The vaccination brochure known as Forbes.com ran this silly piece on doctors firing patients declining vaccines. Since my comments have been in moderation (or whatever vaccination.com calls it) for twelve hours, I've decided to share them here:
Doctors can't "fire" patients because they didn't hire them. All doctors can do is quit. And as more doctors quit, more parents will realize they were unnecessary in the first place. Childhood is not an illness and as such should not be spent in the doctor's office. Yes, kids will no longer get unnecessary antibiotics for conditions for which those drugs are ineffective, but hey, that's just the price they'll have to pay. And I wonder, are these docs "firing" families in which the parents are not up to date as well? They too could “endanger” kids in the waiting room. Perhaps we'll have to wait for the adult-vaccine push to progress further to hear that talking point emerge.
So quit away. We'll learn to live without the unnecessary and overdone well-baby visits - a brilliant ritual in which the healthy are brought into contact with the ill and infirmed. And we'll learn to weigh and measure our kids without your help.