Letter To The Skeptics Guide To The Univerise Podcast

[joreth]

Dear SGTU Members:

I want to thank you and let you know your efforts are not in vain.  I credit you with directly contributing to the turning of an autism-comes-from-vaccines believer.  Here's the story:

I was at work the other day and someone asked what the device was on my arm.  I told him it was my iPod.  He asked what I was listening to and I said "The Skeptics Guide To The Universe".  He asked what it was about and I gave a brief summary that included something to the effect of "using science and skepticism to debunk popular myths and pseudo-science".  He said something like "you mean like how vaccines cause autism?"  I rolled my eyes and immediately launched into a tirade of how that just isn't true.  He started quizzing me.  To my surprise, I was able to answer each point and counterpoint he threw at me clearly, concisely, and rationally.

At the end of the conversation (which lasted about an hour), he confided in me that he had a son with autism and that it was his son's physician who identified the cause as vaccines.  I immediately blushed and frantically reviewed the conversation to see how insensitive I had been in my debunking statements.  But he said that, having a personal interest in the matter, he has gone out of his way to review every claim made on the issue and he often goes back and forth over whether or not vaccines are linked to autism.  He was currently on the side of "yes they do" when he met me.  His doctor was the primary reason for this.  The doctor pointed to images of his son's blood, identified elements as various heavy metals in the blood, and said, conclusively, "this is the cause of your son's autism and it came from vaccines".  This coworker didn't see any reason why a medical doctor would say something conclusively like that if there was any question that it might be wrong (I pointed out that any individual in the scientific community is just as likely to be prone to biases and misinformation, and that it's the community as a whole, and their consensus, that should be given more weight).

He said that I was the first person he had met who had clear answers for all his challenges, and that I seemed informed, whereas everyone else was simply repeating what they had heard without understanding why it was true, much like those they accuse in the True Believers side (my words, not his).  He said that I had swung him back to the No side with my arguments.

And all those arguments I got from you guys.  Thank you!

Some backstory:

I was already on this side of the argument before I began listening to your show.  But I couldn't argue my position.  The way my brain seems to be working as I get older is that I can understand what I'm being taught, and I can understand it pretty thoroughly, but over time (and it's not a very long time), if I don't re-teach or use the information regularly, the details of the lesson will begin to get fuzzy and eventually I'm left with just my impression of the conclusion, not how I arrived there.  This makes debating difficult, since all I can say is "I can't tell you why, but trust me, the evidence was convincing!"  It's a bit distressing, because when I was school-age, I had a nearly-photographic memory and could recite just about anything I read, word for word, and could often even repeat things I heard, down to the vocal inflection, making all my boyfriends at that age dread any kind of argument with me.

I am a civil rights activist (I promise, this is related), and my areas of special interest are sexuality and personal freedoms.  I am gradually becoming a leader in the local community in this fight.  The strategy that I believe is the first, and most important step, is education.  I engage people in conversation that challenges their assumptions and educates them on the myths of their ideas, such as, humans are naturally monogamous and heterosexual and that the opposite orientations are "choices" (I'm making sweeping statements for the sake of simplicity, since this letter isn't about these topics).  I also am a female in a male-dominated industry, so I am constantly challenging assumptions made about gender, using scientific studies to back up my claims, not just saying what I want to be true since I am female, or anecdotal evidence.  The goal with civil rights education is not necessarily to "convert" someone into whatever minority group I'm defending, since that's really not possible, but to clear up misconceptions so that people do not fear the minority group and accept that they have equal rights and responsibilities as American citizens.

So, in the process of growing into this role as educator and community leader, I've had to tackle issues of politics and science as my debate opponents get progressively more sophisticated as I move up the ladder.  My journey has even taken me in the direction of media attention, so I've been attempting to polish my presentation to soundbite answers that are more palatable to the media and also harder to take out of context.  This, I found, makes my overall debate tactics more difficult to penetrate, although I feel I am still a novice with much to learn.  I've also been working on some attempts to handle amateur Gish Gallop tactics, which is what a great deal of uninformed people use.  I think it's because of their lack of understanding of the subject, they string together all sorts of unrelated issues to form one big ball of stupid, although I think Gish uses his tactic intentionally to confuse and disorient his opponent.

In this journey of mine, I have come to broaden my interests to other scientific topics, such as the vaccine debate, evolution, bigfoot, etc.  I've reached the position where credulity pisses me off.  So in the meandering way of the amateurs, these other topics come up in debate too, but these are topics that I do not have regular practice in defending.  When I started getting into them, it was mainly online and I could just send people links, so I would refer them to my friends and partners who were polished in these subjects.  I began listening to your show, going all the way back to the beginning (and I'm still only in 2006), because it came so highly recommended by those friends I was routinely referring to in science debates.  As your show matured, it seemed to emphasize skepticality as a skill, a tool to use in the fight against ignorance and began to actually teach us some of those skills, rather than just advocate them, starting with your 10 Most Common Logical Fallacies and adding segments to your show that honed those skills, like the logic puzzles and Guess That Logical Fallacy and even with the first one, Science Or Fiction.  I made a conscious decision that I needed to work on my presentation and my debate skills in all of these areas.

So by the time this debate happened a few days ago, I had already heard several episodes that touched upon the vaccine debate, and I had just decided to start studying the logical fallacies.  I was able to use more thought-out responses, in a clear manner that my opponent could understand, and I was able to point out the flaw in his own positions.  He left the debate with a strong interest in finding your podcast and website, and a renewed belief that vaccines do not cause autism.

So, thank you, and here's hoping you get a new listener soon!

**UPDATE**

Joreth,

Thanks for the great e-mail. We liked it so much we posted it up on Rogues Gallery.
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/sgublog/

Regards,

Steve
 

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

I wish fewer doctors were stupid. Even if the child does have heavy metal poisoning, it wouldn't be from vaccines - too small a quantity of metal. But you might need to investigate other issues like is there lead paint in the house or has the kid eaten a lot of tunafish. If you chalk it up to vaccines, then you miss dealing with the real problem.

There isn't a link between autism and heavy metals, but that doesn't mean the kid doesn't have heavy metal poisoning. I don't know - not a doctor and haven't studied the kid.

I've heard of many stupid statements from doctors. Some have caused quite serious harm. I'm glad that my doctors have been honest with me about not knowing why I am ill and generally not knowing what will make me better. They present options as stuff we can try and we won't know what it'll do til we do it. That's not what you want, but if that's all that exists, I'd rather be told it honestly. It's not their fault if medical science doesn't have the answers yet.

[joreth]

I often have to explain why I distrust "doctors" while simultaneously embracing the scientific community. Having a medical degree does not take away personal bias, misinformation, prejudice, or any other human foible. But the scientific method and the scientific community has measures in place to reduce human error, so the system is still the best option we have while the practitioners of it can be excellent or stupid.

I consistently am at odds with doctors who won't tell me stuff. No one told me how HPV was transmitted when I contracted it 15 years ago. No one told me that an "abnormal pap" immediately following was related to the HPV. Doctors have outright refused to acknowledge my complaints of back pain. In order to get the answers I want, I have to know the right questions to ask, which is sort of circular.

So I'm quite peeved at this man's doctor, and, while I was able to point out the flaws in his logic, I still lack the training and experience and expertise to fully allay his fears or point him in the right direction from here. He will probably just go back to the same doctor and continue to chase shadows in his son's treatment. And that's just sad.

[leora.livejournal.com]

My father is a retired doctor. He hadn't been closely following the autism-vaccination debate. He had thought that it was an open question and we weren't sure and that vaccinations might cause autism. So, I looked up a bunch of studies, showed him the research against, and pointed to the studies and evidence for (badly flawed reasoning and research). He read it over, evaluated it, and agreed with me that, in fact, the evidence was conclusive - there was absolutely no reason to suspect a link between vaccinations and autism.

I was right and "the doctor" was wrong. Because the doctor hadn't yet researched it that thoroughly. My father being a reasonable man whose ideas are firmly grounded in science was quite pleased to have a bunch of research done for him and just needing to read over the links to the studies and such. And being reasonable changed his view when he found that the evidence wasn't what he thought it was.

But not all doctors are reasonable, and no doctor is able to fully investigate every subject. I know more causes for proliferative retinopathy than the average eye doctor does. I know it because I've had to study it to try to find out what caused mine. Most eye doctors only know about diabetes, and they don't need to know about more because if you have proliferative retinopathy there's a good chance they'll refer you to a retinologist. Most retinologists seem to immediately think of diabetes but also know one or two of the other more common causes. I can list five before resorting to "ideopathic".

What a really good doctor does is not know everything, but when they get a patient with something they don't know as much about, they dig in and research that subject. I think the real problem is doctors who are too busy, too lazy, or too arrogant to do the serious research when they suddenly are faced with a less common case.

[joreth]

Someone was recently diagnosed with HPV, and when she asked her doctor about carageenan or the latest studies indicating that HPV is transferred orally, her doctor was clueless. This information is the very latest, cutting-edge research into HPV, and a given county clinic doctor is probably *not* going to know about it unless she makes HPV her pet research hobby, like I have.

You're right, a doctor simply can't keep abreast of every and all medical subject. These just happen to be pet interests of mine, but there's a wide world of medical breakthroughs and research out there and no single individual can keep up with them all. Doctors are human, and even the most reasonable and intelligent among them are still restricted to the same 24-hour day as the rest of us.

If she's a reasonable doctor, being presented with the documents discussing how carageenan is in Phase 3 testing or that HPV has been only recently linked to oral cancers, she will do some research and adapt her advice practices. If she is not, she will dismiss the idea that boiled seaweed can prevent a virus and claim that everyone knows that tobacco is the leading cause of oral cancers.

I hope she's the former.