I usually stay out of the vaccination controversy (Im in enough other controversies, ha ha!), but my good high school friend, Dr. Leslie Willingham, has something very important to say. Take it or leave it, but I just wanted to put this out there as food for thought: I disagree that parents who do not vaccinate their children are stupid, but this is an excellent video about the current state of vaccination in the United States. The majority of parents that I know who have chosen not to vaccinate their children or alter the vaccine schedule are well educated, intelligent and attentive parents who want the best for their children. I want the best for my children also. I also want the best for my patients and their children and your children. Based on my extensive medical training, I strongly believe in vaccination according the schedule from the Academy of Pediatrics. Please watch this video. Please have your children vaccinated. I am alarmed at several things in this video and in my clinic and in the world: 1) note that NOVA has chosen not to caption doctors, scientists and other experts with their professional titles. Why? Maybe because parents in the U.S. are so anti-doctor and anti-expert and prefer to do their own research and draw their own conclusions from google, from friends, from books they read on their own rather than rely on the opinion of their doctor. This is a real sentiment that is prevalent in the U.S. and in my clinic and NOVA has just acknowledged it by leaving off the M.D. and Ph.D. from their experts 2) Every medication, every treatment or non treatment given from prescription meds to over the counter therapies to heat or ice packs is a balance of risk and benefit. If I hear one more person tell me they cannot or will not take ibuprofen because of the POTENTIAL side effects or risks, but prefer to take percocet because it is safer, I will scream. FYI percocet has side effects and risks and you do not have ulcers or kidney failure. FYI your risk of a compression fracture or hip fracture is a million times higher than your risk of an atypical fracture or osteonecrosis from bisphosphonates. FYI the low grade fever and aches you had for 1 day after the flu vaccine was not actually the flu, it was your body mounting an immune response to the vaccine, which is the intended effect of any vaccine FYI Tamiflu will shorten the duration of your influenza by approximately 24 hrs and it does not work for bacterial sinusitis, which is what you have anyway. And tamiflu has potential side effects. And, YES, I know Dr. Google has multiple articles stating otherwise 3) There is no such thing as informed consent. I spent 11+years in my medical training trying to understand the risk/benefit ratios of millions of therapies or the positive predictive value or the odds ratio and I am expected to boil this down to a 5 minute conversation with my patient who spent 36 hours on the internet reading Dr. Googles most popular articles. I am expected to give an unbiased report to my patient to let them decide on a therapy. Wish me and my patient luck with that conversation. Most of these conversations still end with well doctor, what would you do? FYI I would vaccinate. Even after watching someone die from Guillian Barre Syndrome 4) I know from experience that if you are the 1 in a million that has a side effect, or a cancer, or a bad outcome from your surgery or colonoscopy, that it no longer matters what the risk benefit ratio was. And, yes, that keeps me awake at night every time I prescribe a statin, vaccinate or dont vaccinate a child, or decide not to get the biopsy of a lump in someones parotid gland because statistically it is probably a benign cyst. Which is basically every day of my life. 5) A parent in the video who has researched on the internet and talked to friends at length states I dont know who to trust. Here is my advice, if you dont trust your doctor to be doing their best, to be well trained, to be unbiased and to have your best interests in mind every second of every day, then get a new doctor. https://youtube/watch?v=5xm9mZ9j-oQ#t=50
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 19:17:43 +0000
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