By Julie Stachowiak, PhD
Multiple Sclerosis Guide; Guest blogger
I have always been amazed at the "magical thinking" or "fuzzy logic" that people have (and feel compelled to talk about) around health matters. You know what I am referring to - the people that justify smoking because some smoker uncle lived to be 92 or the people that refuse to take medicine because they "don't want to put that stuff in their bodies," yet they regularly wash down Big Macs with cheap beer.
With an infectious disease epidemic like H1N1 that has been in the news and has everyone talking, you get to hear a whole lot of these interesting opinions. Often, there is also quite a bit of emotion behind the proclamations of an individual's latest theory about the virus or their justifications to avoid vaccination.
Many of us see these ebbs and flows of feelings within ourselves, as well. From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to get my children vaccinated as soon as possible, but I really wanted to wait for the injectible vaccine to be available. I have multiple sclerosis and wanted to avoid even the very miniscule chance that I might get infected from some live virus shed after the nasal mist version. Blogging about H1N1 and reading about all of the tragic deaths of small children kept it in the front of my mind, but I thought, "surely it won't be long before the shots come."
Then a coworker in another city called me to tell me that a child in his son's gymnastics class had died. My girls got the nasal mist version of the vaccine the next day. At some point, the stress of thinking about them being unvaccinated even one more hour outweighed the stress of worrying about possible infection in myself.
The recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Emotional Epidemiology of H1N1 Vaccination, explores the other prevalent phenomenon - people who were desperate to get the vaccine a couple of months ago are now shunning it as it becomes available. The author, Dr. Ofri, correctly points out that emotions guide much of our health-related behavior (much to the frustration of researchers and physicians) and that these feelings need to be taken into account as we try to strategize ways of coping with epidemics.
It's an interesting article and might be an eye-opener as to why loved ones (or yourself) have yet to be vaccinated.
