to not expect my dr to give me such a hard time over vaccinations

[squimlet]

So we have decided to delay giving dd her mmr vaccinations. she has glue ear and persistant coughs and colds and we have decided to delay giving it to her till she is up and running a bit better - even it thats a few years down the line.
So this morning my dr started giving me a hard time over it saying that she will catch this that and the other and then she will be infertile and her children might be brain damaged and do I want that on my concience. How would that make me feel knowing it was my fault etc etc.
I just nodded and smiled but Oh god inside I was boiling with rage. I so wanted to tell him to bugger off but refrained.

Read OP and half the thread (sorry)

GPs shouldn't patronise and upset their patients.. the days of "here take this yellow pill followed by the red pill" are gone.

You're reasonable to get annoyed, and to delay if your child is ill.

I'm sure all doctors operate in good faith. But the targets make them follow up and pressurise. People have even been crossed off gp's lists due to the targets so it's wrong to say they don't make any difference.

Not all GPs are like your GP, unless he was having a very bad day.

and by the way wanted to applaud shabster from early on in the thread

Measles can be nasty (esp with vitamin A deficiency), rubella can obviously be nasty for an unborn baby. So I get the logic of those 2. But Mumps? Mumps is usually mild in children- in a 1/3 of cases the child doesn't know they have it. Mumps can be nasty in adults, but if you vaccinate children with a vaccine that isn't lifelong, and doesn't work all that well (which we do now) then doesn't that just increase the risk of getting it as adults (as the vaccine induced immunity wears off).

That's why I don't understand the logic behind mumps vaccine. Wouldn't it be better for everyone to be exposed a children and therefore get a good chance at developing lifelong immunity naturally.

I suppose we'll just have to wait and see if the mumps numbers in adults go up (although it'll be hard to tell as mumps data wasn't even recorded until the intro of the MMR).

Measles is very rarely nasty in healthy, strong children.

There is no link between MMR vaccine and autism.

But there are lots and lots of other nasty things in vaccines (aluminium for one) that I wouldn't want near my children.

Doctors are not gods. Don't let them make you feel bad about decisions you make for your children.

Shabster, your doctor sounds very unprofessional - fancy refusing to treat an unvaccinated child. Probably the same kind of doctor that would dismiss convulsions in a child vaccinated six hours earlier as a coincidence. That happened to my nephew. He's ok but convulsions? FFS.

i respect op reasons for delay however my friend's son had measles at 11 months and it was awful - he survived but was in hospital for ages

i wonder if single vaccinations might be the answer for your child?

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7259338.stm

This will have been transferred without analysis from an HPA press release. Analysis of measles figures and the threat of an epidemic (which has been imminent for about ten years by the way) can be found elsewhere on the net.

I think some doctors and HVs do the 'hard sell' and some don't.

My initial GP and HV were very hot on MMR and even tho we had single measles jabs and intend to get ds mumps at 7 and dd rubella at 10ish they still kept trying to get us to have the MMR for a booster The single measles jab is considerably more effective than MMR and in most cases a booster is not needed anyway

However we recently moved house and doctor and took ds for his pre school boosters and they were absolutelyt fine about him not having the MMR

The BBC reporting on the MMR/measles etc is absolutely shocking. Totally full of errors repeatedly. Watch any other channel. It does make me wonder about their reporting elsewhere in other subjects that I'd find it harder to spot the errors.

When I wrote to the dept of health and said that confidence in the MMR was low they wrote back to say not at all, that most people vaccinated and coverage was very high indeed and I was totally misinformed.

So I don't know why they keep on whinging about vaccine coverage (especially when most of the 'no-MMR' cases will have had single measles anyway).

Yurt you are right about the BBC coverage of MMR. I know.

I want to know how long the vaccines last for? I don't believe anybody knows they give lifelong coverage even with boosters. We're all guinea pigs.

Reckon we're going to have lots of adults with mumps and measles and chicken pox if they bring in that vaccine too.

We've already had one student mumps epidemic that spread into the wider adult population. And we're always introducing new "boosters" which really tells you something.

Wrong of the GP to be so patronising.

You may well know your child better than anyone else. The Gp knows medicine. Perhaps you could work together on this one?

The GP may well know medicine but personally, I'm not satisfied that enough is known about vaccines - their contents and administration - to want them for my kids.

Do you really think not enough is known about the content of vaccines and how they are administered? Really? So people just inject "stuff"? have you been reading some dodgy websites?

No, no dodgy websites. Just enough reading around to discover that elements like aluminium aren't really the greatest thing to introduce to the human body in large amounts.

one example of further reading

well they did eventually remove thimerosal from routine paediatric jabs. Unfortunately the UK was 5 years behind Oz/NZ and the US.

Yes and those vaccines containing thimerosal are routinely used in Africa and India because the pharmaceutical companies aren't as regulated there.

You really cannot blame UK parents for being suspicious and questioning.

I wouldn't willingly introduce aluminium "in large amounts" in my body or my children's. Luckily, none of us need antacids for any gastric problems. Luckily, vaccinations have been fine for us all.

I don't blame "UK parents for being suspicious and questioning". I find it sad that some reading on dodgy websites replaces knowledge gained in more formal ways.

and parents in India get pissed off with dodgy vaccines too Even when the diseases are life threatening. china too

But how can you be so very sure vaccines have been fine for all of us? I don't think anyone can be so certain. I'm not.

And I don't read dodgy website, thanks. Some consider any reading material questioning vaccinations to be dodgy.

There is an NHS page for vaccine damage claims... . just trying to find it again.

By "us" I meant my family. I wouldn't want to trial untested vaccines but I really don't have a problem with the ones currently in use in the UK. A leap of faith? Perhaps. But better to trust the medics than some people who have a book to sell or some other dubious or monetary gain from their stance.

But I thought that when I vaccinated ds1 Cristina. I was pretty pissed off to later find out that other countries thought thimerosal shouldn't be in paediatric jabs.

Book wise Richard Halvorsen is an NHS GP who has written about vaccinations. He has put his money where his mouth is and offers his NHS patients single jabs. He also recommends most standard jabs at the end of the book (having pointed out the 'real story'- tabloidy I apologise I can't think how else to put it- behind them.

And it is well referenced so easy to track down the source material to verify for yourself.

Oh, the old thimerosal again. I don't know the ins and outs of it. Do you know it was well known stuff and there was a conspiracy to keep injecting it? Or was there genuinely not enough known about it? Did it actually do any damage? Was it withdrawn because of political pressure rather than any scientific need? Not trying to be controversial here, really i'm not, but it pisses me off big time (there, i admit it) when people think they know better than others just because they;'ve read it somewhere and it kinda made sense at the time of reading.