How Doctors Could Improve Childhood Vaccination Rates

[Guest guest]

good grief - McCarthy acolytes?

Huge numbers of us were here LONG BEFORE McCarthy and it is NOT all

about autism - one of the many injuries after vaccination

Sheri

(

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/how-doctors-could-improve-childhood-vaccination-rates/?src=recg

)

How Doctors Could Improve Childhood Vaccination RatesBy

KJ

DELL'ANTONIA

How should pediatricians handle a parent who wants to refuse or delay a

child’s vaccinations?

In November, the question of whether that pediatrician could ethically

refuse to treat the child was debated on the

Armchair Ethicist, and

here as well. Putting the ethical question aside, Dr. Diekema

has a simple answer for pediatricians who might want to turn away those

patients (and in his experience, many routinely do so, some by screening

them before an appointment is even made): Don’t.

Dr. Diekema, a pediatrician and professor at the Seattle Children’s

hospital, wants his fellow physicians to reconsider their approach to

parents who delay or refuse vaccinations for their children. “They’re

not,” he told me firmly, “all McCarthy.”

Dr. Diekema doesn’t necessarily think his fellow physicians should invest

a lot of time in trying to change the minds of Ms. McCarthy’s acolytes

(many of whom persist in believing in an autism/vaccination link). But

many parents who’ve delayed or refused vaccinations on behalf of their

children without a medical reason to do so might be open to influence.

Vaccine resistance occurs in clusters, so the influence of their friends

and communities is probably what prompted their decision in the first

place. Physicians who turn these parents away may be protecting the

patients in their waiting rooms, but they’re missing an opportunity to

protect public health.

In

“

Improving Childhood Vaccination Rates” in the New England Journal of

Medicine, Dr. Diekema invites doctors to consider the reluctant or

recalcitrant parent as a diagnostic problem. A parent who’s read that

multiple vaccines might weaken a child’s immune system requires one

tactic; one who’s concerned with the number of shots in a single visit

another. What’s most important is keeping the conversation alive, and a

doctor who won’t provide routine care to a family that won’t adhere to

the vaccine schedule is one who won’t have the chance to revisit the

question.

With vaccination rates in some pockets of the country shrinking (in one

Washington State county, Dr. Diekema says, 72 percent of kindergartners

and 89 percent of sixth graders are either noncompliant with or exempt

from vaccination requirements for school entry, and at a

Bay Area Waldorf school I wrote about last year, only 23 percent of

the incoming kindergarten class had been fully vaccinated), doctors who

support vaccination (as the vast majority do) need strategies to work

with parents. A physician who’s willing to talk parents through doubts

and fears may be a physician who can persuade a family determined to wait

for all vaccines to accept, for example, the DTaP (or Tdap) shots, which

vaccinate infants against pertussis — a disease that’s still common, and

is most deadly for infants under six months.

Have you had a conversation with your pediatrician about vaccinations

that involved more than the pro forma handing over of the sheet of

possible side effects? Have you changed your mind about vaccination with

the help of a physician, or learned something new from a doctor who was

willing to talk? If you know families who haven’t vaccinated their

children on schedule (or at all), what approach would you like to see

your pediatrician take?

Sheri Nakken, former R.N., MA, Hahnemannian

Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Washington State, USA

Vaccines -

http://vaccinationdangers.wordpress.com/ Homeopathy

http://homeopathycures.wordpress.com

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