A physician on why she takes a parent’s refusal to vaccinate their children personally:
The fact is, when people tell me that they decided not to vaccinate their children, I am taking it personally.
Here is why.
As someone who works in healthcare, with sick patients, I see every day the injustice and horror that is illness. Preventative healthcare is a wonderful thing, perhaps the best kind of medicine that we can practice. Along with a healthy lifestyle, protecting against preventable illness is a big part of that. As a doctor, it’s quite simply the very best that we know how to do.
So when I stumble upon those internet parenting boards, read the anti-vaccination literature and hear the rhetoric, I see people who are not only rejecting we have to offer, but are vilifying doctors and other healthcare workers–who have devoted decades of their lives to caring for children and families and continue to work their hardest to give patients the highest quality care we know how. And quite frankly, it hurts my feelings. It’s not just paternalism, it’s not about me wanting to tell patients what to do and for them to comply mindlessly, it’s about me wanting to do my job and do it well, always, for everyone. And when I feel like people reject my efforts and recast my motives as somehow evil, greedy, or just plain ignorant, it hurts my feelings.
So yeah, I take it personally. I respect a parent’s intuition and I respect the fact that no one feels great, myself included, about bringing their baby in, making them cry by jamming them with needles filled with seemingly mysterious antigens and preservatives. As a doctor I know fever and irritability is part of the immune process in action, but as a parent, I still hate to see it. The rational mind understands the biology, but I know first-hand that the desire to protect your children from all real or potential harm is beyond conscious thought–it is, pure and simple, instinct.
But I respect science, too, and I have based my life around that. In lieu of religion, I have science. And the impulse to prosthelytise is equally strong. And just like people who prosthelytise about religious faith, I am doing so not to force you to be like me, not to scorn or humiliate you for possibly being of a different faith, but because I care about you and your children and families, and I want what all best evidence I have points to being the most effective way to stay out of my hospital.
