FSM News and Articles
When do we vaccinate the kids? “Immunologist John Dwyer, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of New South Wales, warns of the greater risk posed by the Delta strain to both children and unvaccinated adults…. The higher the levels of vaccination, the less strict will be the lockdowns that follow outbreaks.”
FSM Friends’ News and Articles
My vaccine is better than yours! The best vaccine is the one that is available now. All the vaccines approved for use in Australia are safe and effective. Being protected now is better than waiting – especially given that there have been no trials significantly powered enough to directly compare the Pfizer and AZ vaccines for efficacy/equivalence.
“Imbalanced Energy Field” is not a valid diagnosis and therapeutic touch is pseudoscience, so why can’t nurses just give it up? “If nurses want to claim that ‘imbalanced energy field’ is a valid diagnosis and therapeutic touch is effective, they must be able to defend it with a plausible mechanism of action and evidence of effectiveness.”
General
We studied how to reduce airborne COVID-19 spread in hospitals. Here’s what we learnt: Reducing the risk of aerosol transmission of COVID-19 is not as complicated as it sounds – outside of specialized negatively pressured infection wards, researchers have found commercially available home air purifiers with HEPA filters were highly effective at reducing aerosols in Melbourne hospitals.
COVID-19 Vaccination Centre: COVID-19 vaccines are designed to help you fight off COVID-19 before it makes you sick and to reduce the severity of your symptoms if you do get sick. Data from the Doherty Institute explains the effectiveness of both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines at reducing your risk of ending up in hospital, an Intensive Care Unit, or dying. Make sure you get two doses to give yourself maximum protection. Evidence suggests that getting vaccinated also reduces the chance of passing the virus to others if you do become infected.
Today’s Abused Health Concept
Professional accreditation. Good Thinking welcomes new Standards from the Professional Standards Authority, and the withdrawal of the Society of Homeopaths: Many non-evidenced health modalities benefit from some kind of professional accreditation. This allows then to stand shoulder to shoulder with other health professionals and claim that they are legitimate. But a professional accreditation is useless if it doesn’t impose meaningful standards. What is the ethical use of a professional if they are able and allowed to pretend anything they like? What is the use of a professional standard if it doesn’t protect the public from harmful practices? Thus we applaud the achievement of the ‘Good Thinking Society’ in the UK. They caused the “Professional Standards Authority” to improve their standards, including a consideration of public benefit, resulting in the withdrawal of the “Society of Homeopaths”.
Michael Marshall said of the decision: “The Society of Homeopaths cited a change in fee structure as the reason for their withdrawal, but in my opinion it would have been very difficult for the Society and their registrants to meet the new Standards – or, indeed, even the old Standards… In our opinion, the accreditation of the Society of Homeopaths had always been inappropriate, given that homeopathy has been comprehensively shown to be ineffective, and given that many of the Society’s registrants routinely made misleading claims regarding the safety of vaccines, the ability of homeopathy to ‘treat’ autism, and much more. Since 2014, those claims often featured alongside a PSA logo, giving the impression to the public that they came from a practitioner of a credible healthcare modality. Thanks to the decision of the Society of Homeopaths to withdraw from the programme, that will no longer be the case.”