Honestly prior to the early 20th century the pharmaceutical industry was like the wild west,
there was basically no rules. You could make drugs that had all kinds of compounds like cocaine,
morphine, heroin, cannabis, chloroform,
some of these very dangerous or highly addictive compounds were very common
I'm in the somewhat wild west and as i go about my days in the
37th month of this pandemic i find myself thinking about modern medicine constantly.
In the past 100 years we've gone from a point where we had this blind faith in medicine to
a different point, where trust in science and medicine is eroding. And my question is, why?
Why did we go from a place where we would give cocaine
lollipops to our children for a toothache to being hesitant to receive
a preventative vaccine? And what does this all say about the psychology of trust?
This video is sponsored by the album music for
scientists. You can listen now on your preferred music service.
To get some perspective i want to travel back in time: to the days when smoking was
prescribed for asthma, beer for diabetes and methamphetamines for weight loss.
But before i re-emerge into the universe i have
to take part in the ceremonious pre-production ritual.
Negative... negative! It's negative.
I am the nerd who takes care of the old drugs. I think, i think that's my official title.
This is Stephen Hall, whose official official title is the curator of the
history of pharmacy museum at the University of Arizona.
The truth is most of what we have here is what you might call old science these treatments often
lack the scientific rigour that we would see today, where there was not always,
you know, hardline academic research done. There was not always proper testing done
honestly prior to the early 20th century. The pharmaceutical industry was like the wild west,
there was basically no rules. Everyone knows about old coca-cola that used to contain cocaine,
well sure the fact is lots of things did at the time.
It's easy to look back with our 21st century perspective
and gasp that cocaine was practically the high fructose corn syrup of the old times.
But back then a lot of guesswork and trial and error were part of life, as was trust in the
person who did that guesswork. They were the keeper of knowledge and part of the community.
In the present day there's a great separation in the health science professions:
you have pharmacy which is distinct from medicine which, is distinct from nursing and ophthalmology
and dentistry and these are all their own insular professions. A hundred years ago
that was really not the case, there was much more overlap between the professions and
the reason for this was often in small rural towns. Especially out here in the west, the west
was a was a rough rugged terrain, there was not nearly as much development as there was out in the
in the older part of the country. And so when a if there was a pharmacist in a community
in some in many cases the pharmacist may have been the only medical professional
in a whole community and so by necessity the pharmacist then would have acted as
the doctor or the dentist because if there was no other option that person would be your best bet.
And a lot of this blind faith in old medicine comes down to the existence of this one medical
professional. So trust researcher Rachel Botsman coined this idea of a trust stack:
these layers that are necessary for people to act change their behaviour or jump into the unknown.
The first layer of the stack is the idea let's say in this case that we need to protect against
infectious disease. The next layer is the platform which can be technology or organisations and in
the final layer you need to trust individuals, so other people. A hundred years ago there
were far fewer layers to this stack that people needed to trust. Of course there was the idea,
so to get better or prevent against infectious disease. And then there was the individual often
at the one medical professional that you turn to. But fast forward to the 2020s and
this trust stack has expanded: there's still the idea but then the platform has expanded to include
government organisations, pharmaceutical companies, and advanced technology,
and there's a whole host of medical professionals down the chain. Where
there used to only be a couple of layers required for us to trust something now there are many.
All that's needed to break trust is a crack in one of these layers, perhaps someone who is vaccine
hesitant believes in the idea of preventing disease but they distrust their doctor, or what
is more likely is that they distrust government organizations or pharmaceutical companies,
or they concerned about what's in the advanced technology that is delivering the vaccine.
And the prevalence of this lack of trust is pretty alarming: the latest figures indicate
that more than one third of American adults would not get a vaccine to prevent
Even when our medical knowledge has come such a long way in a pretty short amount of time.
So how can we rebuild trust?
The very first vaccine was actually what's called an inoculation people would take
pus from one of the eruptions
and put it on to somebody else maybe in an open wound and people did this willingly they risked
getting full-blown smallpox in the hopes that they would only get it a little bit bad and
develop immunity for it and that's how this you know rapid vaccine development sort of came to be.
This is my friend Cara Santa Maria, a science journalist, podcaster, and healthcare worker
who's recently received the vaccine. I wanted to know what it was all like: did it hurt?
Interestingly the needle the jab itself you didn't really even feel but then when i got
home i'd say for the first dose it was about an eight hour delay and that's when i started to
feel some pretty intense injection site soreness that lasted about three days
and i would say that that was comparable to getting punched really hard in the arm
the second dose was a completely different story I'd say it took about 12 hours and that's when I
started to experience pretty severe symptoms that are absolutely normal but pretty intense
responses to the vaccine itself they're often described as flu-like symptoms I had a fever
joint pain. Is that fairly common?
Yeah so there all of the vaccine studies publish side effects this is a
normal immune response to the vaccine.
What i found fascinating was Cara's cognitive response to the side effects.
And so one thing that was weird for me, I have to tell you Vanessa, during the experience is
cognitively I knew I didn't have covid of course and I definitely didn't have the flu I had no
pathogen in my body that my body was fighting off but for all intents and purposes it felt the same
and so it's such a weird thing to be like this is my immune system telling me that I just had
an invader in the wrappings of a vaccine. I'm perfectly safe i'm perfectly healthy but I feel
ill because this is my body mounting a response so that in the future if i'm exposed to
i'll recognise it and be able to fight it off. It also gives you some really good insight into
how much of feeling crappy when you're sick is your immune system responding.
So even with this awareness of what the vaccine is doing we can still be concerned
and even panic and be fearful, which is often the part of the story that gets shared publicly. Which
then leads some of those 39% of people who won't get the vaccine to question if it's safe.
But what we know now is that we figured out how to vaccinate safely efficiently effectively and with
minimal minimal i'm talking almost non-existent harm and we have these short memories it's really
hard for us to put ourselves in the shoes of our parents our grandparents our great-grandparents
who lived every day with the spectre that probably one of their many children or more than one of the
many children were going to die they were going to die of early childhood diseases they were
even going to die during child birth that's just unheard of now that's seen as a medical failure
it's just a different time we live in and it's so important that we maintain that perspective.
With time and more information
we seem to have forgotten the real and dire consequences of the past.
It's important to note that people were still questioning of old medicine, which is always good,
but we didn't have hesitancy at the level we do today when vaccines are safer than ever.
In this age of and with this rollout of the vaccine that is already
saving lives and will only continue to do so it is interesting to kind of look back and say
how did we get here, and what groundwork was laid with some of these older ideas.
And while medicine has some interesting old practices we have come
so far in the past 100 years we have made so many advancements thanks to science,
but we're also at a point where trust is fractured in science.
So if you are lucky enough to have access to the vaccine please talk about it,
please talk about the process of getting it. One way that we can rebuild trust
is through humanity, through empathy, and through telling our stories.
And as we move past this challenging point in history, past the 81st month of the pandemic,
what we can do is something that has got us through challenging times before: we can trust
in the process of science we can trust experts and we can trust each other just a little bit more.
And I trust that you will enjoy listening to the new album Music for Scientists,
which is the sponsor of today's video. Music for Scientists is an artistic tribute to
science and the work of scientists. The album was created by Patrick Olson who was actually
one of my first Patrons, so it is cool that I now have the opportunity to shout out Patrick's work.
You can watch the music videos over on their YouTube channel, which i will link to
right here or you can stream the album from your preferred music service. Thanks for watching!