Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Don't like my medical advice? Fine, go somewhere else. Seems perfectly reasonable and rational. If I were these doctors, I wouldn't want to feel responsible for the health of a child whose parents were demonstrably not interested in keeping their child healthy.
FYI not all hippies are against it. I'm an old hippy, and I think people who are refusing them are goddamned idiots.
Doctors aren't always right (like anybody in any profession), but this isn't about the doctors themselves. It's about the science.
And the scientific evidence has shown time and time again that there is no link between vaccinations and autism, and that the benefits of eradicating these types of diseases far outweigh the potential mild side effects of taking them.
As such, I have no problem with the idea of doctors who practice said science turning away patients who want to be in denial about it.
No Shirt, No Shoes, No Vaccine: No Service. Go waste some other doctor's time. It's hard enough for doctors to make a living with Medicare cutbacks, insurance cuts, etc.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
You should have said "Goodbye, cruel world".
brandelf -t FreeBSD
If pharmacists are allowed to refuse to dispense birth control based on their convictions, and churches can refuse to cover it due to their convictions, doctors should be allowed to refuse to treat idiots based on their convictions. Welcome to the free market, bitches.
On the contrary, the doctor has avoided harm to his other patients. Every new born baby or person with a weakened immune system is at risk from the preventable infections his unvaccinated patients bring into his clinic.
A person who thinks a vaccine causes autism is liable to start blaming their doctor for whatever other ailments crop up in their kids life. Which is only no big deal if you don't have a family yourself or reputation.
Why would any doc want that?
If somebody doesn't trust vaccines, why are they going to a doctor in the first place?
The sound science behind vaccinations is by and large the same sound science that doctor is going to be using when he diagnoses you and prescribes a treatment. You can't reject one without rejecting the other.
> The problem is that vaccines rely on herd immunity.
Yes, this is an important point that not much has been made of in the comments so far. There are people who cannot be vaccinated or in whom the vaccine will not produce the desired immunity. So long as these people don't come in to contact with the disease they'll be fine, but if you don't want to get your child immunised and send them to school with some poor kid with a crappy immune system or on chemo or something then you might end up killing them too.
Are there schools that ban unvaccinated children from attending? I think that'd be a more effective way than kicking them out off the doctors list.
I think people today are generally spoiled by good customer service at large retailers like Amazon or Best Buy, where the business writes off 1-2% of asshole customers who consume most of the customer support resources as the cost of doing business.
The problem is, that doesn't extend to small businesses, where one bad customer can quite literally eat up a majority of the proprietor's time and energy, and the business doesn't have the depth to just send the customer free stuff to make them happy. Had that happen with a scout troop I volunteer for a couple times, where one obnoxious parent consumed hundred of hours of volunteer time before they were told to leave.
If I were a physician, I'd certainly trade one marginal (in the economic sense) customer for the freedom from losing sleep at night about whether their child is dying from one of any number of untreatable disastrous diseases. If my patients are going to argue with me about whether vaccines are, in fact, the greatest medical development for humanity in the past two centuries, how on earth am I supposed to be able to get them to consent to any other medical science?
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
A doctor's responsibility is to all of their patients. Parents who are not vaccinating their children are not just risking their children. These children may be brought into close proximity to patients that cannot be vaccinated (very young) or whose immunity has worn off (the very old). As such it puts more than themselves at risk.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
. . . 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.
If you are willing to let your children die, and possibly infect and kill other children, that are not yours, and are too young to get vaccinated, you are to be both pitied and feared.
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...
Tin-foil comes in maroon? Can I get it in purple instead?
On a side note, I agree that it's the doctors' right to see what patients they want (as long as the decision is not based on certain criteria like race/color/religion/gender/etc). Stupidity is not a protected group.
No less, it's reasonable for a doctor to be able to refuse to treat a patient who continuously refuses treatment. At that point, the doctor is simply saying, well, if you don't want me to treat you, then I won't treat you.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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/
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.
What the fuck? "they're causing many narcolepsy cases" - [citation needed] to the max. I don't even know of any mechanism by which a vaccine could have anything to do with narcolepsy.
Then you go and revise history. It was a pandemic, even though not everybody got sick (pandemic has a specific definition that was met). And it was on par with the average flu in terms of mortality, but it was affecting the young and able-bodied disproportionately - a characteristic it shared with the 1918 flu epidemic, which was also an H1N1 strain. Young and able-bodied are both more resistant to infection in the first place, and more capable of spreading it, so there was absolutely cause for alarm.
It was probably overhyped (mostly by the media) but it was not "many kids getting their lives ruined". From what I can find, one person died from an anaphylactic reaction, but that says more about the environment in which they were vaccinated because we know how to treat anaphylaxis. About 30 people had temporary problems possibly resulting from the vaccine, but they all recovered.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Maybe it's the difference between the US and Europe, but here in Europe, not all doctors recommend all available vaccines. I wouldn't trust my doctor if he would recommend that I (or my children) get a vaccine against flue for example.
If your doctor recommended a flu shot, he/she thinks you're in an at-risk group. Influenza is not a harmless infection, it kills 250,000 to 500,000 people in a typical (non-pandemic) year.
Now, I've lived in the US for some time and I've been shocked by the amount of drugs people take everytime they feel somewhat bad. I think there is a middleground between the "listen to your body, it will cure cancer by itself" bullshit and the "omg, I have a headache, let's eat these 3 pills". Same for vaccine.
A flu vaccine isn't like antibiotics or painkillers or anti-depressants or other drugs that may be harmful is needlessly prescribed. A vaccine introduces your immune system to a foreign element, which it then remembers so, if introduced to it again (in a live virus), it will be able to attack it more immediately. Getting a flu vaccine needlessly isn't going to weaken you or cause you to be more likely to be sick.
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.
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