What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Childrens Vacinations, by Stephanie Cave, MD, FAAFP, with Deborah Mitchell. New York: Warner Books (2001)

"[Socrates] And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

[Glaucon] I see."

Plato's Allegory of the Cave comes to teach that Truth is not apprehensible by means human senses alone - We can only come to know Truth via education. According to Plato, the job of the teacher is to point students toward the True and the Good and to encourage students to apprehend these things for themselves.

The world of health and medicine is a particularly dark corner of the cave. The workings of the body, the mysteries of disease and its prevention prove difficult to access via the unaided senses. For this reason we have created academies devoted to the education of medical philospher-kings and queens. Those academies are called "medical schools" and the products of those schools we refer to as "doctors".

One such product of our academy is Stephanie Cave (verbal joke absolutely intended). Dr. Cave has written a book designed to educate the wretched, blinded inhabitants of Plato's cave to understand vaccines and the diseases they are designed to prevent.

What kind of Philosopher-Queen is Stephanie Cave? And what does she come to teach us about childhood vaccines?

Dr. Cave believes with perfect faith that heavy metals cause developmental disorders in children. She believes futher that chelation therapy cures children with ADD, ADHD, and PDD. The following is excerpted from a 2002 interview with Mothering Magazine:

"MM: Did you find [mercury, aluminum, antimony, and arsenic] across the board in children who exhibited some form of developmental delay?

SC: Yes. The children fell within the autism spectrum, including those with speech and language delay, ADD, ADHD, PDD-NOS (Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified), Asperger's Syndrome, and Autism DSM-IV (sic). I feel they are part of the same spectrum because they all seem to improve dramatically when we start treating them metabolically and actually detoxifying the metal. They improved as we did repletion of nutrition and improved bowel-bacteria balance. But when we started pulling metal, all of them started turning around. And the earlier they were treated, the greater the improvement."

According to Dr. Cave, heavy metals are to blame not only for ADHD and PDD, but are responsible as well for certain normal variants of motor development. Here is part of an exchange, taken apparently from a Q&A session with mothers:

"Q: What causes toe walking? How can you get rid of it?

A (Dr. Cave): Toxins, heavy metals, lack of chemistry, lack of magnesium."

In similar fashion to Flea's new best friend Alix, Dr. Cave predicts in her book that removal of Thimerosal from childhood vaccines will have an enormous beneficial effect on the rates of autism and other developmental disorders. Flea eagerly awaits the next edition of Dr. Cave's book for her assessment of the hoped-for improvement.

Flea got a splitting headache reading Dr. Cave's book. It is a riddled throughout with junk science, junk medicine, and voodoo therapies. The parade of factoids and nonsense fairly dance off the page. A post-length review could not address them all. On one page Dr. Cave states definitively that Vitamin C prevents adverse vaccine reactions. Two pages later she backs off from this claim, adding that Vitamin C "may" prevent adverse reactions. Elsewhere she rehearses the urban legend that oral polio vaccine was responsible for the outbreak of AIDS in San Francisco in the early 1980's.

Dr. Cave also pedals two hoary factoids that have never been adequately rebutted. The first is that an infant's immune system is in some sense "weak". Flea knows of no credible evidence to suggest that an infant cannot handle introduction of proteins and toxoids at early ages. The second is the canard that separating the components of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine give fewer adverse reactions than giving them together. Again, there is no data whatsoever to support this claim.

It saddens Flea to report that Dr. Cave's book is widely regarded as "balanced". Dr. Cave earns this designation, apparently, because she does not advocate abandoning the vaccine program altogether. If this book is what passes for "balance" in the vaccine debate, we are all in a great deal of trouble.

Finally, Flea derives no joy from informing his faithful readers that Stephanie Cave is no Philosopher-Queen. She leads her readers right back into Plato's cave, where she lovingly places chains back on their legs and necks.