does alt med equal fewer vaccinations?

Researchers find more evidence that alternative medicine practitioners are a public health menace.





Did you know that the state of Washington requires insurance companies to cover alternative medicine under a special provision that requires them to compensate all types of medical care? Heh. Forget what I said in my post about why alternative medicine faces a long shot at being covered by insurance companies. Science be damned when enough state lawmakers have a sympathetic ear. But where there are lemons, a quartet of clinical researchers saw an opportunity to make some lemonade and use data from insurance companies to try and find out whether there’s a correlation between alternative medicine and pediatric vaccinations.

As it turns out, the correlation is there and unfortunately, it’s negative. Children who see alternative medicine providers are up to 75% more likely not to receive the four major vaccines intended to prepare their immune systems against chicken pox, diphtheria, mumps, measles and hepatitis among other infections. And even worse, they were notably more likely to be diagnosed with a preventable childhood disease when compared to kids who were treated by conventional doctors and received their vaccine regimen. The best case scenario found that children treated by chiropractors were 25% less likely to get their shots which is not good, but it’s a drastic improvement over the aforementioned three quarters of pediatric patients treated by naturopaths.

Yes, a study that uses insurance claims is inherently limited in the information it can collect and there is the possibility that vaccinations were done without the companies’ involvement. However, given the high costs of medical care, it’s not likely that the omissions were all that drastic. It’s cheaper to have insurers who already cover vaccinations to a significant extent, pay for them than to shell out for them yourself. And as was noted by Orac, the study can’t be taken to mean that alternative medicine practitioners are actively deterring patients in their care from getting their kids vaccinated. Quite a few people who go to naturists or chiropractors who still ascribe to the idea that alignments of the spine cause all disease rather that those who simply say they can help you with your back pain, already have a deep seeded suspicion of conventional medicine in general.

However, there are cases of homeopaths trying to scare potential patients with stories about how evil and dangerous vaccines can be. We also know that naturism and other types of medical woo reject the reliable and successfully used germ theory in favor of vitalism and the ever ill-defined “aggregate toxicity,” so for them, vaccines are either a menace or totally useless. Even if they don’t outright reject the merit of vaccinations, it’s not very likely that they’ll be rushing patients to get their regimens. Let’s remember that alternative medicine is a business that makes billions of dollars in selling unregulated treatments exempt from FDA review thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 which treats alt med products as food rather than a medical treatment. When naturists and homeopaths attack conventional evidence-based medicine as limited, useless against numerous diseases, narrow-minded, arrogant, poisonous and profit-minded, they’re really protecting their income in a rather callous and hypocritical way.

When it comes to vaccines, we know that while they’re not perfect, they work. We have volumes of evidence for how effective they are, which is why we rely on them to control dozens of diseases. However, on the other side of the debate, we have people who deal in fears rather than fact and go by stubborn personal opinions on a subject they know very little about. And even worse, alongside them we have quacks who promote anti-vaxer rumors and accusations for their personal gain while hypocritically accusing doctors of giving vaccination only for the sake of profit. Together, they seem firmly committed to slam over half a century of radical progress into reverse, obliviously unaware of just how dangerous their proposition really is. All doctors want to do is infuse us with potential defenses for as widespread diseases and vaccines are the best technology we have at the moment. Why should those of us who have nothing to gain from it attack their goal of helping us live a longer and better life by training our immune systems?

See: Downey, L., Tyree P., Huebner, C., Lafferty, W. (2009). Pediatric Vaccination and Vaccine-Preventable Disease Acquisition: Associations with Care by Complementary and Alternative Medicine Providers Maternal and Child Health Journal DOI: 10.1007/s10995–009–0519–5