I just don't see why living healthily and having faith in medicine/science have to be mutually exclusive.
They don't - but there's a difference between faith and blind faith, and the latter is what is all too often followed in making medical decisions (for ourselves and for our pets). Again, there is no medical/scientific reason to vaccinate our pets annually - and there
never has been. There is now scientific proof that immunity from vaccines lasts at least seven years, and probably the life of the dog. (In other words, it wasn't that after seven years the immunity was gone - it was that after seven years, the study ended.) Yet some people - even some vets, who you would think would have quite a lot of faith in medicine/science - refuse to acknowledge these medical/scientific facts, and continue to vaccinate every dog, for every thing, every year.
As for the autism thing - I'm not exceptionally 'up' on it since I don't have children, but I know for many the connection to vaccines has not been completely disproven - there are still questions there. As far as the three children who went deaf, I wonder - how many children developed autism in the same time period? How many of those were vaccinated? My nephew is autistic, and let me assure you - it is not remotely an "easily managed" situation. Deafness would be far, far easier to deal with.
And if people choose a macrobiotic diet over radiation and chemotherapy, so what? It is their choice, and for many people it has provided a cure. While not vaccinating could, in certain situations, create public health concerns, and so the larger impact needs to be part of the consideration, choosing diet over chemo doesn't pose a danger to anyone other than the individual, and it should be entirely their choice. Modern medicine has the answers sometimes, but not all the time - things we "knew" were true 50 years ago have now been proven to be false; we may find out 50 years from now that we were wrong about many of the things we believe today.
The main point is that any medical decision should be based on information and made with consideration, and not by just blindly following "the way it has always been done".