Letter Of Medical Necessity - Golden State Medical: Fill & Download for Free

Yes there is.There are effective methods both surgical and non-surgical to successfully widen the relaxed width your mouth.Why would you want to do this? Are there any tangible reasons why a wider mouth might make your life better in some way?It turns out there are surprisingly many good reasons you might want a wider mouth beyond mere medical necessity.Only recently has the horizontal width of our mouths been recognized as a much more significant factor in judgment of overall facial beauty by others than previously assumed.A growing number of people are starting to take notice that mouths with lateral widths close to about 1.6 times the width of their noses (Golden Ratio) are the most aesthetically pleasing of all, in other words the most beautiful.People of course want to be attractive, and after eyebrows and eyes, your mouth is one of your most visible facial features. Our lips’ color usually contrasts clearly with the coloration of the rest of our faces, so anything that can enhance their visual appeal should be quite welcome. Lips color changes from lipstick and procedures to thin or thicken lips have been used for a very long time to enhance beauty. A ratio of lower lip vertical width to upper lip vertical width of 1.6 is also ideal. Now the optimal horizontal width of your entire relaxed mouth (what it looks like when it’s closed with no voluntary effort to widen it) to nose ratio approaching 1.62:1 has been recognized as a very important contributing factor as well in overall perception of facial beauty for either gender.According to a recent scholarly research article (statisticsfacpub) the neoclassical cannon (a widely recognized set of beauty rules) of the attractive mouth to nose ratio of 1.5:1 should be revised to 1.618:1, the famed Golden Ratio, since the study participants of both genders rated the latter ratio more beautiful for both genders, same and opposite sex, than 1.5:1 and much greater than 1.2:1 or lower. Perception of beauty also starts to drop off when the relaxed mouth to nose width ratio exceeds 1.8:1—so if your mouth to nose width ratio is already a little greater than 1.6:1, you’re still right at the top.Above a 2:1 relaxed mouth to nose width ratio (measured straight across, not curved around your face) is perceived as more and more abnormal in appearance as it increases beyond this figure, so there’s no need to embrace your inner frog or Joker in your quest for a beautiful mouth.However, when you are actually putting effort into a big smile your widened mouth to nose width ratio can briefly exceed 2:1 to over 2.5:1 and still look really striking in a very good way. As long as you frequently relax back to a ratio in the neighborhood of 1.6:1, you’ll remain on top of things in the facial aesthetics department..To summarize, if your resting (relaxed neutral expression) mouth is from 1.5–1.8 times your nose width measured straight across (not following your facial curve with a flexible ruler), you’re pretty much set. If you were blessed with the right parents and grew up with a mouth to nose width ratio like this, then give God or nature a broad grateful smile and enjoy. Image below from Pinterest shows kids benefiting from having a wide-mouthed father, most obviously with the boy.The issue is that a large percentage of people naturally have much narrower mouths, ratios to nose width being 1.2 to less than 1.0, most often inherited from parents with similar oral to nasal measurements ratios. The study cited above indicates that perception of overall facial beauty is lower in people with mouths similar in width to their noses.There are a lot of benefits that can come with your wider mouth (natural or otherwise), especially when it approaches the 1.6:1 golden ratio to your nose width. These are just some of them.Easy, relaxed toothy ‘celebrity’ smile.Better singing dynamics and projection. AMAZING YOUNG BOY singing - I will always love you // THE VOICE KIDSStrong connection to being an effective and credible leader. People with wider mouths are better leadersEnhanced ability to project intelligible speech at a higher volume over a greater distance.Perception of greater generosity.Lips Shapes Meaning and PersonalityMuch more convenient and less painful access to the oral cavity for dental and orthodontic procedures.Easier eating and drinking, especially if your original mouth was quite small.Enhanced intimate activities—I’ll leave the details to the reader’s imagination.Heightened overall impression of facial beauty (see reasons above and examples below).Don’t despair if you currently have a narrow horizontal oral opening, with a non-ideal ratio to your nose width, because it turns out you aren’t necessarily stuck with the kind of mouth you were born with.Thanks to modern plastic surgery methods that preserve normal mouth function with insignificant to almost no scarring, a wider mouth could be yours in a matter of a few hours at the clinic. It costs money to do this, though, and unless oral function is compromised by a narrow mouth, most insurance companies won’t cover this.If the costs or worries about surgical complications are making you shy away from plastic surgery, don’t worry because there are two ways to visibly widen your mouth opening horizontally:surgical and non-surgical.It is possible to widen your mouth by manual methods, but it will take time and commitment with rather modest, yet clearly visible, results if you wish to do it without surgery. This will involve sustained use of stretching exercises in certain key ways in order to be effective—some of these will be described below.I should know. It worked with me.The other is surgical, adapted from methods developed for treating microstomia (a mouth opening that is abnormally small). This procedure is traditionally used for correcting congenital microstomia, or acquired microstomia through burns or disease. However, certain plastic surgeons (some in India, Mexico, South America, Europe, and several in the United States) are well-trained in adapting these surgical techniques for widening healthy narrow mouths using a procedure called a commissurotomy, followed by a commissuroplasty. The first procedure is the cutting procedure and the second is to establish new lateral commissures and rearrange the muscles on the enlarged mouth so scarring is minimal and the mouth remains fully functional. This method is described in greater detail later on in my answer.Do you want a mouth as wide as the guy on the right in the picture below has, or a bit narrower like the woman?What you want will make a difference in how realistic it might be to stick with non-surgical methods. The wider one will likely be achieved only by plastic surgery like the guy on the right had (I don’t know anything about the woman—sorry). The look works for this guy in my opinion—he had a palatal expander treatment, then decided on the mouth widening surgery to showcase his new and improved dentition.Cheryl Hines wide mouth looks really good on her—I believe hers is natural.A wide mouth allows for showing a lot of teeth with even a casual smile.Model Tim Borrmann rocks the wide mouth, too. His mouth to nose width ratio is pretty close to the ideal Golden Ratio (1.618…), supposedly the most visually appealing look of all. (Images from Pinterest). I measured {on my computer monitor} his mouth width in the picture below of 5.0 cm and nose width of 3.1 cm. 5.0/3.1 = 1.613:1 ratio.Who wouldn't want an amazing face with such pleasantly balanced features like this?Even relaxed, Tim’s mouth looks just perfect for his face.Of course the wrap around smile is the most obvious visible benefit of a nice wide mouth.Now that you’re hooked on the idea of having a wider mouth your own, here are the options.First, the non-surgical method:The idea here is to stretch the mouth in such a way that the lips vermillion (skin) doesn’t tear, but instead gradually thickens and adjusts to being stretched wider than normal so that a greater width can be maintained without conscious effort. A very positive long-term benefit of the stretching techniques I will describe is a greatly reduced or totally cured tendency toward chapped lips.This is a challenge because the human mouth is surrounded by one of the most forgiving and stretchable muscles in the body, the orbicularis oris. It’s basically a sphincter that forms an unbroken loop around a normal mouth. That’s why it’s possible to form your lips into the tiny circle needed for whistling, then open wide during a yawn to over twice the width and height of your normally relaxed mouth size.What you need to do is to stretch this muscle, and the neighboring cheek muscles, beyond your normal maximum width that you can achieve with just cheek and lips muscles efforts alone. That will require a horizontal lips stretcher, the most familiar method being a splint.The object is to force (without tearing!!!) your orbiculus oris muscle to stretch beyond its normal limit and get the adjoining cheek muscles to adapt to the greater desired width. This will require lots of smiling and other expression efforts while wearing the splint (you may not see much actual movement at first, but in time you will see it as your cheek muscles adapt to the mouth opening being much closer than usual to where the muscles insert into cheekbones, etc. by shortening somewhat, but not losing their maximum stretches) This won’t be very comfortable, but if you’re motivated, you’ll push through the most painful first few days and gradually start to see results.The above splint and muscles pictures are from “Microstomia Treatment & Management” by Homere Al Moutran, MD, and Arlen D. Meyers, MD, MBA.This is what you’re up against (another type of splint). Those loose-looking muscles over the person’s stretched mouth below will in time straighten out as their relaxed length shortens some, allowing a larger overall range of motion. There are a good number of accessory muscles that will need to be exercised and stretched for this to work (see picture below this one).I developed my own mouth stretching apparatus and used it successfully to widen my mouth somewhat.Update 12/30/18: One of the most amazing positive side-effects of my own mouth stretching regimen is I have not had chapped lips in two years. I used to get painful and sometimes bleeding chapped lips every winter several times a month, and even sometimes in other seasons—even with regular use of chapstick. A lot of this had to do with living in semi-arid, low-humidity southern Idaho. I still live in southern Idaho, but my mouth stretching has toughened up my lips’ vermilion enough that I can sing and widely smile all I want to even in the winter without fear of painfully splitting my lips, and I almost never use chapstick anymore. The only exception now is for sunscreen protection while surface-mining opal or spending a lot of time on sunlit snow.Update 11/20/20: Make that four years without chapped lips. 😁Even if the stretching regimen doesn’t result in you getting a much wider mouth, curing your lips’ tendencies toward painful chapping is likely worth the regular horizontal mouth stretching all by itself.Edit (6/22/19). Due to increased interest I am now showing my favorite mouth stretcher design. This mouth stretching brace uses smoothed and highly polished perforated springy semi-rigid stainless steel sheets. It takes into account the need to have something to stretch my mouth, some tabs on the ends to stabilize and hold the ends in my lateral commissures, and a wide portion where my entire upper and lower lips are supported in a stretched natural curvature. The other splint designs require you to manually hold your mouth wide with sustained conscious effort, limiting the time that you can wear the splint to what your muscles can endure.My “10 cm” mouth brace uses blue electrical tape to spread the pressure over a wider area, and my “11 cm” mouth brace uses sports mouth guard silicone to soften its end edges. The perforations permit normal breathing and somewhat coherent speech while the brace is being worn. Due to the small size of the perforations, breathing through the appliance while it’s being worn produces a pleasant white sound rather than whistling or annoying hisses.While slightly slurred and sounding somewhat different from my normal appliance-free speech, if I substitute “n” for “m,” “d” for “b,” and “t” for “p,” moving my tongue as far forward as possible with the substitute consonants, and normal tongue position for words that actually use m,b, or p, my speech is fully intelligible for most listeners. To make the “f” sound, merely sending a puff of exhaled breath at the right moment through the perforations makes a passable phoneme. The letter “v” is just the voiced version of the “f” puffed breath adaptation. It took practice, but I can now talk on the phone and not have to remove the mouth-widening appliance.Here’s what they look like.Please excuse the so-so quality of my selfie. I was 57 when this picture was taken and not a model. This shows what the 10 cm one it looks like worn properly. I can wear this for a couple of hours or the 11 cm one for maybe 20 minutes before removing it due to discomfort. The most important thing to notice about my appliance is that you do not need to keep your cheek muscles tensed up to keep it from popping out of your mouth like other splints might. Your lips themselves hold the appliance in place. This way the only limit on how long you can wear it is the need to relieve discomfort from an extreme stretch or to eat or talk normally.If anyone wants something like this, let me know. You will need a series with 0.5 to 1.0 cm increments wider as your mouth stretching progresses. I’m not doing this for profit, but instead I have gone to the trouble of describing my methods because I think wider mouths look beautiful and I want to see more people enjoying both the visual and practical aspects of having them—and I know my appliance works.My mouth used to be between 4.5 and 5 cm wide when relaxed and closed and is now 6 cm wide. My maximum smile width used to be about 7.5 cm wide and is now 9+ cm (10+ for a couple of hours immediately after a stretching session) with muscular efforts alone. To get this result I had to gradually work my way up from 9 cm forced stretches (the effort hurt, especially at first!) to now 12 cm wide with very little pain (if it hurts, I stop—I have learned to heed the warnings my body makes). I can still whistle, so I haven’t injured anything. This took about six months of serious effort and my designing and testing several novel apparatuses on myself to achieve this (other models involve stainless steel hooks or headgear).I’m starting to get my own wraparound smile, though I also need to drop about 40–50 pounds so my thick cheeks stop getting in the way (picture from 6/22/19).My most recent trip to the dentist with my more stretchable mouth resulted in the easiest teeth cleaning I’ve ever had, and I can now open my mouth much wider for singing without cheek cramps. It’s not just for looks alone I did this. I haven’t had chapped lips at all (I guess the stretching toughened them up) this year, either. Finally, to my pleasant surprise, I have not acquired additional wrinkles around my mouth and face (I’m 58).This requires time and commitment, and like you having to wear a retainer daily for the rest of your life after orthodontic treatment, you may have to do a daily mouth stretch to maintain the desired final width of your mouth.Update 2/13/20: I realized that side views don’t tell my own story adequately, so I found two “Photo Booth” pictures I had taken a bit over three years apart. One was taken July 7th 2016 before I had started my own mouth-widening project. The other was taken November 13th 2019. I sized the images so they’re at the same scale, though the resolution and lighting is a bit different. Notice in the first image my mouth is only a tiny bit wider than my nose. I didn’t like how my mouth to nose width ratio looked in this and other pictures taken of me prior to then, hence the inspiration for my mouth-widening project.Now take a look at the next image taken three years later. My face is just as relaxed as it was in the first image—or else my nose and face shape would have been different. Notice that I have no more wrinkles or sagging on the corners of my mouth despite the stretching, yet it’s obviously visibly wider—and I’m now 58.If my appliances hadn’t worked on me, I would never have mentioned them, since I don’t exactly feel like embarrassing myself in front of over 150k readers (so far). I believe in them because they work, and I have made more progress (without giving myself sagging wrinkles, lips, or other damage) in a year with this design than with any other appliance I’ve come up with.I have made additional progress in the couple of months since then, as I have since made and currently use a 12 cm appliance (it’s of course a tight fit as expected); I can now force-smile widely enough while wearing the 10 cm appliance to permit it to fall out of my mouth with a slight tongue push. My mouth is as of today between 6–6.5 cm wide straight across, and if I follow the curve of my lips around the front of my face, it’s between 6.5 and 7 cm as of February 13th, 2020. My nose is still 4.2 cm wide. The mouth to nose width ratio range is from 1.55 to 1.67 for the curve following measurement, meaning the average is 1.61, almost exactly the Golden Ratio—my goal.Another person who'd answered this question in 2018 has a very good idea on how to compensate for mouths returning to normal size despite frequent stretches. It's the use of injectable lips fillers on the lateral portions of the lips, possibly augmented by fat injections later on to make it permanent. After your lips are toughened up by regular daily stretches beyond the ideal relaxed width you want, you can partially stretch your mouth a bit beyond your ideal, get the injections, and your mouth will naturally relax wider than before.Let's say you have a 5 cm wide mouth and 5 cm wide nose and want your mouth to nose width ratio to be near the Golden Ratio (1.618..), meaning a mouth about 8 cm wide. Stretch beyond 10 cm if you can to toughen up the lips vermillion against splits and chapping. Then more lightly stretch your mouth with some sort of splint to about 8.5 cm wide while receiving the lateral lips injections, the extra 0.5 cm to compensate for inevitable shrinkage. For a time (not sure how long) you'll have a 7.5–8 cm wide mouth to 'test drive' so you'll know if you like the look or not, especially if you're considering the surgical option.If you feel you just cannot handle the discomfort and commitment of daily forcing your mouth beyond its normal width, there is the plastic surgery option. When completely healed, your wider mouth will not require stretching to maintain its new width—except perhaps a little to keep scars from causing contractures.Surgical Method:Note: I’m not connected in any way to Dr. Eppley or anyone else referenced, and do not receive (nor have asked for) any sort of compensation or personal gain from anyone. I’m just motivated by the opportunity to pass on what I’ve learned about the surprisingly large number of benefits of getting a mouth width to nose width ratio of 1.6:1 and how to actually get it done for ourselves.Most of the surgical results images and methods I describe and show below are either from “Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery” by Maria Z. Siemionow and Marita Eisenmann-Klein or the Dr. Barry Eppley website for his Plastic Surgery clinic in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA: Cosmetic Plastic Surgeon Indianapolis IN | Dr. Barry EppleyThe object of this surgery is to change not only the opening of your mouth, but also move and resection the muscles so that they can accommodate your new wider oral opening and lengthened lips without any unusual conscious effort.The only negative I can immediately think of is if you don’t manually stretch your mouth width, any tendency toward chapped lips you had before surgery will likely be the same as before, or maybe worse near the newly extended corners of your mouth.The scariest part for me is the fact that if you wish to get a significantly wider mouth (2 to 6 cm wider), you have to allow the surgeon to cut the ring-shaped orbicularis oris muscle (actually four components are linked end-to-end to form the loop) in such a way that it can be resected into a longer version capable of controlling opening and closing the reshaped and larger mouth as before.Then the commissures (lip corners) are cut to widen the mouth after the orbicularis muscle halves are protected in preparation of moving out to their new position beyond the ends of the new lip commissures (there are other steps involving protecting and moving blood vessels, salivary ducts, and nerves, but I won’t go into that detail here—leave that to the plastic surgeon!). After the orbicularis muscle halves are stitched together, the surgeon uses a combination of stretched regular lip vermillion and internal cheek mucous membranes to lengthen the lips and form a new mouth commissure. The surgeon will repeat this muscle lengthening and lip extending procedure on the opposite side of the mouth. Less extensive mouth widening surgery may not involve the orbicularus oris at all, or merely the innermost few millimeters that won’t be missed.The 22 year old woman in the pictures below was one of Dr. Eppley’s patients. She had a lip lift and a commissurotomy/commissuroplasty procedure. The lip lift shortened her lip to nose distance, intended to complement the mouth-widening procedure. I think the results are pretty good, even right out of surgery.A side view of the same woman before and just after surgery.The best part is the final picture. Another patient had this done, but the before and after pictures are about a year apart. This patient dyed her hair a different color than before her surgery, but this is definitely the same woman (Eppley site) in both images. Like the first woman, she also had a lip-lifting procedure as well as a commussurotomy/commissuroplasty (sorry, couldn’t find a face-on version of this image). The results look pretty good.It’s not only young women getting mouth widening surgery, but also older men such as this 60-year-old male who had his frowning expression repaired and mouth widened at the same time. This image is also from the Dr. Eppley site.In summary, you have two options:A work-intensive non-surgical series of stretches and exercises can work, but without guaranteed results. If there are results, the method is very low cost, and you won’t have to endure healing from plastic surgery, but still have the fun of giving your friends a bigger smile than they have ever seen you have before. As already mentioned, you’ll also be much less prone to chapped lips (personal experience).—or—Plastic surgery. The cost is much higher, but maintenance is a breeze. You might just end up with a super-beautiful smile like the anonymous man in the first picture or like Julia Roberts', Cheryl Hines’, or Tim Borrmann’s nice naturally wide mouths, and not have to worry about stretching your mouth routinely to maintain the look.I hope you find the way that works for you the best.Good luck! :-)Edit (12/29/17): I have kept up my measurements of my mouth’s width over the past year. I started at a relaxed width of between 4.5–5.0 cm. I noticed about a month ago that my mouth is now 6.5 cm wide when relaxed closed and just tonight I noticed I’m starting to get closer to 7 cm wide. My goal is 7.5-8 cm wide minimum relaxed width and maybe 8.5 cm relaxed if I like the look, since my nose is 4.5–5 cm wide and the consensus on the ideal mouth to nose width ratio visually (public opinion surveys on what ratios appear the most beautiful to the eye) is the Golden Mean (or Golden Ratio) times nose width (4.5 x 1.618 = 7.3 cm; 5.0 x 1.618 = 8.1 cm).I’ve been using the stretching method described in my answer above, but with my own designs of stretchers (see images recently added to the non-surgical method part of my answer) instead of the commercial splints also described and shown above.The difference between mine and the others is that with mine your (relaxed) lips hold the mouth widening appliance in place rather than your sustained muscular efforts.EDIT (2/12/18): I am now considering trying temporary lips filler injections near the lateral commissures of my mouth while stretched to 'test drive' a wider mouth to see if I actually would like how it changes my overall appearance and other people's reactions to me. Then I'll decide whether to do it permanently much wider than normal, slightly wider, or forget the whole idea altogether. It would be less expensive than surgery, but more effective than stretching alone.11/27/18—no local options for test-drive lip injections. Currently stable at between 6.5–7.0 cm wide. Will update further if my situation changes.Edit (6/21/19): Added a pre- and postoperative image of a 60 year old man’s widened mouth, showing that getting a wider smile isn’t just for young people.Thanks all of you who have read my somewhat extensive answer, given me upvotes, and posted interesting and supportive comments and questions. I sincerely hope what I’ve written here will educate many more people on the plentiful surprising benefits and intrinsic beauty of getting a wider mouth.If any of my readers gets a wider mouth and achieves a greater love for how he/she looks and becomes a happier person overall as a result, then my time writing this was worth it.EDIT (10/30/19): I was just informed by one of my readers that he had gotten mouth widening plastic surgery a short time ago and is absolutely thrilled 😁 with the results. Now I know for sure it was worth it.

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not have an official position about vaccination.In 1988, an article about benefits of vaccination was published in our Awake! magazine, and some indignant letters were received. The answer to these letters may illustrate our position:Many things people do in seeking improved health are less than desirable. Some take medicines that have undesirable side effects, believing that the benefits outweigh the risks. Many view vaccines similarly. We consider vaccination to be a personal matter, though one must accept any legal consequence of his or her decision.​—ED.[1]In my case, I only know of one of Jehovah’s Witnesses who mistrusts vaccination (and believe me when I tell you that I know a lot of JWs).Since we are here, we can mention some interesting things from a historical perspective. There was a time, when the use of vaccination was very controversial not among marginal pseudo-scientific groups, but within mainstream science.For example, professor Charles Creighton, wrote an article against vaccinations in the 1888 Encyclopedia Britannica.[2]Image: A cartoon from a December 1894 anti-vaccination publicationBack then (19th century and early 20th century) the main method used to inoculate people was to infect a person with a variant of one "mild" strain of the virus; the infected person had to return seven days later when the pustules appeared on them; the pustule was scraped off and used to directly infect another person, who would then return in seven days.In 1889, Professor Alfred Wallace said that in England and Wales vaccination was the probable cause every year for 10,000 deaths—deaths by five diseases of the most terrible and disgusting character, introduced by the vaccine virus (Alfred Russell Wallace. LL.D., Forty-Five Years Of Registration Statistics, Proving Vaccination To Be Both Useless And Dangerous, second edition, London, 1889, p. 38).Actually, the Registar-General reported 1,108 deaths from vaccination in England and Wales from 1881 to 1907, the deaths averaging one every week during the first sixteen years (The Register Report of Births. Deaths and Marriages in England and Wales, vols. XLIV-LXX).Image: “Death the Vaccinator,” an engraving published by the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, late nineteenth centuryIn the autumn of 1901, in Philadelphia, 36 cases of tetanus were reported, which were admitted to have resulted from vaccination, and nearly all were fatal. After a study of these and 59 similar cases, the prominent Philadelphian physician Prof. Joseph McFarland, an ardent defender of vaccinations, concluded that the danger lay in the presence of the virus in the vaccine in spite of all precautions. (John Pitcairn, The Fallacy Of Vaccination, 1911, citing of Joseph McFarland, Tetanus And Vaccination – An Analytical Study Of Ninety-five Cases Of This Rare Complication, 1902).In 1913, the British National Anti-Vaccination League (of which the famous scientist Alfred Russel Wallace was a member) published a booklet entitled Is vaccination a Disastrous Delusion? The booklet condemned the practice as "a monstrous and indefensible outrage upon the common sense and sacred personal rights of every human being, and especially every Englishman."Image: G.B. Shaw, WikipediaThe writer George Bernard Shaw, a former member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, published strong statements against vaccinations, such as these: "The obligatory vaccination is a crime and should be punished as such. ...The vaccine kills more people than smallpox." (From the article Vaccination is a crime, from the magazine Naturalism). "At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox." (Published in the Irish Times of August 9, 1944).In these years, Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t have a religious position about vaccination, either, and it wasn’t mentioned in our main religious magazine, The Watchtower, whose editor was J.F. Rutherford.But JWs had another periodical called The Golden Age (whose editor was called Clayton Woodworth) devoted to general topics -social issues, health, science, commerce, agriculture, etc.- which did reflect the controversy for and against.For example, in the April 27, 1921 issue, a long and detailed article by certain Mr. G del Pino was published, explaining how vaccines work and praising their results.When germs are introduced into the system, the living tissues have the power or farculty of manufacturing colloid substances which clissolve and destroy the bacteria injected. These anti-substances, as they are called, are manufactured in excess and are carried by the circulating blood to all parts of the system. When produced in sufficient amount, these anti-bodies destroy the live germs which are attacking the patient. . . . It may be assumed that the success which has so far been achieved from the use of these detoxicated vaccines represents only the beginning of the ultimate possibilities of the immunizing agents in the prevention and cure of disease.In the September 21, 1921 issue, an article contrary to vaccinations was published. Here is a short extract:Vaccination is supposed to make the vaccinated immune to some certain disease, or at least to allow it to appear only in a mild form. The big question is, Does it really do this? This question is a vital one to us and to the future welfare of the human family; and judging from its past the answser is an emphatic NO.Germany and Japan gave the practice of vaccination the most thorough trial possible by compulsory inoculation, after which both countries were visited by the worst and the most fatal epidemic in their histories. England gave this practice a fair trial, especially in her armies; and finding that an appalling increase in tuberculosis followed in its wake, she revoked the compulsory vaccination laws.More passionate was the article by A.M. Wilton, M.D. published in Twin Falls, Idaho Times and reprinted in The Golden Age 1921 Oct 12, titled: “The Vaccination Infamy”. The article criticises the compulsory vaccination of school children in his county and says things like these:But first, Doctor, we want you doctors to agree among yourselves as to the efficacy of vaccination. Now, as it stands, the best half of the medical profession denounce vaccination, not only as being useless as a specific for the prevention of smallpox, but because it propagates various other diseases.Then the article quotes a good number of doctors from different parts of the world expressing against vaccination.Next, several letters pro and against are published. First, an article contributed by a doctor is published firmly in favour of vaccination:As to the efficacy of vaccination for smallpox and of its harmlessness there can be absolutely no doubt. It is one of the few proved facts with which the medical profession is acquainted. Unlike the treatment for nearly all other diseases, vaccination for smallpox has remained practically unchanged throughout all the years since it was discovered.Then he quotes favourable reports from the "Analytic Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine" regarded as the last word on this. A.M. Wilton, M.D. responded to this article attacking vaccination as dangerous. After that, a long article very positive about vaccination by L.W. Putman, M.D. A few interesting excerpts:THE GOLDEN AGE is kind enough to open its columns to the people; and it would seem that the people would be kind enough in return, to investigate a subject carefully and exhaustively before presenting it, that tlie public may feel, of all publications there is at least one unbiased and perfectly reliable, that being THE GOLDEN AGE. . . . True scholars of the practice of medicine would never think of condemning a valuable proven form of treatment upon the testimony of one case or even on a dozen cases. Many of the so-called new schools of healing condemn vaccines and antitoxins, not through experience but, as the use of these does not agree with their theory of practice, they must of necessity condemn them through prejudice.Next, a reader tells his negative experience with a vaccine that deformed the muscles of his feet. After that, a negative article contributed, claiming vaccination is a fallacy. A letter by Mrs. Mary E. Burnet telling her positive experience with serums followed by a positive letter by A. Murray, M.D. For example:Vaccine therapy, fortunately, has demonstrated its value. Typhoid fever in the army is practically a thing of the past, as a result anti-typhoid inoculations. The value of vaccination against smallpox was clearly shown in stamping out epidemics in the Philippines after the United States took control there and vaccinated everybody.And last, a letter by Mrs. R. Walter Maygrove, clearly disturbed after reading about animal torture to create vaccines. Some excerpts from this letter:Vaccination never prevented anything and never will, and is the most barbarous practice. . . The conditions as one has put it are: "The torturing of calves until in some well-known cases the eyes of the animals have dropped from their sockets from the agony they have endured. Then the corpse virus is about ready to be injected into the blood of some baby or some elder with, let us say, softening of the brain." . . . It I cannot picture the heavenly Father torturing a poor helpless calf, taking the pus from a vile, stinking sore on its belly and giving it to a child, saying, "Here is life". We are in the last days; and the devil is slowly losing his hold, making a strenuous effort meanwhile to do all the damage he can, and to his credit can such evils be placed. ... Use your rights as American citizens to forever abolish the devilish practice of vaccinations.For the following years, the controversy was mentioned in about a couple of issues each year, again with positive and negative (or neutral) letters and contributed or reprinted articles and news stories. But no religious objection was mentioned. At least until The Golden Age February 4, 1931 in which a letter from a certain Chat A. Pattillo of Virginia (EE.UU.) was published with scriptural reasons to reject vaccines. He said that vaccines could represent a violation of divine law on blood, since the serum of some vaccines was produced in animal blood. The article was not an editorial article, the publisher of the magazine did not specify if he agreed or not with the opinion of Mr. Patillo. The matter was not presented like a prohibition, but as an opinion that could help make a personal decision. Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t ban vaccination nor took any kind of disciplinary action if any of them accepted a vaccine. The Watchtower magazine didn’t even mention the topic.As a matter of fact, the 1959 Encyclopedia Britannica, under the heading "Vaccine Therapy," stated:"At mid-20th century, adequate statistical data concerning the effectiveness in humans of some of the virus vaccines was still lacking."Nevertheless, safer forms of vaccination were just being developed in the early 20th century. In 1931 Woodruff and Goodpasture began to use the chicken egg as a culture medium for many viruses (Woodruff, A. and E. Goodpasture, The susceptibility of the chorio-allantoic membrane of chick embryos to infection with the fowl-pox virus, 1931. A.m. J. Path. 7:209-222). Later, in the early 1950s Jonas Salk developed a safer and more effective vaccine (Jane Smith, Patenting The Sun) and in 1954, large scale tests were done on Salk's vaccines, proving their effectiveness and contributing to end the controversy among doctors.Image: Britannica.As for Jehovah’s Witnesses, in 1944, all official representatives of the headquarters were required to be vaccinated.Also, of the approximately 4,300 Witnesses imprisoned in different U.S. prisons during World War II (Cushman R.AND., Civil Liberties in the OR.S. p. 96-97, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.AND. 1956; Zygmunt J.F. Jehovah' s Witnesses in the USES 1942-1976. Social Compass 24, 47, 1977), there was only one group that refused to accept the obligatory vaccinations. So, in 1944-45, a prominent representative, Alexander H. Macmillan, had to encourage these Jehovah's Witnesses to be vaccinated. He wrote:"One of the more serious problems I had to deal with was vaccinations. Some of our boys in one prison . . . refused to submit . . . I told them, We're wasting time talking about the evils of vaccination because much could be said both ways . . . Furthermore, all of us who visit our foreign branches are vaccinated or we stay at home." (Alexander H. Macmillan, Faith on the March, pp. 188, 189).Since a number of individual Witnesses continued rejecting vaccines (apparently because they considered it to be unscriptural), The Watchtower of December 15, 1952 in its "Questions From Readers" section, addressed this topic for the first time. It stated in part:"The matter of vaccination is one for the individual that has to face it to decide for himself."Then after considering some relevant scriptures, Genesis 6:1-4, 9:4 and Leviticus 17:10-14, 18:23, 24, it stated:"Hence all objection to vaccination on Scriptural grounds seems to be lacking."Some of our “friends” like to quote only the negative opinions leading people to believe that there was an official prohibition and that vaccinations back then were as safe an as accepted by medicine as they are today. And then, they usually finish with a melodramatic allusion to Jehovah's Witnesses who supposedly died for refusing a vaccine. But no, no official position existed nor were disciplinary measures taken. However, can anyone give the name of one single Jehovah's Witness who died for rejecting vaccination? Even if someone could offer a name or a statistic, even approximate (and that’s a big “if”), it would have to be contrasted with those who actually died from accepting vaccinations in those early times.It is sad that, as with the organ transplant issue, the vaccination issue is used to promote intolerance and a lack of understanding.(BTW, at the time vaccinations were not banned but controversial, before WW2, blood transfusions were neither banned nor controversial, since their use wasn’t as generalized yet.)Footnotes[1] From Our Readers - Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY[2] Dr. Charles Creighton's article on �Vaccination� in the ninth edition of the Engclopedia Britannica, published in 1888

I’m afraid that is another hoax.Jehovah’s Witnesses do not have and never have had an official position about vaccination, for or against.In 1988, an article about benefits of vaccination was published in our Awake! magazine, and some indignant letters were received. The answer to these letters may illustrate our position:Many things people do in seeking improved health are less than desirable. Some take medicines that have undesirable side effects, believing that the benefits outweigh the risks. Many view vaccines similarly. We consider vaccination to be a personal matter, though one must accept any legal consequence of his or her decision.​—ED. [1]But this question is about a supposed ban up to 1950, so let’s consider this topic from a historical perspective. There was a time, when the use of vaccination was very controversial not among marginal pseudo-scientific groups, but within mainstream science.For example, professor Charles Creighton, wrote an article against vaccinations in the 1888 Encyclopedia Britannica. [2]Image: A cartoon from a December 1894 anti-vaccination publicationBack then (19th century and early 20th century) the main method used to inoculate people was to infect a person with a variant of one "mild" strain of the virus; the infected person had to return seven days later when the pustules appeared on them; the pustule was scraped off and used to directly infect another person, who would then return in seven days.In 1889, Professor Alfred Wallace said that in England and Wales vaccination was the probable cause every year for 10,000 deaths—deaths by five diseases of the most terrible and disgusting character, introduced by the vaccine virus (Alfred Russell Wallace. LL.D., Forty-Five Years Of Registration Statistics, Proving Vaccination To Be Both Useless And Dangerous, second edition, London, 1889, p. 38).Actually, the Registar-General reported 1,108 deaths from vaccination in England and Wales from 1881 to 1907, the deaths averaging one every week during the first sixteen years (The Register Report of Births. Deaths and Marriages in England and Wales, vols. XLIV-LXX).Image: “Death the Vaccinator,” an engraving published by the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, late nineteenth centuryIn the autumn of 1901, in Philadelphia, 36 cases of tetanus were reported, which were admitted to have resulted from vaccination, and nearly all were fatal. After a study of these and 59 similar cases, the prominent Philadelphian physician Prof. Joseph McFarland, an ardent defender of vaccinations, concluded that the danger lay in the presence of the virus in the vaccine in spite of all precautions. (John Pitcairn, The Fallacy Of Vaccination, 1911, citing of Joseph McFarland, Tetanus And Vaccination – An Analytical Study Of Ninety-five Cases Of This Rare Complication, 1902).In 1913, the British National Anti-Vaccination League (of which the famous scientist Alfred Russel Wallace was a member) published a booklet entitled Is vaccination a Disastrous Delusion? The booklet condemned the practice as "a monstrous and indefensible outrage upon the common sense and sacred personal rights of every human being, and especially every Englishman."Image: G.B. Shaw, WikipediaThe writer George Bernard Shaw, a former member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, published strong statements against vaccinations, such as these: "The obligatory vaccination is a crime and should be punished as such. ...The vaccine kills more people than smallpox." (From the article Vaccination is a crime, from the magazine Naturalism). "At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox." (Published in the Irish Times of August 9, 1944).In these years, Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t have a religious position about vaccination, either, and it wasn’t mentioned in our main religious magazine, The Watchtower, whose editor was J.F. Rutherford.But JWs had another periodical called The Golden Age (whose editor was called Clayton Woodworth) devoted to general topics -social issues, health, science, commerce, agriculture, etc.- which did reflect the controversy for and against.For example, in the April 27, 1921 issue, a long and detailed article by certain Mr. G del Pino was published, explaining how vaccines work and praising their results.When germs are introduced into the system, the living tissues have the power or farculty of manufacturing colloid substances which clissolve and destroy the bacteria injected. These anti-substances, as they are called, are manufactured in excess and are carried by the circulating blood to all parts of the system. When produced in sufficient amount, these anti-bodies destroy the live germs which are attacking the patient. . . . It may be assumed that the success which has so far been achieved from the use of these detoxicated vaccines represents only the beginning of the ultimate possibilities of the immunizing agents in the prevention and cure of disease.In the September 21, 1921 issue, an article contrary to vaccinations was published. Here is a short extract:Vaccination is supposed to make the vaccinated immune to some certain disease, or at least to allow it to appear only in a mild form. The big question is, Does it really do this? This question is a vital one to us and to the future welfare of the human family; and judging from its past the answser is an emphatic NO.Germany and Japan gave the practice of vaccination the most thorough trial possible by compulsory inoculation, after which both countries were visited by the worst and the most fatal epidemic in their histories. England gave this practice a fair trial, especially in her armies; and finding that an appalling increase in tuberculosis followed in its wake, she revoked the compulsory vaccination laws.More passionate was the article by A.M. Wilton, M.D. published in Twin Falls, Idaho Times and reprinted in The Golden Age 1921 Oct 12, titled: “The Vaccination Infamy”. The article criticises the compulsory vaccination of school children in his county and says things like these:But first, Doctor, we want you doctors to agree among yourselves as to the efficacy of vaccination. Now, as it stands, the best half of the medical profession denounce vaccination, not only as being useless as a specific for the prevention of smallpox, but because it propagates various other diseases.Then the article quotes a good number of doctors from different parts of the world expressing against vaccination.Next, several letters pro and against are published. First, an article contributed by a doctor is published firmly in favour of vaccination:As to the efficacy of vaccination for smallpox and of its harmlessness there can be absolutely no doubt. It is one of the few proved facts with which the medical profession is acquainted. Unlike the treatment for nearly all other diseases, vaccination for smallpox has remained practically unchanged throughout all the years since it was discovered.Then he quotes favourable reports from the "Analytic Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine" regarded as the last word on this. A.M. Wilton, M.D. responded to this article attacking vaccination as dangerous. After that, a long article very positive about vaccination by L.W. Putman, M.D. A few interesting excerpts:THE GOLDEN AGE is kind enough to open its columns to the people; and it would seem that the people would be kind enough in return, to investigate a subject carefully and exhaustively before presenting it, that tlie public may feel, of all publications there is at least one unbiased and perfectly reliable, that being THE GOLDEN AGE. . . . True scholars of the practice of medicine would never think of condemning a valuable proven form of treatment upon the testimony of one case or even on a dozen cases. Many of the so-called new schools of healing condemn vaccines and antitoxins, not through experience but, as the use of these does not agree with their theory of practice, they must of necessity condemn them through prejudice.Next, a reader tells his negative experience with a vaccine that deformed the muscles of his feet. After that, a negative article contributed, claiming vaccination is a fallacy. A letter by Mrs. Mary E. Burnet telling her positive experience with serums followed by a positive letter by A. Murray, M.D. For example:Vaccine therapy, fortunately, has demonstrated its value. Typhoid fever in the army is practically a thing of the past, as a result anti-typhoid inoculations. The value of vaccination against smallpox was clearly shown in stamping out epidemics in the Philippines after the United States took control there and vaccinated everybody.And last, a letter by Mrs. R. Walter Maygrove, clearly disturbed after reading about animal torture to create vaccines. Some excerpts from this letter:Vaccination never prevented anything and never will, and is the most barbarous practice. . . The conditions as one has put it are: "The torturing of calves until in some well-known cases the eyes of the animals have dropped from their sockets from the agony they have endured. Then the corpse virus is about ready to be injected into the blood of some baby or some elder with, let us say, softening of the brain." . . . It I cannot picture the heavenly Father torturing a poor helpless calf, taking the pus from a vile, stinking sore on its belly and giving it to a child, saying, "Here is life". We are in the last days; and the devil is slowly losing his hold, making a strenuous effort meanwhile to do all the damage he can, and to his credit can such evils be placed. ... Use your rights as American citizens to forever abolish the devilish practice of vaccinations.For the following years, the controversy was mentioned in about a couple of issues each year, again with positive and negative (or neutral) letters and contributed or reprinted articles and news stories. But no religious objection was mentioned. At least until The Golden Age February 4, 1931 in which a letter from a certain Chat A. Pattillo of Virginia (EE.UU.) was published with scriptural reasons to reject vaccines. He said that vaccines could represent a violation of divine law on blood, since the serum of some vaccines was produced in animal blood. The article was not an editorial article, the publisher of the magazine did not specify if he agreed or not with the opinion of Mr. Patillo. The matter was not presented like a prohibition, but as an opinion that could help make a personal decision. Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t ban vaccination nor took any kind of disciplinary action if any of them accepted a vaccine. The Watchtower magazine didn’t even mention the topic.As a matter of fact, the 1959 Encyclopedia Britannica, under the heading "Vaccine Therapy," stated:"At mid-20th century, adequate statistical data concerning the effectiveness in humans of some of the virus vaccines was still lacking."Nevertheless, safer forms of vaccination were just being developed in the early 20th century. In 1931 Woodruff and Goodpasture began to use the chicken egg as a culture medium for many viruses (Woodruff, A. and E. Goodpasture, The susceptibility of the chorio-allantoic membrane of chick embryos to infection with the fowl-pox virus, 1931. A.m. J. Path. 7:209-222). Later, in the early 1950s Jonas Salk developed a safer and more effective vaccine (Jane Smith, Patenting The Sun) and in 1954, large scale tests were done on Salk's vaccines, proving their effectiveness and contributing to end the controversy among doctors.Image: Britannica.As for Jehovah’s Witnesses, in 1944, all official representatives of the headquarters were required to be vaccinated.Also, of the approximately 4,300 Witnesses imprisoned in different U.S. prisons during World War II (Cushman R.AND., Civil Liberties in the OR.S. p. 96-97, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.AND. 1956; Zygmunt J.F. Jehovah' s Witnesses in the USES 1942-1976. Social Compass 24, 47, 1977), there was only one group that refused to accept the obligatory vaccinations. So, in 1944-45, a prominent representative, Alexander H. Macmillan, had to encourage these Jehovah's Witnesses to be vaccinated. He wrote:"One of the more serious problems I had to deal with was vaccinations. Some of our boys in one prison . . . refused to submit . . . I told them, We're wasting time talking about the evils of vaccination because much could be said both ways . . . Furthermore, all of us who visit our foreign branches are vaccinated or we stay at home." (Alexander H. Macmillan, Faith on the March, pp. 188, 189).Since a number of individual Witnesses continued rejecting vaccines (apparently because they considered it to be unscriptural), The Watchtower of December 15, 1952 in its "Questions From Readers" section, addressed this topic for the first time. It stated in part:"The matter of vaccination is one for the individual that has to face it to decide for himself."Then after considering some relevant scriptures, Genesis 6:1-4, 9:4 and Leviticus 17:10-14, 18:23, 24, it stated:"Hence all objection to vaccination on Scriptural grounds seems to be lacking."Some of our “friends” like to quote only the negative opinions leading people to believe that there was an official prohibition and that vaccinations back then were as safe an as accepted by medicine as they are today. And then, they usually finish with a melodramatic allusion to Jehovah's Witnesses who supposedly died for refusing a vaccine. But no, no official position existed nor were disciplinary measures taken. However, can anyone give the name of one single Jehovah's Witness who died for rejecting vaccination? Even if someone could offer a name or a statistic, even approximate (and that’s a big “if”), it would have to be contrasted with those who actually died from accepting vaccinations in those early times.It is sad that, as with the organ transplant issue, the vaccination issue is used to promote intolerance and a lack of understanding.Footnotes[1] https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101989130#h=5:0-10:330[2] Dr. Charles Creighton's article on �Vaccination� in the ninth edition of the Engclopedia Britannica, published in 1888