Most pediatricians are simply not qualified to assess the risks and appropriateness of any particular vaccine for our children. They limit themselves to speaking about vaccines at the population level and performing check-the-box medicine instead of providing individualized healthcare.
Check-the-box medicine is efficient, but is it effective, helpful, and healing? Is it what you want for your children?
Can you imagine putting up with career advice, legal advice, or investment advice like that? It’s absolutely unacceptable behavior from a professional. The entire point of being a professional is the freedom and responsibility to provide customized solutions that improve the lives of your customers.
Generally speaking, 95% of any profession does the least amount of work possible to stay licensed. You can count on about 4.5% to do some additional learning from time to time by going to conferences or reading in their fields. Only 0.5% are the real problem solvers, the real healers, the ones who love working on super difficult problems and are always learning. They are hard to find because they’re too busy with their work to self-promote. This is why vaccine-choice friendly doctors are hard to find.
If you’re curious, here’s an example of a superior 0.5% dentist whom I know personally. This guy is the real deal. It isn’t surprising that he doesn’t participate with ANY insurance plans and never pushes any additional procedures. He gently recommends and welcomes a conversation and time to think it over.
Most of us are currently with the “I just want to keep my head down and maintain my career” 95% of doctors. Because of that, we are taking our children’s healthcare into our own hands by doing our own research. We occupy the expanding middle-ground of the “vaccine-hesitancy spectrum”:
I started off briefly in the “Accept All” category while my wife was pregnant with our first child, until I heard every pediatrician we interviewed insist upon the Hep-B birth dose without being able to explain why it was important for my specific newborn in terms of the actual risks I knew she would and would not be facing in her first 20 years of life.
I recall thinking: how can such highly trained smart professionals all recommend something so dumb? (The reason is that they aren’t telling us the truth about the real purpose of the Hep-B birth dose, which I will explore in a future article.)
My growing sense of being lied to moved us out of “Accept All” and into the far left part of the yellow “Accept some… Refuse some” middle ground.
YOU are the expert on what is best for your family.
