Again, dropping this onto the front page so on edge (and other interested parties) do not miss it.
[quote]ActivitiesGuy wrote:
[quote]on edge wrote:
AG, I was absolutely not dismissing selective results.[/quote]
Really? Because this…
[quote]on edge wrote:
If you take those results away we are left with lower vaccination rates = better behavior regulation, fewer phonic & facial tics and backward digit recall (yes I just painted with some broad strokes but that’s the predominant result from their 3 categories).
Since mercury is a neurotoxin I think these later results are more likely the result of mercury exposure than the former, positive results, are likely to be attributable to mercury. No one thinks the stuff is actually healthful.[/quote]
…sounds EXACTLY like selectively dismissing results.
[quote]on edge wrote:
I pointed out the results that didn’t jive with what we know about mercury and potential explanations for them and I stated those areas need to be looked at more closely before a conclusion is made.[/quote]
You “selected” which ones you decided “didn’t jive with what we know about mercury” and decided that they must be due to something else. Please re-read this from before:
[quote]ActivitiesGuy wrote:
They looked at a LOT of tests. If mercury had zero cognitive effects, we would have expected to see relationships between mercury exposure and a few of the cognitive tests (in both directions, positive and negative) by chance alone.
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…which is exactly what happened.
[quote]ActivitiesGuy wrote:
If mercury exposure was associated with worse cognitive function, we would ONLY see those results going in one direction (i.e. a lot of tests with no significant relationship, a few tests with significant NEGATIVE relationships, and zero tests with significant POSITIVE relationships).
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…but that didn’t happen. We saw mostly NULL results with a handful going in each direction. And, despite your attempts to “explain away” the positives, I already pointed out that your theory about those was wrong, because they accounted for every single variable that you listed as a potential confounder.
Moving on…
[quote]on edge wrote:
I consider myself to be open minded with a healthy dose of skepticism and I wouldn’t change that for a second. There’s no way in hell I’m going to just accept the word of experts on something, especially something like wether or not I should have some compound injected into my child.
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And you shouldn’t just “accept” the word of experts. You should probe and ask questions; I’m okay with that. This sort of discussion is healthy.
A tangent: my friends and I go round and round on whether compulsory vaccination would be a good thing. Ultimately I think it would do far more harm than good; the few who don’t vaccinate would go even more bonkers than they already do about this. What I’ve already said in this thread is that I want parents to have a choice, and I want them to understand that vaccination is the right choice.
[quote]on edge wrote:
-You are probably quite right that this study has been scrutinized more than most and by better minds than most. It may may very well be right on the money. The problem is I’ve seen too many studies that clearly are crap.
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This is like saying I won’t order a burger at the best restaurant in town because I’ve seen too many crappy burgers from McDonald’s. (And the gulf between what’s required to publish in NEJM vs. the lower-tier journals is that large)
One other point of clarification here: there’s a difference between “studies that are crap” and “studies that are actually decent but are so poorly reported and understood by the media that they might as well be crap.” Most scientific publications have an in-depth discussion of their strengths and limitations and have carefully worded conclusions. Unfortunately, the media tends to boil them down to STUDY SHOWS MERCURCY ASSOCIATED WITH FACIAL TICS IN CHILDREN without any attempt to understand the nuances of a study.
[quote]on edge wrote:
Granted, they probably weren’t published in the New England Journal of Medicine but as a layman, (and I get laid a lot) how am I supposed to know when I click a link on a body builder website if a study has already been scrutinized to the nth degree or if it’s just more run of the mill crap?
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You’re not. You’re supposed to ask an expert, or at least someone that has a stronger understanding of it than you do.
Allow me to introduce myself. I’ll be here all week.
[quote]on edge wrote:
Especially if the first thing I heard about it was they let a non scientist in on the design. You’ve got to admit that sounds sketchy from the get go.
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This line probably makes me angrier than anything in your post. You know why?
The entire reason the “non scientist” was let in on the design was to give the anti vaxxers a voice at the table. Prior studies were biased, they said. Prior studies missed X, Y, and Z, they said. So the scientific community, a team full of very smart and very committed people, designed the best study that was feasible to carry out, and they invited a “non scientist” to be part of that process - not to design the entire thing herself, but to understand exactly what they were doing, why they were doing it that way.
And NOW you want to dismiss the study because they let the “non scientist” in on the design. Bluntly, you have to be fucking kidding me. If she hadn’t been there, the anti vax community would have dismissed it as just another shady conspiracy (of course, they went ahead and did that anyway). That’s what the CDC gets for trying to be as open, accommodating, and transparent as possible.
[quote]on edge wrote:
-In the history of vaccines there has been recalls and product pulled from use.
[/quote]
In the history of grocery stores, there have been recalls and products pulled from shelves. Vegetables and meat linked to bacterial outbreaks. Have you stopped shopping at grocery stores? Have you stopped eating vegetables and meat?
[quote]on edge wrote:
Ihow am I to know that NOW is the point in history when they’ve got it right and I can be absolutely sure vaccines are perfectly safe for my children…
[/quote]
You can’t.
You also can’t be sure that crossing the street is perfectly safe for your children, nor riding in a car, nor playing on a see-saw, nor going to Disneyland (ahem).
[quote]on edge wrote:
even though my kids are probably in about the lowest risk group imaginable for contracting disease? My kids, btw, have a stay at home mom who home schools them. We live in a middle class neighborhood far from any riff raf.
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Incidentally, this is another big fallacy, the idea that you’re safer in a middle class neighborhood “far from any riff raff” - paradoxically, vaccination rates are not any lower in poor neighborhoods than they are in middle/upper class neighborhoods. You know why?
Because the people riding the anti-vaccination bus are generally middle and upper class, educated people that can click a few links on Google and convince themselves that vaccines cause autism. They’re just smart enough to read and understand the vaccine hit pieces without being dedicated or smart enough to dig deeper, as we are doing in this discussion, to understand that vaccines are the single most researched, most regulated, and probably the safest drugs in existence. All they know is that their chiropractor’s website linked a study from vaccine-injury.com that says kids with vaccines have a higher rate of X, Y, and Z, so they’re not about to expose their special little snowflake to those toxins, they’ll develop a “natural immunity.”
Ask the Native Americans how that worked against smallpox.
[quote]on edge wrote:
Like I said early in this thread, I’d vaccinate if I thought it warranted and not lose any sleep over it (and have done so) but for the most part I don’t find it warranted for my kids.
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For the ten zillionth time in the thread, it’s “not warranted” for your kids because everyone else in your neighborhood, or hopefully most of them, are vaccinated. Maybe you live next to Jenny McCarthy, I don’t know. And as usmc said, hopefully you don’t frequent tourist attractions or travel internationally very much. And your kids are never planning to do so. (You know that these diseases don’t just infect children, right? If your kids grow up and go to Africa when they’re 25, good fucking luck).
[quote]on edge wrote:
One more thing, I should have slipped this in somewhere above or last night, but I forgot. What’s your breakdown on the note about having parents not give their kids their ADHD medication the night before the test? I would sure like to know more about those kids, how long the effects of those medications last and of course how many of those kids were in the higher mercury sets and how many were in the lower.[/quote]
Decent question. I don’t really know how long the effects of ADHD medications last, although I think those are pretty fast-acting things (i.e. people without ADHD that take Adderall to help them study for a big test) so they presumably wear off quickly.
Let’s run with it for a second, and let’s play devil’s advocate. Suppose that the higher-mercury-exposed children are more likely to have ADHD, as we surmise that mercury is associated with these disorders.
Thus, they’re more likely to take medication, so let’s assume that our high-mercury ADHD kids all take their meds the night before the tests.
Presumably, they all score better as a result.
This would have made the results more favorable for high-mercury-exposure than what was actually observed if all kids in the study had taken their ADHD medication.
Therefore, if the hypothesis that mercury → ADHD is actually true, the condition that the children NOT take their medication the night before the test would NOT have obscured some devious NEGATIVE relationship between mercury and cognitive function.
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