on believing in science

Sometimes, I feel caught between two worlds.

As a person fighting against a poorly-understood chronic condition/disease in osteoarthritis, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to educate myself. I’ve tried a huge number of therapies, supplements, exercise and non-exercise regimens, many of which fall into the category of naturopathic, holistic and non-traditional from the Western medical standpoint. A few have helped, many have not, and trying to figure out the difference in a human laboratory with a single test subject who is absolutely subject to the placebo effect is a hugely frustrating exercise.

The bottom line is that I consider myself a rational person. It grounds my atheism, informs my moral choices and helps steer my journey in learning about my health. I believe there’s a lot out there that science hasn’t had the time or money to study completely, like the benefits of acupuncture or yoga, or the impact of gluten in our diet on auto-immune diseases. Even where the science exists, I think there’s so much out there we miss a lot of it. If a tree falls in the forest but it’s not trending on Twitter, does it still make a sound?

Since Quinn was diagnosed by his doctor with H1N1 last week (we’ll get confirmation from the lab early next week), I’ve been reading up a lot on the vaccination debate. A lot of people just like me – well-meaning individuals blogging and commenting their way through the online world – have been voicing a lot of wildly divergent opinions on the issue. I was getting very confused and pretty scared, and trying to get some hard facts from a source that doesn’t dumb everything down the way Health Canada does was proving difficult.

I realized that I was losing my rational perspective because I didn’t know what has and has not been proven scientifically. This article helped me.

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All | Wired Magazine.