"Vaccination - A Layperson's Perspective"
EXCELLENT! If you have ever had a question about vaccinating, or have any friends advising you about alternate vaccine "schedules", please click the link to read the whole article and share!Vaccination: A Layperson's Perspective
As a medical "layperson," it's ironic that I'm blogging about vaccination - or at least I think it is. While my husband slaved away on all the pre-med courses in college, I avoided science like the plague (terrible pun, I know.). When he scored within the top 2% of MCAT takers I was pretty impressed, but truthfully I don't know much about the MCAT. While he busted his butt - to put it politely - through four years of medical school and two years of funded medical research, I studied the health care system... in law school. And over the past 4.5 years that he's been putting in 60-100 hour weeks in medical training at the #1 hospital in the U.S., I've thankfully managed to continue to ... not study or practice any medicine. That means that he has 14.5 years of grueling medical training that I don't have. And - conservatively estimated - 28,160 hours. My father has infinitely more; he's seen tens of thousands of patients over the course of his forty-year career as a pediatrician.Clearly, I can't run a google search on a complex medical topic and eventually cobble together a better answer on it than these two can. Not even if I spent ten hours on it. Not even if I spent forty. Not even if I spent weeks. They don't hand out medical degrees for running google searches. Or for talking to midwives... or doulas... or anybody else. Imagine if they did though, and you got in a car accident or you had a heart attack, or you needed a liver transplant or something. Um... yikes.But the problem is that lay people are blogging about vaccination. And they're meeting up and talking about "vaccine choice." They're imagining conspiracy theories and refusing to trust anyone other than each other. And they've managed to convince others of their "practice of medicine" to the point where there are schools at which only about half of the children are vaccinated. Essentially, they're threatening the "herd" immunity that protects us all, especially those who are too young to receive their first vaccines or who are immunocompromised because of a childhood illness like cancer.