What Do Doctors Learn About Vaccines In Medical School

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I usually don't respond to many comments on my blog, preferring instead to encourage conversation between readers. I likewise don't typically close comments on whatever of my pieces, so conversations and reactions go along for a long time. Sometimes that takes the discussion in an interesting direction. I retrieve that a few recent comments on my "Dear parents…" piece are worth highlighting, every bit they provide an excellent window into an ongoing discussion of a very common anti-vaccine argument.

Anti-vaccine activists accept a trouble with medical expertise. They prefer to rely on their own intuition, only it's difficult to mensurate that gut feeling up against an actual medical degree (much less the feel and knowledge that comes with information technology). At that place'due south a reason hospitals hire doctors out of medical schools rather than the University of Google.

Anti-vaxxers need to defuse the expertise of existent medical practitioners. Simultaneously, they have to grapple with the consequence of culpability: if vaccines are harmful, and physicians know virtually it, they must be acting with deliberate malice to prescribe them to children. Just what is their motive? And why would any dr., knowing the dangers, vaccinate his or her own children?

One of the ways the anti-vaxxers maneuver around this problem is past claiming that physicians don't actually know (or accept) the dangers of vaccines. Information technology's only those sinister vaccine manufactures and their "shills", driven solely past profit motives who are fully aware of the dangers (this statement still doesn't account for why they vaccinate themselves and their children, but anti-vaxxers tend to ignore this trouble). According to this line of thinking:

"those people y'all mention didn't study the effects on the neurological system, the effects on the kidneys, etc. They've merely studied a pocket-size slice of the puzzle. A very small piece. Ask whatsoever primary care physician or family doc how much time they've spent on learning all the ins and outs of vaccines and how they work. It's a frighteningly minor corporeality of time."
–A Concerned Mom (extract from comment on Nov 16, 2014)

To someone who's really gone through medical school or graduate school (or knows someone who has), it'southward obvious why this is wrong. But if you're not familiar with the kind of rigorous, even punishing training that physicians receive, information technology's harder to see the difference between a serious education and self-study. And for someone who's emotionally invested in an upshot and only has that self-written report to justify their position, information technology'south tempting to put that knowledge on a pedestal and presume it's every bit good as, or even better than, traditional schooling and feel. So Concerned Mom's argument would make a lot of sense, specially to someone who needs to believe that the doctors who disagree with their position somehow don't know what they're talking most.

That'southward why I was very beholden of a comment in response to A Concerned Mom, which I highlighted on the Tearing Metaphors Facebook page a few days after. (That's where I post daily, diverse stories almost science and scientific discipline literacy issues. Check it out!). At a reader'due south suggestion, I want to highlight it again here, because I think information technology does an splendid job of responding to this argument, and the question of simulated equivalency of expertise in general: