The Proof is in the Pudding: Our Medical System is Making America’s Children SICK

I’m stealing an expression from a friend who probably wouldn’t want to be named, the pudding. The proof is in the pudding. If your children are healthy, there’s nothing to see here. Business as usual is working just fine for your family. Your doctor is your ally. All is well.

But if your child is sick, there’s a problem.

And, in the United States anyway, so many of today’s children are so sick. (There’s your pudding.)

Four children in my daughter’s fourth grade class were on the autism spectrum.

A middle schooler I know was recently diagnosed with diabetes.

My daughter’s friend has such severe eczema all over her body that her face and arms are blotchy with angry rashes.

It’s a Sisyphean task to stand up to the medical establishment. Why would anyone want to?

I spoke at a conference recently with James Lyons-Weiler, PhD; Mary Holland, JD; and Tetyana Obukhanych, PhD, which was organized by Informed Choice Washington and the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge.

Among the amazing people who participated were Alan Phillips, Del Bigtree, Bernadette Pajer, Drella Stein, bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain Garth Stein, Leah Houser, Jena Hensler Dalpez, Alissa Desancic, and many more.

I talked to parents who attended the conference who have children who:

• Are nonverbal
• Smear their own feces
• Stim
• Scream in pain
• Have unusually severe and early onset food allergies
• Are uncontrollably violent
• Cannot concentrate
• Have multiple seizures a day
• Have leaky gut syndrome
• Cannot tolerate even basic foods without severe stomach pain

Many of these children will never go to college, get married, have a career, or start families of their own.

Their parents are not the crunchy granolaheads who had home births, breastfed exclusively, ate kale popsicles, didn’t bother with pediatricians, and skipped diapers.

(Yes, that’s a thing. Yes, it works. Yes, it’s weird. And yes, it’s awesome if you’re open-minded enough to try it.)

These are the parents who did EVERYTHING their doctors told them, followed medical advice at face value, and listened when their doctors insisted they keep vaccinating, keep using Tylenol, and keep taking antibiotics, usually for ear infections.

They asked their doctors, “Could some of my child’s health problems be caused by vaccines?” and they were told no. The timing of the problems was just “an unfortunate coincidence.”

Their doctors would even go on to insist that their sick child needed vaccination and other treatments MORE URGENTLY than healthy kids.

A lot of older people wonder why on earth would my generation of parents be rejecting some vaccines?

My 72-year-old aunt has friends who get upset with my vaccine safety Facebook posts.

They believe parents who forego or delay vaccines are “selfish” and “irresponsible,” that not vaccinating is like putting kids in a car with no seatbelts.

Back to the pudding: I’ve seen time and again that many (not all) kids who are completely unvaccinated within the same family tend to be healthier than their fully vaccinated older siblings.

I heard dozens of stories to that effect at the conference: the oldest child gets all the vaccines and his health starts to decline, as does his younger brother’s.

But by the third child the parents have wised up and are no longer following medical conventions.

Their unvaccinated youngest is by far their healthiest and smartest and best adjusted kid.

Of course those kids are also:

•  avoiding Tylenol (which can be neurologically devastating)
• eating real food
• not being exposed to as many neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors, which are present in everything from conventional baby shampoo to building materials.

I put to you that no thinking person can look at the American CDC childhood vaccine schedule today without having some concerns.

A Washington State epidemiologist came to Saturday’s conference as a private citizen and she, too, has concerns.

If you use your logical thinking skills, you quickly see that something is very, very wrong.

We are giving a vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease, hepatitis B vaccine, at birth and in infancy when it should be given preteen if needed.

We vaccinate against rotavirus and chickenpox, two mild childhood illnesses, which flies in the face of good science and common sense.

As William Parker, PhD, at Duke University’s medical school explained to me, the human immune system is like a well trained army, always on high alert, always wanting to attack.

Our immune system evolved to fight off and cohabitate with bacteria and viruses.

You can’t remove bacterial and viral illnesses from the human landscape and expect not to disrupt the organism.

We continue pushing a yearly flu shot for children and adults when a double-blind ferret study published in PLOS One showed that exposure to flu vaccine makes the flu more severe and a Canadian study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases showed that consecutive shots make the flu vaccine LESS effective.

Yet we give six month olds the flu vaccine, which still contains mercury, one of the deadliest substances on earth.

It’s irresponsible and unscientific to have such an aggressive and unnecessary schedule.

The proof is in the pudding.

The emperor is naked.

Whatever metaphor you choose, we can do better than this.

About Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D.

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an investigative journalist, book author, and Fulbright awardee. She is the author of Your Baby, Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Decisions for a Happier, Healthier Family, co-author (with Paul Thomas, M.D.) of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, and co-author (also with Paul Thomas, M.D.) of The Addiction Spectrum: A Compassionate, Holistic Approach to Recovery. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Watch her in the series, The Truth About Vaccines.