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Lifestyle, religion, good health or natural immunity would be enough to avoid disease
People often have a distorted perception of the risk that they or others face from a disease. Specifically, people may perceive that the risk from a disease is low or inconsequential. This can motivate their belief that they don’t need a vaccine or that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of vaccination. A misperception of disease risk has been found to be related to hesitant attitudes towards vaccination.
One of the reasons that people underestimate the risk from diseases is that vaccines have been so successful. It’s easy to misperceive that the risk from a preventable disease is low when few people, if any, suffer from that disease.
This theme dismisses the risk of the disease because of a belief that one’s own immunity is sufficient. An individual may cite these examples as reasons why vaccination is unnecessary for them personally:
Good lifestyles, hygiene and personal responsibility are important components in the fight against diseases. Healthy lifestyles are promoted by health care professionals because they help prevent or may palliate some diseases. Hygiene and personal responsibility, such as washing hands and keeping a distance from others when ill, can help reduce the transmission of pathogens. Acquiring a disease can offer some protection against future exposure to that disease—assuming one survives and recovers from it.
Dialogue between patients and healthcare professionals is most productive if it is guided by empathy, and an opportunity for the patient to affirm the reasons underlying their attitudes and to express understanding for that. That’s why it is important to understand the attitude roots behind people’s overt opinions. To affirm a person’s underlying attitude root does not mean we need to agree with the specifics of their argument. For example, we can acknowledge that:
Good lifestyles, hygiene and personal responsibility are important components in the fight against diseases. Healthy lifestyles are promoted by health care professionals because they help prevent or may palliate some diseases. Hygiene and personal responsibility, such as washing hands and keeping a distance from others when ill, can help reduce the transmission of pathogens. Acquiring a disease can offer some protection against future exposure to that disease—assuming one survives and recovers from it.
Vaccines are another important part of a healthy lifestyle, because they train our body to fight off diseases.
It is impossible to completely eliminate exposure to diseases, no matter what you eat or how active your lifestyle is, because it is impossible to live completely isolated from society. There is no single practice that can protect against all threats to our health, as diseases have diverse origins and respond to different preventative measures and treatments.
No other preventative measures can rival the protection offered by vaccination against infectious diseases that otherwise kill or harm people. Vaccines train our immune system to recognise and fight off disease without needing to expose ourselves to the full risk of that disease.
We should therefore make vaccines part of a healthy lifestyle, which should have many components, each of which deal with different health threats.
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