My wife frequents a baby forum where I pop in once in a while to throw my thoughts on some subject into the ring. Recently the topic of vaccinations, or lack there-of came to light.
Here’s my input into the matter, read up.. it’s good for you.
http://community.babycenter.com/post/a32434863/vaccines.
I 2nd embeekay’s words of wisdom. i respect that people on this forum tend to be polite & try to honor the concept of “a mothers choice” i’m going to go ahead and push the play nice envelope a bit more since its such an important topic.
here’s the basic rundown – science has provided us with complete immunity to various nasties that try to destroy our bodies. use them and you are immune, dont, and you are not.
believe it or not, an ill informed new mother really doesnt know better than the combined forces of modern medicine science world wide. if you really want to say “im not letting them touch my baby” because you heard a rumor on the internet that vaccines cause autism and make a choice based off that than lets say, several thousand medical scientists who actually know the subject matter… you’re absolutely in the wrong, and have taken your first step toward child endangerment, and in my opinion a potential neglegent homicide.
either goto med school and learn why you are wrong, or accept the fact that you are not all knowing and go with this simple phrase: “so doctor, what is best for the baby?”
I’ll warn you right now though.. if you do go this anti-vaccination route there is a good chance your doctor may ban you from his service. Its happening quite a bit lately. anti-science parents dont want to vaccinate their child? .. .. here’s the door…
Doctors “Fire” Vaccine Refusers
Posted by on Wednesday February 15, @03:48PM
from the a-vaccine-neigh-keeps-the-doctor-away dept.phantomfive writes“In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had asked a family to leave their practice for vaccine refusal. Pediatricians are getting tired of families avoiding vaccines, which puts their children at higher risk of disease. From the article: ‘Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are “firing” such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor’s responsibility to these patients. Medical associations don’t recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers.'”YouTube Breeding Harmful Scientific Misinformation
Posted by kdawson on Thursday December 06 2007, @02:17PM
from the playing-to-the-emotions dept.Invisible Pink Unicorn writes“University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in videos on YouTube related to vaccination and immunization. In the first-ever study of its kind, they found that over half of the 153 videos analyzed portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. They also found that videos highly skeptical of vaccinations received more views and better ratings by users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light. According to the lead researcher, ‘YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination. Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.’ An extract from the Journal of the American Medical Association is available online.”What the Papers Don’t Say About Vaccines
Posted by on Sunday December 07 2008, @01:40PM
from the headlines-over-reason dept.jamie tips an article in The Guardian’s “Bad Science” column which highlights recent media coverage of the MMR vaccine. A story circulated in the past week about the death of a young child, which the parents blamed on the vaccine. When the coroner later found that it had nothing to do with the child’s death, there was a followup in only one of the six papers who had covered the story.“Does it stop there? No. Amateur physicians have long enjoyed speculating that MMR and other vaccinations are somehow ‘harmful to the immune system’ and responsible for the rise in conditions such as asthma and hay fever. Doubtless they must have been waiting some time for evidence to appear. … Measles cases are rising. Middle class parents are not to blame, even if they do lack rhetorical panache when you try to have a discussion with them about it. They have been systematically and vigorously misled by the media, the people with access to all the information, who still choose, collectively, between themselves, so robustly that it might almost be a conspiracy, to give you only half the facts.”edit – i love this scene from house..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0yXn9XA-5c
David P. Roberts
Science isn’t infallible. Throughout history the experts have made grave mistakes. Dr. Spock (my generation) for example. While I agree with you that “most” vaccinations are safe and highly recommend their use, if you look into you’ll find that almost all, if not all, of them have potential side effects and undesirable results. Granted it is usually a small percentage who are affected by these. I happen to be a parent of a child who at infancy had one such life changing reaction to one of the routine vaccinations (the Chicken Pox one). For her the vaccine turned out to be a much greater threat to her life than the actual disease. You have got to weight the risks and benefits of each vaccine for yourself.
For me the jury is still out on the autism debate. But then again I inherently distrust anything where either the Government or large corporations (big money) are involved. With childhood vaccines you have both.
I’ve been a parent now for 2 decades. When my wife and I started out we pretty much took whatever the pediatrition told us for the final “law” on the matter. But then we had another child and found all the rules had change somewhere in the 6 yrs between kids. Then the vaccine thing occurred. Then we have another kid and the rules have changed again. Then we have another kid and yep, there’s new rules and the ones we used with the first two are considered the worst possible way of doing things. To me it seems that whatever the current fad is what you get from all the so called experts.
Note: With our youngest kid we made them space the vaccines out. No combination vaccines and plenty of time between each. The healthcare personnel didn’t like it much, but we had 2 reasons for doing this. 1) We’d read a study where not hitting their little systems all at once with multiple things helps there bodies adjust and reduces the risks of each vaccine even more. 2) If there was a negative reaction to one of the vaccines we wouldn’t have to go through all the evasive testing we had to with child #2. We’d know which one was causing the problem.
Also, there’s one vaccine we’ve declined (so far) completely for 2 of our kids. This in it’s self is a major undertaking if you plan to have a child in public school. They (the school and healthcare people) tell you it can’t be done. However, we refused to take no for an answer and after lengthy and exhausting efforts on our (the parents) part were able to jump through all their hoops and avoid all their traps to get what we felt was the best for our kids. It really helped having a lawyer and a couple of insiders in the school system in the family.