Why I hate

WIGSF posed an interesting, but good question to me yesterday in the one of two comments I had on my post. The question was:

"In recent years I've noticed a surge in your posts against people who dislike modern science/medicine. Why?"

I've addressed this in passing on my blog once or twice, but I guess now would be a good time to dedicate a post about my loathing for all things stupid. First off, poking fun at the ridiculous is an enjoyable task and feeds my superiority complex, but seriously the reason why I can't stand people who promote the idea that modern science is out to kill them is that they do a lot of harm to the uneducated, and the easily misled. I've learned this first hand when a family member decided to give a bunch of homeopathy literature to my immediate family. One of them believed in it, abandoned all use of modern medicine in favor of the quackery, and almost lost their life because of it. Thankfully they're fine now, but that planted the seed of my skepticism about people who believe they're above modern science.

It got worse when the wife and I tried to have a baby. We were given all sorts of anecdotal information and supposed tried and true methods on how to reproduce, but when looking at the facts, getting pregnant is just a crap shoot. Talk to any Doctor and they'll tell you when and how often you should attempt conception, but any and all people who tell you there are "proven methods" to increase your chance of getting pregnant without the use of modern science is flat out lying. In some cases they're profiting off their lies from desperate couples eager to have a child, which is just sick.

After my wife got pregnant I started looking into the health of my baby, simple things like medicine dosage and vaccines. The amount of anti-vaccine folks, especially Mike Adams and his legion of uninformed fans, scared the living hell out of me. When I started to do research on the web about vaccines and their effectiveness I found a lot of people were listening to fraudulent studies about a correlation between MMR and autism (which doesn't exist), and were refusing to vaccinate themselves or their children against these deadly diseases based on junk science. Now normally I wouldn't care what people do to themselves, if they want to die from polio, be my guest, but to risk passing it on to others, especially babies who are too young to get the vaccine, based on some nutty conspiracy theory that the monolithic entity of Big Pharma wants to keep you sick and dying is really low. I have no patience for this kind of thinking.

When people bring their quackery in the public realm at the cost of the general health of the populace, I really tend to hate them, well I guess hate's a strong word. I do pity them and their families, so their beliefs should be poked at to show how stupid they are in the hopes that it plants the seed of skepticism in at least one person. It's our health, and it's worth it.

“Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off." - New Scientist Magazine