Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is distancing himself from his anti-vaccine work as he seeks to become the leader of the nation’s top health agency under President Donald Trump, according to government ethics documents released Wednesday.
Kennedy has pulled in roughly $10 million in income from his work over the past year, which includes speaking fees, leading an anti-vaccine nonprofit and legal fees, government ethics forms filed for his nomination show. He has millions of dollars more tied up in investments and other assets.
If confirmed, he has promised to stop collecting fees on some of his vaccine lawsuits involving the U.S. government.
Hey if you own it that’s totally cool and fairly noble. And frankly even if you don’t it’s cool too. Not my job to decide who to take on as long as you’re within my practice scope and not actively suicidal, murdering people, or diddling kids, which are like three main dealbreakers for getting your therapist to snitch (varies by state and there are other exceptions check the fine print)
One of the things I explain to people when I’m doing needle desensitization is that the phobia does make sense to a degree. At its core there is a threat. We know that it will hurt. It’s why I fucking hate it when people use bullshit lies to get people to get shots, “oh it won’t hurt at all!”. No, that’s a lie, it by definition will cause some pain. And it’s pain you see coming. A scrape is different. We generally get those accidentally and often don’t notice it’s happened until the pain registers. But a shot or blood draw is more analogous to torture: I get a sharp needle, put you in a weird chair, and let you know that I will absolutely stick this into your body, piercing your flesh. You anticipate it. You tense up.
The thing to remind yourself is that it’s irrational and your anxiety is magnifying the intensity. The pain is real and will happen, that is true, but it is generally not that big of a deal outside of certain scenarios that are uncommon for most people. And even in some of the more painful scenarios like lumbar punctures there is an anesthetic involved (trust me I’ve had one. It’s not awesome but not as bad as you’d think).
Desensitization can help for the obvious reason of lowering your anxiety in reaction to the aversive stimuli. Avoiding it only serves to sensitize you and lower resilience to the stimulus. However this is the challenge of the phobia. Often they’re things we don’t have regular exposure to: vomiting, spiders, air travel, etc. so we desensitize, do much better, and then don’t have to deal with the thing for months or years and end up with it being an issue again. Maintenance is always necessary.
But with needle phobia there is a specific benefit. If you can calm yourself down during blood draws and relax your body the blood draws will actually hurt less. Tension held in your body makes the piercing of the needle sting a bit worse. It’s not a huge difference but apparently a noticeable one.
The idea of pain doesn’t really factor into my issue with needles, I’m not worried about it hurting, I’m just skeeved out by the needle itself.
If it were an option I’d gladly take needle-less vaccines and blood draws that hurt 10× worse (which still wouldn’t be that bad, needles really don’t hurt much)
Hell, if they hurt more I’d probably have less of an issue with them. I’d rather have an actual reason to dislike them instead of just a random case of the heebie-jeebies for no particular reason.
You bring up a good point. I ultimately oversimplified my post to illustrate the point which upon reflection was probably not the best idea
Your presentation is not uncommon at all. It is totally a thing to fear the needle and not fear the pain. Ultimately the strategies remain the same (which is why I kind of glossed over this but it was still a bad idea to do so, my bad)
In addition to desensitization you can also try diversion in the short term. Create sensations in other areas of your body to divert your focus away from the needle. Put an ice pack on your thigh or something similar that’s not harmful but mildly uncomfortable to pull focus. Similarly you can just go with good old distractions if possible like watching a video while looking away. This isn’t the best strategy, especially long term because in some cases it can worsen the stimulus you’re anxious about, but in a pinch it can be helpful. And of course if your phobia is trauma related processing said trauma is helpful (although that in and of itself is often a desensitization process fyi)