How can I (26F) teach my mother (60F) the scientific method? My mother believes that vaccines cause autism, and other hilariously wrong conspiracies.

Background information: My mother was diagnosed with Heavy Metal Poisoning from having Mercury dental fillings. I believe that my mother functions at a lower cognitive level due to this, but other people don't see it. I'm not really sure if I just grew up and found out that my mother isn't as smart as I thought she was, or if her cognitive abilities have declined over the last decade. Anyway, she experiences constant pain, fatigue, and reactions to most foods. A genetic test from 23andme says that she's unable to process histamines, but I don't know how accurate it is. Another genetic test said that she's close to having Celiac, but not quite having it? She's had a ton of other tests done, but I don't know enough about them to gauge their validity. Doctors tell her that she's anorexic or that it's all in her head. My mom doesn't give a shit about her size, and I doubt that it's all in her head because of how real her symptoms seem to be.

Due to my mother's ailments and lack of formal education, she regularly falls prey to schemes that claim to cure a wide array of hard to treat diseases. She's spent every dollar that she can spare on supplements, treatments (which insurance won't cover of course), doctor (sometimes not a real doctor) visits, and some machine that claims to "vibrate at the frequency of pathogens and kills them".

It pains me to see my mother be taken advantage of so regularly by terrible people selling snake oil. She lives across the country from me, and I only get to see her once or twice a year. My mother lives alone and has very few friends. She spends most of her time on Facebook, spreading misinformation without bothering to check its validity. For example, my mother recently shared a post about a missing elderly man, and someone commented on her post saying that the man was, "Safely found in June". A simple Google search would have cleared it up before deciding to post.

A couple weeks ago, I flew up to visit her and was saddened to see how much all the misinformation has taken over her life. We ended up having the conversation about whether vaccines cause autism multiple times throughout the visit. I'd show her a YouTube video based on scientific research, and she'd show me a video of a grieving family who is 100% certain that vaccines caused their children's autism. Someone who is very close to me has a sibling who has severe autism, and their mother changed professions to become a doctor and learn everything about autism to help her child. When my mom heard about this, she said that this mother "didn't look in the right places". At one point during the conversation, she proudly stated that nothing that anyone said could ever change her mind. I feel like I'm talking to her in a caring and informative way rather than talking down to her, but she still gets frustrated and shuts down.

Whenever I show her a study and explain the method and results to her she tells me, "Well that's another way of looking at it". She doesn't understand human fallacies and claims that she finds personal experiences to be more credible than data.

My mother is a wonderful, empathetic person who has had a pretty crap life for the past 30 years. Her strong belief in lies designed to steal her money and instill fear is ruining many aspects of her life, yet she still thinks every time that this new thing that she buys is going to heal her. It's getting to the point where she's going to spend the rest of her money within the next couple of years and lose her home. What can I do to help my mother?

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TLDR: My mother has some debilitating and confusing health issues and she's spending all of her money on scams that promise to heal her.

Submitted September 26, 2019 at 02:50PM by hvfnstrmngthcstl https://ift.tt/2ltsWFl