In my experience, lots of infections are very effectively treated with herbs, dietary changes, and so forth -- more effectively than with anti-biotics and similar.

Prevention through cultural practices. Older societies frequently have practices like taking your shoes off at the front door and bowing instead of shaking hands. These are generally societies that have had to deal with relatively dense city populations for much longer than most cultures where an epidemic was a serious threat.

In my experience, diet and lifestyle go a long way towards providing protection from disease. As I understand it, study after study after study (for heart disease, cancer, etc) agrees with this conclusion.

This all being the case, we have with scientific methods in order to overcome these annoying biases. None of which are perfect, of course, but they are vastly preferable to, "trust me! it seemed to work for me!"

All of which is to say: show me the evidence. "I got better!" is not convincing.

Cultural practices: Which cultures? When? Was there any evidence that certain diseases were present but did not spread as quickly as in other societies?

Also: let's not move the goalposts. You're absolutely correct that diet and lifestyle have an effect on heart disease risk, and to a lesser extent on cancer (besides the obvious, like smoking), but those are not infectious diseases. And I'm sure there's a protective effect to diet and lifestyle on the capacity of the immune system, but is it anywhere near as effective as vaccination?

Dude, I love to hear other people's subjective experiences. It's data of unknown dimensionality, the most challenging sort, and good input for the synthetic mill. I assign assertions a rough weighting along various axes, and then build out multiple overlapping, often contradictory models of reality. There are branches, revisions, mergers, etc. It's awesome.

Anecdotal data is among the most interesting data to deal with, because the weighting is quite challenging, and because despite all the noise and static, it is here that I most frequently discover something new and revelatory.

Cultural practices:

In Africa, for I believe ebola (see the book "The Hot Zone"), tribal elders barricaded the roads into and out of the area, told their people "do not go to the white man's hospital (because you would go with a broken leg and die of infection) and quarantined sick people to their huts. They would leave food outside the door. If the food stayed there too many days, they burned the hut to the ground without going in to check if anyone was still alive. This finally contained the problem when modern/western/conventional medicine was failing to do so.

Historically in the US, it was common practice to contain the spread of venereal disease by getting the names of all your prior sexual contacts and contacting them to make sure they got treatment if necessary. This went out of fashion with the advent of AIDS, probably because it was in America primarily a disease of gays and IV drug users who had good reason to not want to give up those names. My understanding is this is part of what fueled the search for a vaccine for AIDS.

During the plague in Europe, flea markets were born of a desire to keep traveling sales people and their fleas out of the city to try to prevent the spread of the plague. Farmers would leave their goods by the side of the road and leave a dish filled with vinegar. Buyers would take food and leave coins in the vinegar, to try to kill the infection so the farmers wouldn't catch it.

Cooking is so widespread it is not really viewed as specifically intended to prevent the spread of disease. But undercooked or raw meat is well known to spread infection. Similarly, monogamy is a very widespread cultural value, in part because it helps reduce the spread of disease.

The name "malaria" basically means "bad air". They did not know what caused it but did understand that you got it from visiting the swamps. One practice was to live in the mountains to try to not be exposed to "bad air". Since mosquitoes don't typically go up to higher altitudes, this was somewhat effective in protecting people.

A "gin and tonic" was developed as a means to protect against malaria. Europeans who were living in Africa would drink a gin and tonic nightly in hopes of killing the infection before it was too developed to effectively treat. Similarly, in Europe during the middle ages, it was standard practice to drink alcohol with dinner instead of water because the well water was usually not safe to drink. It was too filled with bacteria.

There are many ways in which cultures prevent the spread of disease using cultural or lifestyle practices in place of drugs and vaccines. Diseases like AIDS have proven so far to be much harder to treat than to avoid getting by just not engaging in certain practices.

As for goalposts, sorry, but my mental model is different from yours. For example, I believe cancer is most likely viral and is thus infectious, though it doesn't spread rapidly like a cold. Human papilloma virus is known to cause cervical cancer and this is why women get annual pap smears -- to test for it. Women who have had more than X number of partners (IIRC, 20 partners) are at increased risk of getting cervical cancer because it is caused by a virus which is hard to catch but is apparently sexually transmissible. Warts and cold sores are also caused by virii and cause "growths" on the body, similar to the way cancer causes tumors. Mulloskum (sp?) is a viral infection which causes growths on the skin similar to skin tags. These growths are described in the literature as "benign tumors".

Diet, certain herbs and supplements, and an eye towards body chemistry can prevent viral infection and/or effectively treat it, something modern medicine generally does a poor job of. So, yes, I believe these things can be not only as effective but more effective than vaccines, antibiotics and other modern drugs.

Ebola outbreaks are very containable by Western medicine - the patients go into a quarantine ward, everyone observes fluid precautions religiously. It's never really made it out of Africa. In addition, traditional funeral rites in many areas exacerbated outbreaks, as they involved touching the dead.

Notification of partners is great for sexually transmitted diseases that are curable, but AIDS wasn't (and still technically isn't, even if sufferers can live long lives with current medical technology).

The plague killed somewhere between one and two thirds of Europe's population, so bringing it up as an example of successful cultural practices is rather baffling. Bubonic plague is entirely treatable by modern medicine, too.

Modern medicine fully endorses cooking food.

Malaria has been eradicated in the developed world by modern medicine, and modern technology has additionally made water safe to drink without needing to add ethanol to it.

> Diet, certain herbs and supplements, and an eye towards body chemistry can prevent viral infection and/or effectively treat it, something modern medicine generally does a poor job of.

Vaccination has done a great job of eradicating polio, smallpox, measles, and others. I eagerly await a list of diseases eradicated from the world via diet, herbs, and body chemistry.

And why deliberately make your kids sick, when you could just get them vaccinated, with far lower risk of death and injury? http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/decline-chickenpox-d...

I stopped getting annual flu vaccines as an adult. Frequent vaccines are very common for people with cystic fibrosis (which is what I have). People with CF get sicker and sicker until they die. It is a slow, torturous gruesome thing. For me, it became apparent that drugs and vaccines were causing me harm and contributing to my decline. I worked hard to get off the drugs and I stopped getting vaccines. I am drug free. The hole in my lung has closed. I am getting my life back. Doctors told me "People like you don't get well. Symptom management is the name of the game."

For me, there came a point where I had a clear choice between the certain path of doom and the risky path of maybe getting better. I was so miserable, death would have been a welcome alternative to the future ahead of me. I felt it was win/win: Either do something really stupid and die quickly or gradually get better. Both options held more appeal for me than what doctors and all the world were promising me.

I can't recall the last time I had a cold. And I routinely nip infection in the bud when exposed to a sick person at work, without having to rely on antibiotics and other conventional drugs. So while I understand your skepticism and don't really expect to win you over, I'm not going to be won over by your view either.

Hardly. Many vaccines are made up of dead virus particles. A dead virus cannot cause disease. It causes an immune response, but immune responses are not diseases.

Tree pollen triggers an immune response in me, but that doesn't mean I'm getting a disease every spring.

Because even though you aren't symptomatic from the flu due to a strong immune system, you are still likely a carrier.

Peace.

Peace and best wishes.

That sounds like your case, but bear in mind that you'll be relying on herd immunity, so you should be encouraging people to get vaccinated. If your health is that bad, I doubt you'll be very happy if you do catch something like chickenpox or whooping cough.

Sorry, maybe I'm missing something here, but what's the precise difference between that and vaccination?

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/thimerosal/thimero...

> No, measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines do not and never did contain thimerosal. Varicella (chickenpox), inactivated polio (IPV), and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines have also never contained thimerosal.

Additionally, you get more mercury from breathing in pollution from coal burning power plants than you ever will from vaccinations.

Up here in the northern EU, where there's really no discernible anti-vaccination movement, chicken pox isn't usually vaccinated against, since it's a very harmless disease when undergone at the correct age (2-13 or so?). The vaccination obviously exists, and I think it's sometimes recommended for people – particularly women – who have not had the pox in their childhood. I recall having intentionally been sent to play at a friend's house when he had it, and then ensuring my brother also contracted it. The idea isn't particularly revolutionary.

I'm not sure whether your cultural examples really derive from disease avoidance (for example, I don't wear shoes indoors because it's simply not necessary for foot protection), but I suppose they could be – at least in that societies with such customs could have been more likely to make it through epidemics.

I'd also worry about the youngish trend of ultrahygiene. Trying to disinfect everything and using antibiotics willy-nilly is counterproductive, especially for children who can't exercise their immunity by eating dirt every now and then. The best protection against disease is a good immune system.

I realize it's not. It's quite old fashioned. Just trying my best to answer the question someone asked me.

I'm about to get offline as I need my rest.

Later.