Posted on 02/15/2012 1:10:19 PM PST by FewsOrange
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.
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, and a recent survey of 909 Midwestern pediatricians found that 21% reported discharging families for the same reason.
By comparison, in 2001 and 2006 about 6% of physicians said they "routinely" stopped working with families ...
Most pediatricians consider preventing disease through vaccines a primary goal of their job. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and AAP issue an annual recommended vaccination schedule, but some parents ask if their child's immunizations can be pushed back or skipped altogether, pediatricians say. While rates for several key inoculations in young children rose between 2009 and 2010, according to the CDC, lower immunization rates have been blamed as a factor in U.S. outbreaks of whooping cough and measles in recent years.
Parents often voice concerns about autism or that their child's immune system may be overwhelmed by too many vaccines at once. Worries about a link between vaccines and autism arose because some parents noticed their children regressed, or lost some skills, around the time of their vaccinations at two years of age. Another concern centered on the former use of mercury as a vaccine preservative.
Numerous studies since have dispelled these concerns among scientists. Rather, scientists say, it is more likely that autism symptoms begin showing up around the same age children are vaccinated.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Your language defines your intellect!!!! AND unless or until you have a 'perfectly' normal child that does in fact regresses, or is NOT the same child immediately after being vaccinated you have NO clue who is or is NOT stupid.
Seems rather strange given all this crisis mentality over NOT vaccinating the children, why are there NO vaccination clinics all along our borders? Yet it is government law these children must be allowed to go to school.
My father got fired by his doctor after his doctor refused to fill his prescription for gout medication saying that my father did not have gout. This was despite the fact that his previous doctor, from whom he had bought the practice, had diagnosed my father's gout years before and had prescribed medication to treat it for years up till his retirement. The doctor was a West Pointer and former Army doctor and wasn't accustomed to having a patient challenge him.
“In fact Polio is eradicated in the US”
Before arguing against vaccines, you might look at your own argument.
it appears to be “Vaccines don’t work because the illness is eradicated by vaccination”
Gosh, doctors making choices of conscience. Perhaps there is a hope for a free market after all. At least until some jerk decides they have to dispense abortions at the patient’s request.
Does anyone else see the importance of this freedom to treat?
You are clueless.
Of course, we only believe in choice when it comes to abortion.
All babies in a pediatric office are vulnerable to diseases carried by unvaccinated children.
I think that responsibility starts with "first, do no harm."
“The good old days, you know?”
These are not “the good old days”.
The FDA’s objectivity is severely compromised by money it gets directly from drug, device and vaccine makers. It’s roughly 1/5th of their operating budget.
http://www.fda.gov/ForIndustry/UserFees/PrescriptionDrugUserFee/ucm152775.htm
FDA brass is in hot water with Congress for spying on, harassing, and firing FDA workers who’ve been blowing the whistle to Congress on unsafe medical devices.
http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/02/osc-joins-probe-over-fda-employee-whistleblowers/
Should have reported him to the State Medical Society.
You’re fired!
NO MEDICAL SERVICES FOR YOU!!!
The anti-vaccine people are a cult, just like global warmist.
3-4 years ago one of these unvaccinated dogs bit a little kid in my area and the dog had symptoms of rabies so they started the painful shots on the kid and sent the dog to the local vet who put it down and chopped off it's head and sent the head to the state lab for testing.
Here in south Texas, dogs have to be vaccinated every year against rabies due to the fact that rabies is endemic among many mammal populations here. My dogs' veterinarian says other states allow the same vaccines to be renewed every 3 years. The reputable dog groomers will not work on any dog that lacks current vaccination records, and they only accept copies of documents from the veterinarian's office as proof of vaccination. They don't accept the metal tag attached to the collar.
But the cat was out of the bag and across America all sorts of frauds and quacks jumped into the fray, offering all manner of absurd and ineffective and even harmful "treatments," until a series of rigorous epidemiological studies showed that there is no relationship between vaccines, or mercury, or thimerosol, and autism-- or any other illness.
“These are not “the good old days””
I know.
I miss the good old days when children were ravaged and crippled by polio, people died by the hundreds of thousands from smallpox, and all those other wonderful vaccine-prevantable diseases tore through populations making people sick, sterile, and scarred for life.
Damn vaccines ruined it for everyone.
I blame Dr. Jonas Salk, in particular. He was a dirty Jew, you know.
“You are clueless.”
Are you a bad parent, or are you blaming vaccines?
Also, who wants to take their kid to a doctor that also has unvaccinated kids as patients? The risk may be low, but why take it if you don’t have to?
I thought the patients that take the vaccines would be safe.
Incidence Rates of Poliomyelitis in US
In 1953, there were ~35,000 cases of Polio in the U.S. By 1961, that number had fallen to ~1,200, and the number continued to drop until it was, as you said, eradicated. Care to speculate as to what may have happened between 1953 and 1961 to cause this dramatic drop? Perhaps Jonas Salk and the March of Dimes had something to do with it?
It must be nice to be a selective reader. Did you know that before the polio vaccine, polio infections had been decreasing steadily on their own, and actually increased with the advent of the initial vaccines? The vaccines that were supposed to protect you gave polio to kids.
As well as SV-40 and a future of cancer and the precursor to the AIDS virus.
And smallpox didn’t put you in an iron lung either. Not everyone who got polio had to go into an iron lung either.
Not having the polio vaccine PLUS exposure to polio virus PLUS infection, leads to polio and then some percentage of patients exhibit consequences like nerve damage and paralysis. Perhaps that is splitting hairs but the absence of the vaccine does not CAUSE polio. Other factors have to be combined as well.
We also KNOW that exposure to polio vaccine CAUSES a certain percentage of people to suffer complications up to and including death. That is why Congress has created the vaccine fund and given protection from lawsuits to the manufactures.
From a public policy perspective, reducing the number of people who can get and thus transmit polio is a good thing. However there is a point where further using is harming more patients that the threat of the disease. This is the current state of affairs within the United States.
From an individual perspective, it sucks being on the wrong side of the percentages. So if your child just happens to be in that small percentage ... well, your child is still damaged by the choice that you made. Some parents believe that the risk for getting polio is now so low in the United States that the risk of side effects from the vaccine are greater than the risks of getting the disease.
As in all choices, it is a trade off and a risk comparison. I and my kids are vaccinated. Alot of that has to do with the fact that I travel all over the world and to some pretty exotic places ... well did, not so much any more. To my view, the chance of exposure to polio is higher because I did travel to 3rd world countries. Thus to me, the risk of my kids getting polio was higher than the norm in the US. We are also vaccinated against some other rather nasty less common diseases as well.
What I fear greater than the disease itself is a government that takes over so much of the health care industry that what was once my choice and between me and my doctor, becomes a forced program where the government controls what goes into your body, the last truely "private" property.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.