tangential remarks.

This trend toward fear overriding reason has been dominant throughout most of the world's history.

We are fortunate we had the Enlightenment; otherwise, we still might be trying to make gold out of lead.