I generally find it interesting that the demographic with concerns and making alternative choices with regards to vaccines and hospital-based childbirth is most often highly educated and likely higher g.
Well, to be fair, some of that same group also embraces homeopathy and crystal healing... and persists in believing any number of things (Nitrogen in tires = better mileage, urban legends, Snopes items galore, etc.) that have fairly conclusively been demonstrated to be untrue or unsound in principle/theory.
So I'm not sure that is a valid conclusion, really. I also think that there's a
particular educational attainment level for which this is true, and that as one goes beyond that level, it becomes far LESS true. I don't know anyone in our peer group (STEM advanced degrees) who has opted for non-vax (other than for medically endorsed reasons), for example. I know only two who opted to home-birth, and even so, not for a first delivery and only with
quite low-risk pregnancies.
I'm willing to believe that self-care is
g-loaded, all right-- but particularly so for those who HAVE particular risk factors or chronic illness, because outcomes are just
so bad there without it.
But the converse probably not-so-much. I think it's a matter of "those who do well are either lucky or smart" and the category of those who DON'T do well is composed of everyone else. My DH's pithy hypothesis is that everyone gets either a brain or a guardian angel.
If you're genetically destined for Huntington's, Marfan, refractory asthma, hemophilia, an immune deficiency, or have a double BRCA1 mutation, well-- you can improve your own personal
management, but you aren't going to avoid all the bad stuff just with informed decision-making and "smart choices." The best choices in the world are still going to lead to not great quality-of-life for some of those people.
I get pretty testy with victim-blaming, or anything that SEEMS to go down that road, though. Too much genetic stuff in my own family, I guess. Everything else is basically window dressing at that point.
My perspective is that the brightest of those people often have better outcomes
because they can discriminate on the basis of plausibility-- and that this leads them to reject anything that is pseudo-science rather than the real thing. The merely "pretty bright" are far more vulnerable to that stuff.
Consider two people with aggressive metastatic cancers. One of them goes the intensive allopathic route and ignores all the alt-med material that friends and family are offering up.
The other spends a lot of time and energy trying "it all" rather than being focused on their oncologist's recommendations, and is ultimately taking a lot of antioxidants that wind up diminishing the effectiveness of chemo and reduce tolerance for radiation. They also don't believe in vaccination
necessarily; thinking that the natural illnesses are not that serious and that better immunity is obtained via wild-type exposures, and that "just stay away if you're sick" is a fine way to minimize spread of illness-- and so do their friends. So treatment has to be stopped while the person is hospitalized for influenza, then for chicken pox.
All other things being equal, the former quite probably gets a better outcome than the latter. I think that this is probably more closely tied to risk-aversion than to LOG, however-- or that it ties to both things.
My DH and I are pathologically risk-averse. Bottom line.
But I'm also a huge believer in Murphy's Law along with Occam's Razor-- and if I wasn't, life with my DD would have made me a believer long ago. LOL.
I think that this is much like the 10,000 hours business. Necessary-- but ultimately
not sufficient. In fact, I'm not even so sure that it's
necessary. We
all know someone who never exercised, smoked/drank and lived to be a ripe old age without serious infirmity. Lucky is real, too.
