Reading blogs here, I remembered the lady on Blogster whose page became rather famous -- Octogenarian. She was interesting. She'd be probably a nonagenarian now, but I still began looking for her blog. Among blogs of similar name I found another person's, quite an ignorant person, whose statements seem to contain a lot of the troublesome lack of logic and thought that I see as an enormous danger, right now.

octogenariansblog.com
A quote:
"I personally believe the responsibility for one's health is a non-transferable issue."

This is so absurd, I want to send her back to the 19th century to experience being responsible for her own health. Back when community health was being struggled and fought for; when people died massively from now-nearly-extinct communicable diseases; when water systems were often failing and making people sick; when the public willingly built community sanitoriums (sanitoria?) to house the sick apart so they did not infect everybody.

She either hasn't heard of herd immunity,* or cares so little about other people's health that she'd prefer everyone tried to stay healthy on his own, despite the uphill struggle this is.
I think she is simply ignorant. It's a problem.

And what happened to looking after our brothers? She's not her brother's keeper, I guess. This is no way to model a society -- everyone caring for no one else. And I guess the fact that she has left her own offspring extremely at risk in adulthood doesn't register with her.

I was fortunate because even though my father was reluctant to pay to get us to the doctor for all the various vaccinations, I caught some of the major illnesses when I was 4 or 5, when my older siblings brought home germs & their friends from school. In one year I had measles, German measles, chicken pox. (These had no legally mandated vaccination, like smallpox and polio did.) Later I caught mumps. If you can't get vaccinated in time, catching it when you're young is better. (And my cheap father had to pay for his oversight later, when I caught pneumonia because I was worn out from a couple illnesses in a row. He ended up paying for 2 doctor's house calls and a chest X-ray.)

One of those sicknesses, I'm not sure which, made your eyes weak. I had to stay on the couch in the living room with the room darkened. I got a Troll doll as a present from my mother then that I took everywhere. And the doctor gave me an empty syringe he'd used on me, minus the needle. I treasured it, but it was made of glass and broke later. Funny how people just were not that careful about what kids played with.

***
The other thing I was thinking was about health issues and how most of us don't know enough to decide all issues. You really need to hear all the pertinent aspects of health issues because we're so quick to judge or decide a thing when we're uninformed. For the lady I mentioned before, it's mostly the idea of herd immunity that she's not taking into consideration.

But with other issues, there are different things happening. Health and biological stuff are often very weird and we can't think using only what we already know; we need far more information on what's happening. Contradictions in biological processes are sort of the norm. For instance, if a medicine helps for one particular thing, it doesn't follow that a worse case of that illness means you should give more of that medicine. And if you have two different health problems, normally treated by A medicine for the first and B for the second, you don't necessarily add A + B. Because A and B in conjunction often do something very different.

Cancer treatments are another. The very things we use still to treat cancer are cancer-inducive. We use radiation to treat it, but radiation itself causes mutation and cancer.

Chemotherapy drugs often are highly carcinogenic. My oldest sister, who once worked at Sloan-Kettering Hospital, used to wonder if the lack of caution hospitals had in handling these drugs could lead to her developing cancer someday, because of all the skin splashes from chemo solutions she accidentally received.

Another example - Steroids are a contradiction too. The topical ones help heal…. but they also delay healing. You have to use a light touch, and then stop using it. If the skin is not simply rashy but also broken open, that's an indicator not to use a steroid cream or if you do, then not for very long. If you have a cut, and keep putting cortisone cream on it, you can turn it into a nice ulcer that will never heal.

The processes governing biological stuff are complex and much of it known only to physicians. That fact has been pounded into my head by the medical members of my family. We laymen should be really careful when trying to legislate or regulate medical things. We need both information -- and a community perspective. Okay, this got really really preachy and teacherlike and I am neither a preacher nor teacher so please forgive me.


*herd immunity -- the added protection from a disease all of a group receives when most of the group has been vaccinated for that disease. This added benefit occurs because 1) the fact that most of the group will not get a disease makes the most dangerous vectors, or methods of transmission, for that disease disappear; and 2) vaccinations themselves may be nearly but not 100% effective, so individuals for whom the vaccine doesn't "take" are unlikely to be exposed, due to the dwindling incidence of infection.