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Doctors "Fire" Vaccine Refusers
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.'"
FYI not all hippies are against it. I'm an old hippy, and I think people who are refusing them are goddamned idiots.
anti-vax morons "Boys who did not receive the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine during the mid 1990s are now collecting in large numbers in secondary schools and colleges and this provides a perfect breeding ground for the virus" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100330082722.htm
. . . patient stupidity.
If a doctor recommends a vaccine for a child, and the parents refuse the vaccine, then the child catches the flu and dies. Guess what? The doctor is open to litigation. It is a sad state of affairs, but the end result of that lawsuit is probably either settlement out-of-court or a judgment against the doctor. After all, why didn't the doctor educate the parents how they were wrong about autism risks? Why didn't the doctor show studies to the parents so they could have made a more educated decision? The fault will not be on the parents' heads -- at the very least the doctor will have to pay an attorney to defend from the inevitable lawsuit.
Why should a doctor saddle up with 1) Patients that refuse care and 2) Legal risk. If I were a family physician and I had people putting themselves or dependents at risk against my medical advice (A.M.A.), I would "fire" them, too. In the end, we aren't talking about emergency care here. We are talking about medical maintenance, and they can find someone else.
No, of course not. Any doctor will tell you that flu shots are only moderately effective anyway, and of course have to be given every year based on guesses as to the season's strains. The slippery slope argument is the sort of FUD that is feeding the anti-vaccine kooks...
These are pediatricians, so they are more worried about things like MMR, DTaP, meningiococcus, etc. Vaccines that don't just reduce the chance of a moderately annoying winter bug, but have unquestionably saved the lives of millions of children worldwide since their invention.
And from TFA: "Her older child had gastrointestinal trouble and regressed development after receiving vaccines, she said, which she believes were related to the shots." This is the same "proof" by anecdote people wrongly use in the autism argument. Sure, one doctor signed a waiver, but same thing with painkiller addiction, it only takes one doctor willing to sign a prescription, they just have to look hard enough (or be a celebrity and no one will ask)...
I find it ironic that one of the groups that are dependent on herd immunity (Vaccine Component Allergy) is one of the ones that said doctor will kick out of his practice. My son is highly allergic to eggs, which is in many vaccines. We were informed by our doctor that if we did not allow him to inject our son with something that he is highly allergic to we would no longer be allowed to be a part of his practice.
It isn't that we don't want our son to be immunized, it is just we would rather not give him something that results in violent reactions. Especially at the young age that he is.
Our son is as well. The allergist gives him his shots under a controlled and measured process.
Actually it's more dangerous when you are an adult then when you are young.
"Adults have the greatest risk for dying from chickenpox, with infants having the next highest risk. Males (both boys and men) have a higher risk for a severe case of chickenpox than females. Children who catch chickenpox from family members are likely to have a more severe case than if they caught it outside the home. The older the child, the higher the risk for a more severe case...." http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/chickenpox/possible-complications.html
You stereotypers are all the same...
And the article countering this "study":
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
When talking about the wealth of doctors, you need to take into account FAR more than raw salary.
1) Medical school typically results in a few hundred thousand dollars of debt incurred, ON TOP of whatever debt the doctor may have incurred during their undergraduate program
2) Undergraduate debt does not begin to get paid off during medical school - instead, debt increases (see 1) )
3) After graduating medical school, a doctor must atcomplete residency (I believe this is typically a MINIMUM of 3 years) before they can practice. The typical salary for a medical resident (based on looking at the info packets for one of the local family medicine residency programs in my area) is well below the salary for an entry level engineer straight out of undergraduate school. (e.g. an engineer makes a higher salary four years earlier - note the time value of money here.). This is despite the fact that the resident has four more years of school during which they were racking up debt
4) Once the doctor finally finishes residency, they have to pay for malpractice insurance. This is a MAJOR cost driver for doctors.
4) is a major kicker here - Permitting a patient who has refused vaccination to spend time in the waiting room endangers other patients who cannot be vaccinated for whatever reason (such as immunocompromised patients) - opening up the doors for malpractice suits from those patients.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
why should I take even the tiny risk of having a vaccination to protect some idiot who refuses to get vaccinated themselves?
Simple - some people are unable to be vaccinated due to perfectly valid medical issues. They still benefit from herd immunity as long as the herd actually has it.
One person might be highly allergic to eggs and might not be able to get some particular vaccine as a result. However, if everybody around them isn't allergic to eggs wouldn't it be nice if they were vaccinated, thus greatly reducing the chance that any of them will get sick?
Some medical issues really do involve a tragedy of the commons. One is vaccination. Another big one is antibiotic use.
Horseshit.
The doctor who made that claim has been shown as being fraudulent.
There is simply no reputable evidence to believe this. But it's still propagated by people who refuse to accept that the evidence was fabricated -- but now that people believe it, you can't get rid of it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Influenza kills half a million people per year. Since influenza mutates like crazy, it is also constantly developing new strains that require new vaccines, and occasionally strains that are particularly deadly (like the one in 1918, which killed up to a hundred million).
Chicken pox tends to be more severe the younger you get it.
Screw Chicken Pox, I'm worried about whooping cough, which is on the rise in the US since 2004, no doubt due to people refusing vaccines. Ten California infants died in 2010 from whooping cough even though we've had a vaccine for whooping cough since the 1920s.
The man that started the whole "vaccines kill", Dr. Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license when it was discovered Wakefield was paid by lawyers who wanted to sue vaccine manufactures to publish a fake report claiming vaccines kill children.
Parents refusing vaccines are misinformed. Doctors are asking parents to do something to save their children's lives and protect their other patients and the parents refuse. I'd tell them not to come back too.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone