The topic is regarding how people of higher intellect contribute to their own care by making more informed choices and thereby have improved outcomes.
The examples I gave are departures from the norm in medical practice and are informed choices that many make after considering the risk/benefit for their own personal medical histories/situations.
Yes, you're right. The thing here, though, is that there is a TON of misinformation about the risks of vaccines, and that
people don't realize they're reading misinformation. IMO, there is a huge correlation (likely causative) between not vaccinating and people with a certain level of intelligence/education. ETA: meaning, people who know enough to see that some kind of issue has arisen, but not enough to be able to pick through it and assess it based on evidence. Obviously, there are parents whose kids CAN'T be vaccinated for medical reasons like allergies or having leukemia. I'm not talking about them.
I'm talking about people who are taken in by vaccine-autism myths (proven to be not there), vaccine-mercury myths (ethyl and methyl mercury are very different), vaccine-aluminium myths (more aluminium in breast milk), etc. etc. These people tend to be college educated:
...the unvaccinated children were more likely to be male, to be white, to belong to households with higher income, to have a married mother with a college education, and to live with four or more children.
As compared with parents of vaccinated children, significantly more parents of exempt children thought their children had a low susceptibility to the diseases (58% vs. 15%), that the severity of the diseases was low (51% vs. 18%), and that the efficacy and safety of the vaccines was low (54% vs. 17% for efficacy and 60% vs. 15% for safety). Moreover, parents of exempt children were more likely than parents of vaccinated children both to have providers who offered complementary or alternative health care and to obtain information from the Internet and groups opposed to aspects of immunization. The most frequent reason for nonvaccination, stated by 69% of the parents, was concern that the vaccine might cause harm.
I suspect that vaccine refusal for personal (rather than legitimate medical) reasons is an example of bad decision making in precisely the way that Bostonian's article noted. Plus, I also think there's an element of not recognizing one's own incompetence there.
