Purity of Essence

David Gorski is extremely long-winded, so I don't often link to him, but I think he has a good insight here. (You can just skim it if you like.)

Much of the ideology driving the "alternative medicine" and anti-vax crowd, or perhaps a better word for it is sentiment, is analogous to religious notions of ritual purity. If you read the Torah with me, you saw that as a major theme. People who have contact with corpses, unclean animals, menstrual blood, and so on must go through purification rituals. The world is divided into "clean" and "unclean." And so the "alternative" medicine true believers are obsessed with imaginary "toxins" and impurities. Vaccines and pharmaceuticals are seen as "unnatural" and imagined to alter the purported pure and natural state of the body.

 

This is all nonsense of course. Nature is full of toxins and pathogens that for 300,000 years restricted the human lifespan to 40 years or less. It is only in just a little more than the past 100 years, since we have come to understand this and how to combat it, that the lifespan in wealthy countries has more than doubled. We took it for granted that half of our children would die, and few people could hope to complete what seemed to be a full lifespan of 70 years, until the early 20th Century. People back then were "pure" and "natural" in the way the anti-vaxers want us all to be, and they died when we don't.

 

Gorski also perceives racialist ideology behind some "alternative" thinking. Purity of blood means racial purity as well. This is not entirely obvious with the exception of some people who incorporate anti-semitic paranoia into their worldview. But certainly if you are crazy in one way it's often the case that you are crazy in another.