The midwife paid a fine and is barred from accessing the state’s vaccine records system.
A midwife in New York administered nearly 12,500 bogus homeopathic pellets to roughly 1,500 children in lieu of providing standard, life-saving vaccines, the New York State Department of Health reported yesterday.
Jeanette Breen, a licensed midwife who operated Baldwin Midwifery in Nassau County, began providing the oral pellets to children around the start of the 2019–2020 school year, just three months after the state eliminated non-medical exemptions for standard school immunizations. She obtained the pellets from a homeopath outside New York and sold them as a series called the “Real Immunity Homeoprophylaxis Program.”
The program falsely claimed to protect children against deadly infectious diseases covered by standard vaccination schedules, including diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (covered by the DTaP or Tdap vaccine); hepatitis B; measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine); polio; chickenpox; meningococcal disease; Haemophilus influenzae disease (HiB); and pneumococcal diseases (PCV).
Homeopathy is a pseudoscience that falsely claims that medical conditions can be cured or prevented by extreme, ritualized dilutions of poisonous substances that cause the same symptoms of a particular disease or condition when administered directly. Homeopathic products are often diluted to such a point that they do not contain a single atom of the original substance. Some homeopaths claim that water molecules can have a “memory” of their contact with the substance, magically imbuing them with healing powers. Homeopathic products work no better than placebos, though if they are improperly diluted, they can be harmful and even deadly.
The placebo effect is strong, so strong it can confound a double blind study. Having someone who actually listens to your medical complaint and provides sympathy can have a positive influence on recovery. Neither is “real medicine” but for a lot of people it’s supportive of the natural healing process (people usually to get better over time without intervention) and if it’s harmless that’s fine.
The problems start when people replace real medicine with alternative care and particularly for illnesses that don’t get better on their own, like cancer or vaccine preventable illness.
Go to a doctor: I got thirty seconds, you talk, nearly naked, while I read the answers of questions asked you by the CNA. Ok got it. Let me conduct a test. Done. Here is your script.
So like am I going to die? Oh you already left.
Go to a fake-doctor: take all the time you need, clearly you are terrified that something is very wrong and WebMD scared the shit out of you. I will practice active listening while you speak, afterwards I will give you a placebo that doesn’t do anything bad and a massage. Make sure to come back once a week for twenty years.
I don’t blame doctors and I want to make this clear. They are under a lot of pressure to churn out patients. The unfortunate result of the system is that fake-doctors can thrive due to having the ability to develop a bedside manner. I don’t have a solution to this problem.