What's you dog like at the vet?

[Spyglass Sally]

Originally Posted by Ruby Red

I agree about us being locked into paradigms Sally. I sometimes think I am too, lol. Raw feeding, no vacs, no flea/worm treatments.............I think some people must think I am very locked in my ideas too!

Yes, we can't really help having paradigms. Generally they serve us and keep us from having to evaluate everything from scratch. We unconsciously realize which belief paradigm (politics, health, etc) we want to evaluate the information in and then we can pretty rapidly decide if we think it might be true, not true, or how we can start to evaluate it.

What's disappointing to me is that she wasn't able to realize that you had a very good point about titers and Ruby's immunity, and your question about people "catching" diseases like distemper from dogs. Her paradigm was being challenged and she had no response so she shut you out.

I used to be pro-vaccines until someone challenged my paradigm. Although he was a D.C. I respected very much, I remember saying "I'm sure you're wrong about this." because it was inconceivable to me that, for example, the polio vaccine wasn't what was responsible for the decline in polio. (For those who still believe this, see Fig. 4, page 4)

So a couple of weeks later he & his wife invited me to come hear a vaccine expert talk and even though I really didn't want to go (in another city, at night, and besides - I "knew" they were wrong) I thought it would be intellectually dishonest to not at least hear their side of it.

Man was I glad I did. The speaker quoted Center for Disease Control studies, peer reviewed medical journal articles and evidence there was no way I could refute and I drove home wondering why in the world I had never heard this before. It was really hard to admit I was wrong, but the evidence was so strong.

So I'm thinking that if you come up to this lady with very good points and she doesn't even know what titers are, but she's ready to dismiss it, I find that really discouraging.

But, to be fair, she's undoubtedly someone who loves dogs and cares about pet therapy, and not really there to discuss something on this level. Hopefully you planted a seed that she might think about and bring it up with other people there. Some good may come of it yet.