If you're one of those who are against giving kids any kind of immunization, would you change your mind if Small Pox had made a resurgence and was going around?

just as an aside: i don’t think smallpox is extinct. i think there is some locked up at the CDC and also it is believed that it’s in the Middle East. I read an article on it a few years ago (about 8 years ago actually) in the New Yorker. It’s probably not on the internet, going that far back, but it was very interesting – what would happen if you got it. You’d bleed from all the holes in your body, for one.

Yep. Wicked, wicked stuff.

Just for clarification, there really is no effective vaccine for TB since the current version, known as BCG, does not protect adults from contracting TB or developing active disease.

I would hope most adults had the vaccination as a child that would protect them.

I think more than a few of the anti-immunization idiots are in for a rude awakening when their child dies from an easily preventable disease, let alone small pox coming back.

the article in the new yorker said that it would take some time for the CDC to make enough vaccines for everyone, and in the meantime, one person would infect every person they came in contact with, and they in turn would infect every person they came in contact with, and by the time the CDC put out their vaccines the hospitals would be inundated with sick people, dying people. it was a very bleak sounding article.

Small pox I would definitely vaccinate. TB does have a vaccine and the US has decided not to give it (which is shocking when you consider how vaccine oriented we are). The tests we do to detect TB does not work on people who get the vaccine, because they always turn up positive (can be false positive or actually positive) having been exposed to the vaccination. You would be amazed how many people are positive for exposure to TB.

@Val123 Few vaccines give you a lifelong immunity. Or, even full protection for that matter.

Always get a titer before you revaccinate.

@JLeslie Sorry, there really is no vaccine for TB. BCG is ineffective, and only protects against TB meningitis in children. Thus, in endemic areas (India, China, Eastern Europe), it makes sense to vaccinate. In areas where homegrown TB is rare (US and Western Europe), it doesn’t.

@shilolo oh, thanks for clarifing that.

Just for the record the Swine Flu H1N1 virus has the potential to quickly become as dangerous as the two known smallpox virus variants. If the current H1N1 critter mutates into a real killer, I’m sure 98% of all people belonging to the anti-vaccine movement would become desperate to get their names and the names of their kids onto the waiting lists which will grow very fast and we would see widespread 24h vaccination efforts. I admit this is a worst case scenario, but in 2003 no one in Asia thought it would be necessary to have a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean (scientists warned governments since mid last century).

I fear that only a Spanish Flu type pandemic in the 21st century will change people’s mind. The willingness to get the H1N1 vaccination now is extremely disappointing. In Germany the governments fears that only 10–15% will do it and this gives the virus a lot of hosts with a lot of playground. Maybe some anti-vaccine advocates have the irrational hope that the creationists are right and there is no such thing as evolution. The Creator would certainly design the current H1N1 strain to stay the way it is right: very contagious, but not very deadly. We are all saved. Are we?

I asked this same question last night on a different site, a site that involves many mothers who delay or don’t vaccinate. Only one said she would definitely get the vaccine, another said “never say never” and two others said that they wouldn’t take their children to be vaxed

This all changes if two or more kids in this group of mothers actually die, and of course we all hope that it’ll never come to that. It’s a very sad fact that these mothers are victims of irresponsible people who hold a minority scientific view, in this case bordering on pseudoscience. Vaccines don’t cause autism. People are not abducted by aliens. You cannot cure AIDS by having sex with a virgin.

Why doesn’t anybody wonder why the World Health Organization (WHO) or the CDC engage in a widespread public information campaign warning people against vaccinations? Do these mothers seriously believe that the WHO and the CDC employs the most stupid and uneducated scientists? Why do they trust their eloquent quacksalvers more than their health officials? Yes, vaccinations do have side effects. But the whole thing is about benefits versus risks. This doesn’t seem to bother the followers of New Age cults. They certainly trust their astrologers more than the guy with a Ph.D. who works at the CDC and would never go to a website like

http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/vaccination/public/vaccination_qa_pub.htm

which give a very clear answer to this very question:

Are natural remedies (also referred to as “complementary” or “alternative” medicine) recommended to prevent the 2009 H1N1 flu virus?

The first and most important step to prevent the flu is to get vaccinated. Vaccination stimulates an immune response using a killed or weakened virus that uses the body’s own defense mechanisms to prevent infection.

As far as I’m concerned, this is natural selection in action. Choose not to vaccinate, suffer consequences….

@mattbrowne That’s the amazing rub about the 21st century. People like the idea of scientists and science. However, somehow they then don’t trust the scientific results and/or the scientists to advise them of what to do. I find it stunning that as complex as science is today, people feel that their intuition is preferable to the advice of knowledgeable experts who have spent their entire lives studying the problem at hand.

@shilolo – Yes, I’ve just finished reading the book “Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time” by Michael Shermer (with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould). It’s a great book. It tries to explain why for some people their intuition is preferable to the advice of knowledgeable experts. And of course he also comes up with interesting explanations why some people really think there were abducted by aliens, linking this to extreme sleep deprivation for example.

I think scientists need to do more to understand the inner workings of New Age cults and come up with good strategies. One thing that was really missing during the H1N1 vaccine debate in Germany is: emotions. It’s not good enough to convey scientific knowledge robot style. There was one debate in a talk show I watched 2 weeks ago or so. None of the vaccine experts became emotional. Just cool rational talk. Which is okay as such, but it’s not enough. And there was this one woman (I wonder why more women are anti-vaccine!?) and she used some (biased) scientific talk but lots of emotions. She really pleaded and asked the audience not to make this grave mistake of supporting the vaccination effort (which by the way was a plot to increase profits for the pharmaceutical companies). The media of course wanted to appear balanced. Gee, watching this really blew my mind. At the end of the show the moderator asked the audience in the studio whether they would get vaccinated. There were about 100 people. Believe it or not, 3 people raised their arm. I was stunned.

I got my shot yesterday. I’m alive and kicking. I’m denying the virus one host to try anything stupid like mutating into a more deadly strain. But there are plenty of hosts still out there. It’s showtime.

@shilolo and @mattbrowne I question science sometimes because we have examples of scientists saying something is true later for it to be proven false. And as far as medicine goes I personally have trouble trusting doctors because they have failed me and people close to me so many times. Even still I value their knowledge, education and experience, but I question. Sometimes I feel like doctors do not question enough. If an authority tells them it is ok they follow along with whatever the recommendation is. All sorts of mistakes are made in medicine and when you have been burned a couple of times or feel like you are not being heard you start feeling like it is hard to trust. I am not talking about just being annoyed at a doctor who couldn’t help, I mean real mistakes.

Of course this does not explain believing in people who have absolutely no scientific evidence at all. That is a whole other story.

@JLeslie What are you talking about, no TB vaccination? I have one, and I’m getting another TB test today so I can start teaching again….do you have a cite? And what is a “titer”?????

@casheroo I don’t think you had to whisper on that one! You actually had a Mom say that even if the highly contagious and deadly small pox was going around she wouldn’t have her kids vaccinated?? Did you send her some pics of small pox victims who actually lived?

@JLeslie Science never proclaims, beyond a doubt, that something is true. Their statements are more along the lines of, “The evidence seems to show XXXX…... And that may be because of YYYYY”
And I too tend to trust my own judgment over those of individual doctors. But that’s when dealing with human individuals with their own opinions. It’s not quite the same as “science” overall.

@Val123 Most of them seem to say it depends on the disease (and I did specify small pox, I used your question) They seem to say it would depend on the course of treatment, and “technology’s ability to deal with it” More are posting, and saying they’d up the precaution measurements. One is saying “I would certainly be more cautious, but I wouldn’t take my non-vax’d kids to get vax’d if there was an “outbreak” of anything. They don’t even know what the cause of death is in small pox cases.” (am I allowed to post that here? I think I am.) there’s more to her response about small pox, but she doesn’t seem to fear it.

@Val123 You are going to get a test to see if you have been exposed to TB (probably called a ppd or tst) not a vaccination. That is why you have to come back in a coupleof days to have it read. If you come up positive they will make you get a chest xray, if the xray is negative you are not actively sick and not contagious.

As @shilolo pointed out there is no TB vaccination (I had been mistaken on this), just a vacination for TB meningitis in children, we do not give that vaccine in the US.

@casheroo Wow. Some people. Well, they don’t know what causes death in a lot of things, but it does, so what does she think that has to do with anything? In hemorrhagic small pox, hemorrhaging out causes death in 100% of the cases. Crazy. They’re basically saying, “I’d rather expose my child to a 30 to 100% chance of death, and horrible disfigurement if they do live, than vaccinate them.”

The thing is with small pox ( @shilolo please correct me if I am wrong) something like 30% of the people who get infected die and it is highly contagious. Not all diseases are alike. Measles is VERY contagious, so if someone gets it and you are anywhere near them you are likely to get it, very likely. TB less likely. So some diseases are more urgent to prevent than others not only for the good of the individual, but for the good of society.

@JLeslie I agree! There is one form of small pox called hemorrhagic small pox that is virtually 100% fatal…..like that disease that was coming out of Africa that caused all of it’s victims to bleed out. As for the other poxes, yes, 30% is what they said.

@casheroo A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. This notion that because you are a parent, therefore you know better than the public health officials and scientists is ludicrous. Public health is about protecting the public. Sometimes that means doing unpleasant things (like quarantines and mass vaccination, though the later is not unpleasant in my opinion) in the interest of the public health. Yet, as I said, if it weren’t for the fact that not vaccinating provides an unvaccinated reservoir that allows for the spread of disease, I quite frankly wouldn’t care. If someone suffers a bad outcome from their poor decision, that’s their fault, and I really have zero sympathy for them (though I do have a tremendous amount of sympathy for the kids who have no control in the matter). What makes me angry is the outright selfishness on the part of the non-vaccinating crowd and the failure to understand the repercussions of their actions on society as a whole.

@Val123 The thing about the TB vaccine that should be clarified is that there is no highly effective TB vaccine. BCG has very modest benefits. Thus, it is only used in areas where TB is endemic, since the benefits there outweigh the risks and downsides. See my quips above as well for more info.

@shilolo So how come TB isn’t the problem today that it used to be?

@Val123 What do you mean? It is a huge problem everywhere other than Western countries. It is the #1 bacterial cause of death worldwide, kills 2–3 million people every year and causes ~10 million new cases of active disease. 2 billion people are latently infected (i.e. carriers). We now have multidrug resistant (MDR-TB) and extremely drug resistant TB (XDR-TB) that has 100% mortality.

As for why it isn’t such a big problem in Western countries, we can thank public health: quarantines, diagnosis, outbreak investigations, effective treatment (directly observed therapy), treatment of latently infected individuals, good housing with ventilation, etc.

@shilolo O.

@Val123 I personally have a close relative and a close friend who are positive for TB exposure and I know three coworkers who are positive and many of our patients at the psych hospital I work at are positive. If someone comes up with a positive xray they are whisked away to be separated from the population. Oh, I forgot my neighbors mother had TB when she was much younger, I think they said it is healed over though.

You know what else I love about @casheroo‘s answer regarding the anti-vaccine crowd? Some (apparantly) don’t want the vaccine to prevent illness, but will immediately turn to medicine/science/technology to cure the same illness that could have been prevented in the first place. So, “it depends on technology’s ability to deal with it….” means, “I don’t want a vaccine, but certainly I DO WANT the sophisticated antibiotics or antivirals and the ICU level care with its ventilators, dialysis machines, blood pressure support, blood transfusions, etc.” What a crock of shit!

@shilolo you sound a little pissed. :) I don’t understand why we have not done a study where we vaccinate 6 months to a year later and see if autism sets in later? Wouldn’t this help prove or disprove a vaccine relationship? The argument is that autism symptoms shows up around 18 months I think, and that is why mothers related it to the time of certain vaccinations. Some mother observed extreme changes in their children. I have to say I do believe that something might be happening due to the vaccinations, but I am not convinced it is the mercury.

I think if I had a child I would be slower to vaccinate, but would get the majority of them in, especially measles, tetanus, polio, and some others. I cannot see the point of hepatitus B for a baby? Maybe you can enlighten me on that one?

@JLeslie Sorry, I’ve already broken my own promise to not discuss medicine here any more. I thought this was somewhat of a meta discussion, but I see it has morphed into something else.

Also, quite frankly, I am pissed. For many people to turn their backs on some of the greatest achievements in modern medicine is beyond me, and in the long run hurts their kids and society on the whole. I’m not vindictive, but I wish I could take the anti-vaccine people through the pediatric ward to see the consequences of meningitis, pneumonia, disseminated zoster (chicken pox), etc., all of which is preventable.

@shilolo You didn’t have to say sorry, I was just acknowledging your frustration. I hate to hear you will not discuss medicine. You are such a wonderful assett to fluther because of your medical background and your willingness to help and share. It is rare to find a doctor who will talk things through, be willing to argue with us lay people. Doctors like you make it possible for me to go to the next doctor when I am sick. It is actually quite upseting to me as I write this. Generally, I feel very apprehensive when I go to the doctor, I many times avoid going. If it were not for doctors like you who are willing to take the time to answer questions and tolerate my fears I would probably never go to the doctor. It is the few special ones that help me keep my sanity. I guess maybe people like me drive some doctors insane. They feel we are challening them, but I am not in my mind challenging the doctor, I want information to make sure what they are saying makes sense with what I am saying.

I just went to 5 doctors for a problem I have, in the past it would have taken me 2 years to see five doctors, but I went every couple of weeks trying to find one who understood what I was describing and might be able to diagnose me. I did everything the doctors said, took all of the medications they said, 5 different ones none of which I thought made sense, but I decided to trust them because I was not sure myself what to think. I still have the problem. By the way the last doctor was able to visually see what I was talking about when he scoped me, one other doctor scoped me and did not see it. It was Hearkat actually who helped me narrow down the part of the body I was talking about and be able to describe it to the doctor. If not for her I don’t think I would have been able to describe it correctly so it could be observed.

@shilolo I do hope you know I’ve been quoting people, and those are not my views.

@casheroo Yes, I am aware of that. They are views I’ve heard before, so I’m not surprised.

@shilolo You have some great thoughts. Thank you…

@JLeslie By the way, the relationship of vaccination to autism study could not be done today because it would be unethical to be randomized to the unvaccinated arm of the study.

@shilolo Yes, I understand we could not do a double blind, which is what is required for a valid study in most cases, but we could do a study that delayed vaccinations and watch that group over time. I bet it would be easy to get thousands of moms to participate, we could require that the children not be children in daycare to reduce the risk to society. At minimum we could have moms who are not vaccinating sign into a registry to see if their children develop autism (or maybe someone is tracking that some how already?). As long as we continue to vaccinate at he same age that is in question and avoid studies for ethical reasons we will never have the answer. Antidotal evidence would have some meaning I think.

When my father left the PHS they were starting a study about drugs used for ADD because up until then there had not been many, maybe any, studies done on the medication in children (although they are often prescribed for children) for ethical reasons, but how can it be ethical to give the drugs without the studies? I ask rhetorically. It is a catch-22.

@JLeslie – Earlier you said “I question science sometimes because we have examples of scientists saying something is true later for it to be proven false. And as far as medicine goes I personally have trouble trusting doctors because they have failed me and people close to me so many times”

Science should be questioned all the time. It’s the very nature of science. The problem begins if some people don’t like some of the answers. And there are many cases which later turn out to still be true. There really is a majority view of virologists about the destructive potential of H1N1 (also H5N1 which at the moment doesn’t seem to spread from human to human). So if the anti-vaccine mothers talk to, say 2 experts holding a minority view and avoid talking to representatives of the majority altogether the approach is problematic. And yes, some doctors cannot be fully trusted, but their failures should be no reason to doubt the majority of virologists and medical experts from the WTO and the CDC. Besides, even if the opinions would be split, say 50/50, the precautionary principle applies.

@mattbrowne I 100% agree. I think my difficulty with doctors is since I am the type that wants to know all of the information, some doctors don’t want to take the time to explain, they want me to just trust they are right. I really am not that bad of a patient. I don’t call all of the time, or make ridiculous demands, I just want my questions answered and to be heard. I don’t walk in with a bunch of crap from the internet believing it is the gospel, I know better, My favorite doctors seem to treat the doctor patient relationship as a partnership, where we are both aiming for the same goal, my health.

Here are three examples without all of the details of things that have happened to people in my family:

1. my father was prescribed Propulsid and Sporonox at the same time. Black box warning against this, can kill you. Prescribed by the same doctor, he probably prescribes propulsid 20 times a week, he should knwo deadly combinations in my mind.

2. My mother was unable to control her blood pressure for a couple of days after her last colonscopy. Her doctor didn’t seem to care. I hypothesized that it must be the electrolytes in the drug, and indeed when we looked up the drug there is a warning about taking it with medication she takes for blood pressure. This doctor prescribes the same drug every day to many patients. She already had one bad experience.

3. My father had bypass surgery at 46, they wanted to use a mammary artery but his were too blocked, bad genes, stuff blocking up his arteries all over his body it seemed. After surgery he went for his regular cardiac and GP appontments for years. About 12 years post surgery he got a new doctor and for the first time, first time they listened to his neck. We now know they should havebeen doing this all along. Within weeks he was on the table and they wound up having to completely tie off a corotid artery on one side because it was 90% occluded. He was lucky that the system for carrying blood from one side of the brain to the other works perfectly in him, which is not true for much of the population.

I could go on and on.

I’m sorry, those are all inexcusable to me. Makes me feel like I have to be on my toes and questions, and take care of myself, and it is extremely stressful to not be confident that you can rely on your doctor.

I do not expect doctors to know everything or to be Gods. I understand medical science does not know everything, that there is much unknown. But, I don’t want a doctor annoyed at me when I was flippin’ right. Why is my mother’s doctor not opening up the GD PDR when she describes her concerns? I did not even need the PDR to guess what might be affecting her blood pressure, certainly a doctor should be able to easily draw a similar conclusion.

Thanks for listening to my rant, I get wound up :).

@JLeslie It’s horribly frustrating when your Doctor doesn’t seem to want to use either his or her common sense OR their training. Been there, done that.

And about the moms who don’t want to vaccinate. I think they see it as if something happens to their child because of the vaccine they will have to live the idea that they CHOSE to vaccinate their child, even after being warned. If the child gets sick, then something beyond their control got them sick. They are willing to play the odds. I’m not saying it is rational. I think it is ok to roll the dice on some things, and not on others, but like @mattbrowne said you have to be open to all of the information, not just listen to what you want to hear.

@Val123 Thanks.

We experienced a paradigm shift between 1970 and 1990. I think this occurred both in Western Europe and North America. In the past it was mostly a “master-subordinate relationship” which later progressed as @JLeslie pointed out to a “doctor-patient partnership”. Diabetes is a good example. In most cases this is a manageable disease, but only if the patient fully understands it. Eventually doctors began to realize that instead of telling diabetics exactly what to do the overall results (e.g. measured by HbA1c levels) are much better if their patients understand the disease. The doctor provides the overall guidelines, makes some recommendations especially when the results are not so good, but in principles most decisions are made by the diabetics themselves.

Now some of the (older) doctors really got a (ego) problem with this approach. In particular they don’t like their patients to question them. On the other hand there are also some of the (older) patients who prefer not to understand the disease and rather have the doctor tell them exactly what to do.

Widespread access to all kinds of information especially on the web accelerated the general paradigm shift. The master-subordinate-model doctors are a dying species. It still remember them. In the 1970ies they were quite common. Today I totally avoid them, but there are not that many anyway I think. Or maybe it’s easier when you don’t live in rural areas. In Germany there are only very few extremely rural areas, at least nothing that could be compared to large parts of Kansas or even Wyoming.

I live in a small town (in Germany it’s actually called a village) population 6000. There are several general practitioners and also dentists. The next larger town in 8 miles away, population 60,000. There you can even choose between several medical specialists. In the greater area of Frankfurt with a radius of about 40 miles live more than 3 million people. There are dozens of hospitals, special clinics, more medical specialists and so forth. Our health insurance system allows you to choose all your doctors. I really do trust my general practitioner. He’s never let me down. Almost all his recommendations for medical specialists were great. And if not, I told him next time and he said, okay, how about you go see this one next time if need be. What also helps are recommendations from other patients. Word of mouth is powerful. My wife was really not satisfied with her dentists. In the meantime she found a better one.

@mattbrowne Funny you mention diabetes, I complain quite often that I am “jealous” of diabetics, because they get to know their test results and the rest of us are at the the mercy of the system. We have to wait for the doctor to review the bloodwork and then wait for the nurse to call us (although I am learning that in some places you can look it up on-line once the doctor releases it).

When I was in my late teens I had a medical incident, I won’t bother you with the details, and my primary doctor at the time sent me to a specialist. I did not agree with or like his assessment and recommendation, which involved surgery. I spoke to my primary and she sent me to another specialty. This doctor was not keen on the first doctors recommendation as a treatment to try first, not that he ruled it out in the future. This new specialist, who was Infectious Disease was a life changing doctor for me. He communicated very well, explained to me a mistake I had made in the past that was possibly contributing to my innability to get cured, and prescribed medication. His medicine did the trick. I hope @shilolo is still reading, because this doctor is the very reason I appreciate @shilolo so much and other doctors on here. The ID doctor I saw in this example, like fluther doctors, was willing to listen to me, asked questions, figured out where I was mistaken, and where I made sense, and came up with a new course of action.

The primary doctor in my example spoiled me. I don’t know if she agreed with me when she sent me to a second specialist, but she was willing to entertain my hesitation and not be dismissive. I recently went to 3 specialist for a problem I am having and only one could visually see what I am complaining about through a scope, but his communications skills do not gel with mine, he is ery hesitant to share information. I have tried all treatments he has recommended and nothing has worked. I called my primary with some thoughts I had about going to a different specialty, and told her that I am not clear on exactly what the doctor thinks he sees, if it is swelling or just red or what? She said she would not contact the doctor, because she doesn’t know him and doesn’t have a relationship with him. WTF does that have to do with anything? I read his notes and I do not feel they answer my question, so looking at the chart will not help.

about a year ago i got Guillain Barre Syndrome. I did not know what the tingling in my legs was, and the extreme weakness. I went to the local E.R. – a very good hospital where my daughter had been born the year before. Even though the doctor asked to see me walk and i got off the gurney and fell on the floor right in front of him, he did no x-ray, no CAT scan, no blood work. he sent me home with a cane, two prescriptions and told me to stay home from work for 3 days. He diagnosed sprained calf muscles. Long story short, after getting weaker and weaker i fell getting out of the shower and got stuck in there, had to crawl out, could not pull myself onto the bed and had to call a friend to help lift me on to the bed. he took me to another ER where they did blood work, CAT scan and spinal tap and diagnosed Guillain Barre Syndrome (after a neurologist did the nerve test to confirm the next day). One month in the hospital later, after 3 weeks of intensive physical rehab, i left newly cynical about doctors.

Also found out while there and researching the rare illness that is Guillain Barre Syndrome that after the Swine Flu outbreak of 1976, there was a Guillain Barre Syndrome outbreak. It is believed that it is due to something in the Swine Flu vaccine (the preservative, maybe). So i have been cautioned against getting vaccines in the future.

I’m sure the CDC did not think the vaccine they were giving out in 1976 would do harm to the public health.

@jca have you ever connected coming down with GBS to a specific event?

yes – my daughter had a virus two weeks to the day before i got gbs. i actually took he to the ER that i ended up in. she was puking and the doc said she had a virus and it would last about a week – he predicted one day of puking and a lot of diarrhea. everyone got it (and they were not too thrilled). kids at the babysitter’s got it, my parents got it and were in bed for her 2nd birthday party, etc. then i got the gbs. the doctor that i saw in the ER who diagnosed her was the same one who did my spinal tap. they said that the virus was what started my autoimmune response, which as you know, gbs is an autoimmune disease. it was very interesting, very traumatic but yet very nice to “rise from the ashes” and have no lingering effects today, over one year later.

@jca thank goodness you recovered. I have muscle troubles, I am thinking of finally going to a neurologist. My symptoms kind of seem like a very mild form of GBS, but I don’t think there is such a thing. I do seem better when my thyroid is in line…I just have to go to a specialist. I actually think it started after a vaccination, but I cannot be sure, because it had such an insidious start.

my neurologist told me there are many people who have mild gbs and don’t have to be hospitalized – they come in to office for monitoring or meds or whatever. and there are people that had it worse than i – people on ventilators who have to go to a rehab or nursing home for a year or two. i guess i was in the middle. 5 days of IVIG and 3 weeks of rehab on the rehab floor and then i was still weak and shaky but it was amazing how i got better and felt stronger every day. IVIG is a miracle drug.

@jca Interesting. Do you have to give the IVIG within a certain amount of time for it to work? I have been like this for years.

i think the sooner the better. go to a neurologist. or if you are, go for second opinion. if you want to keep in touch, use the personal message.