I’m one of those non-vaccinating mothers.

(*If you came here from the Editor's Pick page, please note: my kids ARE now vaccinated. Not sure how to point that out to the editors, though...)

In 2004, my 1 ½-year-old son had no immunizations at all and my three-year-old daughter had one round of the basics, which included the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine. As we unpacked our stuff in our new digs, a kid from down the street came to see us. He had a pretty bad cough. Soon, our kids were coughing, too, on the tail end of a visit back East to see their uncle and aunt and new baby cousin. It was a cough like none I’d ever heard: loud, barking, intense, leaving the child breathless and almost always (in the case of my son) leading to vomiting. My daughter’s cough wasn’t as bad. Off to the doctor we went, and sure enough, they had pertussis.

Pertussis is sometimes called the “ninety-day cough,” and for just about ninety days, my son coughed himself blue and vomited on everything we owned. The daughter got better much more quickly, likely due to being older and bigger. Maybe having had one round of the vaccine had something to do with it.

I thanked God over and over that my brother had decided to vaccinate his child against pertussis, because if that baby had caught it from my children, his five-month-old body might have succumbed to it entirely. I did load after load after load of pukey laundry. And as soon as he got better, I took him and his sister to the doctor to catch up on their shots – not every one, but the ones most kids have gotten since I was a kid.

One reason we decided to avoid vaccinations was because we believed that there might be a link between those shots and risk of autism spectrum disorders. So it’s with much interest that I observe the kerfuffle over Jenny McCarthy and her insistence that vaccinations cause autism despite the vast number of scientific studies that debunk this notion. When challenged by this scientific evidence, which by now has been gleaned in hundreds of different ways and synthesized many times in review studies and meta-analyses, Jenny has famously said, “My child is my science!”

Like Jenny, most of us don’t decide what is true based on hypotheses that we rigorously test--on Real Science. We decide what we believe based on a combination of personal experience and exposure to life circumstances. In Google Universe, it’s plenty easy to mine out the so-called Scientific Health Information that will back up what we already believe. It’s easy to find the articles, web sites, books and television shows that will prop us up in what we think is true; that will build our case against those other guys; that will once and for all seal the deal of our rightness. And like the lovely, good-hearted Jenny, we all know people whom we can hold up as examples to support the beliefs we probably initially learned from our parents or other aspects of our early lives.

When I refer to Real Science in the realm of health, I refer to the kind that’s dry and boring, that’s published in scientific journals and uses jargon and statistics-speak that can’t be grasped by anyone who hasn’t studied statistics at at least the college level. This kind of Real Science involves rigorous testing of a hypothesis without any vested interest in the outcome. Ideally, it’s not about being proven right—although I’m sure that even the egg-headiest scientist gets excited when his hypothesis proves correct—but about furthering human knowledge in the most unbiased way possible. Great pains are taken in most scientific health research to remove as much bias as possible. It never disappears entirely, but we certainly can trust the conclusions of hundreds of medical research studies more than we can trust one woman’s experience with her own child, whose experience of autism was atypical (he also had a life-threatening seizure disorder...yes, I read Jenny's first book, and loved it).

Real Science is not nearly as entertaining as  Jenny science, just like  C-SPAN isn’t as entertaining as The Daily Show. But if you really want to know what’s most likely to be true, and if you’re willing to do without the drama, the showmanship, and the occasional buxom blond ex-Playboy bunny/B movie actress (sorry, Jenny, I couldn’t resist), it’s the best place to draw conclusions about what makes people healthier and what makes them sick. NPR Health and the New York Times Health section are good places to find intelligent translations of Real Science that are relevant to the average person's daily life. When you do research on a particular topic, avoid sources that deal in drama. Avoid revolutionary findings, hot controversies or conspiracy theories. Read the stuff that sorta might kinda put you to sleep.

Telling people to avoid vaccination because of the risk of injury  to children seems absurd, considering that many, MANY times more children die and are injured in car accidents than by vaccines. We'd have a far more beneficial impact on child health in this country if we stopped  driving them around in cars. But when it's N=1 -- that's what "My child is my science!" is, a study involving a single subject (the child) and the subjective biases and beliefs of the researcher who also happens to be his mother--it's hard to consider anything but the child who is yours to care for.

My own experience is no exception. We chose to delay vaccination. We got whooping cough. The kids made it through okay. I can't use that experience to give anyone else advice about what is best for them. Herd immunity--from fellow parents who chose to immunize their children--is a likely factor in protecting my kids from unpleasant illnesses that would be unlikely to kill them, but that would make them very sick. If anyone hears me generalizing this experience to others for the sake of defending my choices or giving advice, please smack me upside the head with a hardcover copy of any one of Jenny McCarthy's books. 

Real Science can look at the big picture. Pseudoscience can't. Be careful out there in Google Universe.