Old Lad

When I was a GP, I used to often wonder what went on inside people’s heads about their health. Its what academics termed Health Beliefs and used to be taught as part of consultation technique. If I’m honest I think most of the time we had no idea until some bizarre question emerged.. In the case of people with a mental illness it was more challenging to identify the problem. A local Psychiatrist who I worked with had a simple pragmatic approach to this. His view, based on non verbal behaviours, was if a patient made you feel sad chances were they had an underlying depression. If they made you feel on edge it was probably anxiety, and if you sat thinking is it them or me it was probably schizophrenia. Crude but often surprisingly effective.

Most of the time you would not know what strange beliefs people had apart from the odd people who might corner you in a pub and regale you with the latest conspiracy theories. However the advent of the internet has now blown this wide open and anybody with a keyboard can promote their pet theories, and often, defying logic , get lots of support.(Think Donald Trump!). Whereas most of the stuff is harmless, increasingly it becomes dangerous. And there is no bigger worry now than the growing belief that vaccines are harmful and as a consequence levels of vaccination are falling. Worryingly in the USA the President has appointed an opponent of vaccines as Health Secretary.

I am the first to admit that there are rare events that can follow vaccination but in the scheme of things the overwhelming scientific evidence is that these are very rare. I think the bigger picture has been distorted because nowadays very few people have experience of diseases that we rarely see precisely because vaccination has almost eradicated them. One of the memories of my time as a Medical Student in the 1960s was being taken to a ward in Aintree Hospital in Liverpool which was full of adults in Iron Lungs -all victims of polio caught in the 1940s and 50s before polio vaccine was introduced. And in the 1960s we still had awful epidemics of measles and whooping cough which debilitated or occasionally killed children. Measles was the main cause of a chronic disease known as bronchiectasis where the air passages in the lungs are damaged and the sufferer has a life of chronic chest problems and infections. If you trawl through social media today you will find all manner of bizarre accounts of what vaccines are supposed to do to people. Often these accounts are peppered with that well know phrase “They say…” And of course in conversation with people there is a sentiment expressed that if its on Facebook or Instagram it must be true!

It is an awful prospect to think that we would have to wait for an increase in the incidence of some of these historic diseases to make the anti-vax sentiment go away. When I was a GP people used to ask me if I had my own children vaccinated and the answer was always a resounding Yes. Whether this helped the waverers I never really knew. But my message still is if you are offered a vaccination against a particular illness take it! So this afternoon I’m off for my Flu and Covid vaccination!