There is a broadcaster in Cork, Neil Prendeville, who has no problem promoting pseudoscience and instilling fear into people during his radio programme. He regularly invites a guest, Michael O’Doherty, whom he calls a healthcare professional, onto his show to expound on vaccines and antibiotics. O’Doherty has no medical qualifications. He is a quack healer whose shtick seems to be that natural is good, that the body is capable of healing itself without the need for modern medicine.
This stuff is dangerous. It is simply not true to say that our bodies are able to deal with every illness that comes along. The flu, a common disease, kills millions of people every year. Before modern medicine, deaths from smallpox, measles and TB were common. They are much less so now because of vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals. Where is the evidence for the great natural panaceas they keep talking about? In the face of an invader, eating berries and taking exercise won’t always cut it. That’s not how human physiology works.
Another pernicious lie that’s promoted is that when you get sick, it’s your fault. If only you had been thinking properly, or meditating the right way, or drinking the correct drinks, or eating the right foods, you wouldn’t have fallen ill. Sure, some lifestyles are decidedly unhealthy, but healthy people still get sick, all the time, through no fault of their own. Telling people that they are responsible creates unnecessary guilt while scaring them away from treatment options that might save their lives. It’s awful.
Prendeville says he is not anti-vaccinatipn, yet he regularly promotes anti-vaccination views. He promotes a culture of suspicion around medicine and medical practitioners. On a regular basis, he lays into the medical profession while promoting some of the worst pseudoscience imaginable. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he’s endangering people’s health.
Sure, if you are fool enough to believe him, the argument could be made that it’s your fault. But what of your children or elderly and incapacitated adults that might depend on you? What of innocent bystanders whose kids you might be putting at risk because you won’t vaccinate your children?
But what to do about it?
Write a strongly worded letter to Red FM? Send a complaint to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland? What will that do, exactly?
Complain to my local TDs? What will that achieve, exactly?
Blog away like I am doing, to the 20 or so people who read this blog?
Write to the Irish Medical council and other healthcare agencies to let them know what he’s up to?
Is it a free speech issue, so better off being left alone? Do I keep quiet and suck it up?
I don’t know. All I do know is that a radio personality is abusing his power and influence to scare people away from practical healthcare, and it feels like nobody cares about it, except for me and my army of one.
Update: here is a link to the show in question. The Gardasil / vaccine discussion starts about 50 minutes into the show.
Update 2: I have amended a statement that Prendeville tells people not to vaccinate their kids, which is not correct. I have also had feedback that he introduces O’Doherty as a healthcare professional. I have corrected this also.
Passive Impressions 
A mistake in logic.
Just because something happened before it, doesn’t mean it caused it.
Just because a footballer forgot to bless himself before a game, doesn’t mean that’s why they lost the match.
Just because a screaming sound was heard in the middle of the night, doesn’t mean your granduncle is going to die.
Just because a vaccine was given doesn’t necessarily mean it caused a sickness at a later date.
Other things: a virus, an infection, the ageing and growth process, genetics, a stressful situation, other people, might have caused it too.
Trying to figure out root cause is really, really difficult, but if you rush to a conclusion about cause, without doing the hard work, chances are you are going to be wrong.
The hard work, trying to figure out causes? We call that science.
And that is why you need to bring in scientific voices and scientific studies when you are discussing issues like vaccines, because they are the only people who have done the work to assess root cause.
Let me reiterate that. They are the only people who have done the hard work. They are the only people who must take the emotion out of it, who must control for bias, who must look at all the data, who must go about it the right way, in order to be taken seriously. They get penalised for taking short cuts, something that doesn’t happen when we give our opinions or talk about our experience.
If you exclude the scientific consensus and scientific voices from a discussion on vaccines, or if you think it’s “just another opinion”, then you are biasing the discussion. No ifs, no buts.
If you exclude the scientific consensus, you are not looking at the whole picture. And, you might be scaring people without just cause.
Share this:
Like this: