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from the and-the-oscar-for-vaccine-education-goes-to... dept.
Catherine Saint Louis reports at the NYT that according to a survey of 534 primary care physicians, a wide majority of pediatricians and family physicians acquiesce to parents who wish to delay vaccinating their children, even though the doctors feel these decisions put children at risk for measles, whooping cough and other ailments. One-third of doctors said they acquiesced “often” or “always”; another third gave in only “sometimes.” According to Dr. Paul A. Offit, such deference is in keeping with today’s doctoring style, which values patients as partners. “At some level, you’re ceding your expertise, and you want the patient to participate and make the decision,” says Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases. “It is sad that we are willing to let children walk out of our offices vulnerable to potentially fatal infections. There’s a fatigue here, and there’s a kind of learned helplessness.”
Part of the problem is the lack of a proven strategy to guide physicians in counselling parents. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a solid evidence base in terms of how to communicate to patients about vaccines,” says Saad Omer adding that although he does not sanction the use of alternative vaccine schedules, he understands why primary care physicians keep treating these patients — just as doctors do not kick smokers out of their practices when they fail to quit. Dr. Allison Kempe, the study’s lead author and a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, thinks the time has come to acknowledge that the idea that “vaccine education can be handled in a brief wellness visit is untenable” and says that we may need pro-vaccine parents and perhaps even celebrities to star in marketing campaigns to help “reinforce vaccination as a social norm.” "Whether the topic is autism or presidential politics," says Frank Bruni, "celebrity trumps authority and obviates erudition."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 05 2015, @12:24PM
Sure, doctors have a right to deny service, but, what's their motivation?
Do you think denying people medical care altogether will somehow strong-arm them into accepting your idea of medical care?
More likely they will go form homeopathy collectives, reinforce their own views of healthcare among themselves and build a political power base... that doesn't seem like a desirable outcome, from the perspective of mainstream doctors, at least.
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(Score: 1) by KilroySmith on Thursday March 05 2015, @07:04PM
I don't care what their motivation is. It's not my job to assess that for them.
You're welcome to try to convince them that such actions are detrimental to their cause long-term.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 05 2015, @11:29PM
Sure, doctors have a right to deny service, but, what's their motivation?
Easy: if you disagree with them on medical matters, that means you think you know more about medicine than they do. Why would they want to see patients who believe them to be incompetent?
If I were a mechanic and I told a customer their alternator was bad, and they told me I didn't know what I was talking about (calling me incompetent), I would tell them to find another mechanic.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 09 2015, @09:47PM
If you were a mechanic, you might also learn to listen to the owner of the machine you are working on - they have hundreds of hours experience with it, while you just get to see it for a few minutes before you are supposed to fix it. Sure, you may have seen hundreds of machines "just like it," and know what was wrong with them, but unless you hear something of the history of how it came to you, you might just be applying a fix for something that isn't broken in this particular case.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 09 2015, @10:50PM
So when the owner says that his car never needs oil changes, the mechanic should believe him?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 14 2015, @03:03AM
A vaccine isn't so much an oil change as it is a patina of aluminum oxide on a thin bare aluminum panel... it protects from further corrosion, it can form naturally on its own, and sometimes putting it on as a preventative measure does more harm than good.
Living things aren't as simple as vehicles, but if you are looking for bad car analogies, remember that Soylent is full of Slashdot refugees.
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