Kudos to letter writer Debbie Williams for taking Mr. Fletcher to task on his antediluvian attitudes (“Article is stone-aged, head-in-the-sand,” Jan. 30).
One does well to question a newspaper that can’t yet spell the word “hippie” (“hippy” means broad in the hips).
Mr. Fletcher appears uninformed to speak about the 21st century, where the frontiers of mind/body science are being pushed back daily. See the recent Globe and Mail article “Treating the brain and the immune system in tandem” (online); also the link between spirituality and health in the Globe’s 2014 article “Reclaiming medicine’s spiritual roots: Treating people, not just diseases” (online).
Regarding vaccination, there are two sides to the question (otherwise why would a U.S. gov’t agency like VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System] exist, that receives 30,000 reports per year, and it is estimated that not even one in 100 adverse events are reported by doctors; or the [U.S.] National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) that annually pays out millions of dollars in claims to those who have been injured (lifelong, some of them; or to surviving families of children).
This latter agency was created because so many people were suing vaccine manufacturers for damages that the companies were refusing to keep making vaccines. Neutral information can be obtained from the National Vaccine Information Centre (www.nvic.org).
These are subjects for dialogue and learning rather than fundamentalist attitudes.
Neall Calvert
Editor’s Note: Our dictionary defines Hippy as, among other things:
“hippy 1
noun & adjective
variant spelling of hippie.”