60% of doctors “just say no” to flu shot

Click on image above to go to a page where you can watch a doctor tell you that taking the flu shot is a good idea. Note: frame grab above is from accompanying ad.

A little off-topic here, but drug use is not part of a complete childhood or a healthy diet in the Bovine’s books. So it’s interesting to see yet another case of “do as I say, not as I do” coming out of the medical profession. And we’re not even going to any indie news source for this one. You can’t get more mainstream than abc news. Click on the video image to go to a page where you can play a video of a doctor telling you the flu shot is a good thing to get. Here’s an excerpt from that abc news story titled “Docs talk the talk, but do they take flu shot?”:

“Every fall, the public is barraged by messages from doctors, nurses and other health care providers to get a flu vaccination to protect against the influenza virus.

But the truth is, some doctors and nurses might talk the talk without walking the walk.

“Unpasteurized milk poses health risks without benefits” seems to be the new “party line” of establishment “science”

"Scientific proof" -- sold to the highest bidder!

We live in a world in which “scientific proof” is often sold to the highest bidder — usually corporations who can fund those expensive double-blind clinical studies. Perhaps you have a profitable new drug that you’d like to bring to market. Or maybe your product’s market share is being threatened by a natural competitor that no one can figure out how to make money providing — and you’d like to “blacklist” it in the public mind. If you’ve got the money, there will be a scientist who’ll craft you a study to prove what you need proven. See the blog Science for Sale for cases in point.

Anecdotal evidence on the other hand, is widely disparaged these days as unscientific, but it’s something that makes sense to people, and it’s often the only kind of evidence that researchers whose research subjects don’t interest corporate sponsors will have access to. Dave Milano has some great things to say in praise of anecdotal evidence in a recent comment on this Complete Patient post:

“In a somewhat playful letter published eight years ago in the British medical journal The Lancet, a physician made several comments regarding the value of anecdote that warmed my heart. He acknowledged that publication in a modern medical journal is “unlikely to follow anecdotal observation” but also made the point that a mere couple of generations ago, during a time when, not incidentally, many important medical discoveries were being made, it was very common to rely on anecdote as a base for decision making, and for inclusion in respected medical literature. Here is a quote from his letter: