Library Mama

Thanks so much for your comments! You’re right that a good pediatrician should be willing to discuss and work with these things, and that they should be discussed up front. Sears does devote space to how to talk about these things with your child’s doctor. LB’s primary pediatrician has been willing to listen to our concerns and work with them. She always makes sure, for instance, to have mercury-free flu shots for him. But there just isn’t time in a visit to discuss things that we might be concerned about if we knew about it, or to construct a whole alternative schedule that spreads out the vaccines while covering the diseases at the important times. She’s willing to work with whatever schedule we want to use, but it’s felt like we need to know what we want first, and we just didn’t. On the other hand, we met once with another ped in the practice. I expressed concern about the number of vaccines routinely given in one visit – 8 or 10 diseases at a go – and said I thought it might be overwhelming to a baby immune system to learn to deal with that many diseases at once. He said that that wasn’t how vaccines work, that the immune system didn’t learn how to fight the diseases based on the vaccine. We asked then how he thought vaccines worked, and he was unable to. One of the more senior doctors in the practice, and he had no mental model of how vaccines worked that he could share with us. And I also have friends who have been kicked out of practices for disagreeing with standard vaccination schedules… though one hopes this is rare.