About | No More Measles!

	Laurie Endicott Thomas has worked as an editor and writer in various aspects of medical and academic publishing. She learned a great deal about the science of vaccination while working for a veterinary journal. “A friend of mine called me one day and begged me to write a book about vaccination. He was furious because his wife’s midwife had just told him and his wife not to vaccinate their children! As a result, he was terrified that there were a lot of unvaccinated children in the neighborhood.”
	Her first book was Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free. The purpose of the book is to explain what has gone wrong in the public schools in the United States. Many of our teachers have been trained and even forced to use methods of reading instruction that do not work. As a result, millions of Americans never learned to read in school. The teaching of the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric has also been openly suppressed. Yet these studies are not trivial. They were part of the classical liberal arts curriculum. The liberal arts were called the liberal arts because they were considered appropriate for freeborn men, as opposed to slaves. They are the studies that prepare you to fulfill your responsibilities as a citizen of a democratic society.
	Most Americans have trouble remembering which type of diabetes is which. In Thin Diabetes, Fat Diabetes, Laurie explains that French people have no such trouble. They use the term thin diabetes (diabète maigre) to refer to type 1 diabetes, the severe, incurable form of diabetes that often strikes in childhood. If you have thin diabetes, it means that your pancreas cannot make enough insulin to keep you alive. You will have to take insulin shots for the rest of your life. French people use the term fat diabetes (diabète gras) to refer to the milder, reversible form of diabetes that tends to strike overweight adults. If you have fat diabetes, it means that you are a naturally thin person. Your body is resisting the effects of insulin to keep you from storing the fat that you are eating. You can have thin diabetes and fat diabetes at the same time! Regardless of what type of diabetes you have, a high-carbohydrate diet is the key to controlling your blood sugar and preventing complications!
	For decades, many psychologists and educators have been urging us to boost children’s self-esteem at all costs. Yet all of the world’s great religions have warned us that pride is a sin and humility is a virtue. In Don’t Feed the Narcissists!, Laurie points out the reasonable middle ground between these two extremes: Aristotle argued that your self-esteem should be accurate. Narcissists are people who worship themselves. They are trying to occupy a higher social rank than other people think they deserve. As a result, they may try to bully other people into submission. In this illuminating book, Laurie explains what it takes to become a truly great person, as well as providing tips for how to deal with people who are legends in their own minds!
	When you need advice on vaccinations, whom should you trust? The world’s experts on infectious disease, or that guy who sells overpriced vitamins over the Internet? In No More Measles!, Laurie warns us that too many people are taking medical advice from uneducated celebrities and from snake oil salesmen. Instead of worrying about false rumors about the practically nonexistent side effects of vaccines, we should be struggling to drive some of the vaccine-preventable diseases into extinction. Once measles, mumps, and rubella are extinct, we will no longer need to MMR vaccine! But it would be madness to stop vaccinating against those horrible diseases before they are extinct!