No shoes, no shots, no service. Really?

Me? I love vaccines. I’m allll for them — the whole course of shots.

I love knowing that my kids aren’t going to get rubella, whatever rubella is. I love knowing that I’ll likely never have to nurse my kids through a bout of chicken pox, or fear they’ll succumb to meningitis, or even miss school over the annual flu. I don’t have to worry that they’ll be one of the new cases of whooping cough, which is cropping up in some parts of our state.

All of that and they aren’t any more predisposed to autism than they were at birth! Such a bonus.

Despite my vaccination enthusiasm, I nonetheless cannot get on board with pediatricians offices that kick out patients for either refusing any vaccines or not staying on the recommended schedule.

In the case of the former, I think doctors are missing an opportunity to educate and to care for children who may need it. Yes, they’re putting other children at risk — so these families might need to be asked to sit in a room, rather than the general waiting area.

As for going off schedule, why kick these kids out? Jessica Ashley at Yahoo! Shine interviewed Dr. Scott J. Goldstein of the Northwestern Children’s Practice in Chicago. He said going off schedule puts kids at risk, since the shots are given when the kids are most vulnerable to the particular diseases.

I don’t actually buy that reason, but instead think it has to do with paperwork, which he alludes to:

“It is a minority of our patients who opt to go off the schedule recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and CDC (Centers for Disease Control) or not have vaccines at all,” Dr. Goldstein said. “This makes it very complicated for our staff to follow. We don’t just ask those families to leave. We give them every opportunity to ask questions, to schedule vaccines, to work with us.”

I’m an off-scheduler and have been since my first child was born. We had a great pediatrician said that if our daughter wasn’t going to be in daycare right away (she wasn’t) we could delay some of the shots, which meant she only had to have two at the most during any of the three thousand well-baby visits kids have during their first year of life.

We moved when my daughter was around six months old and our new pediatrician also didn’t mind the spread out shot schedule. He just looked at her file and made sure we kept up.

We moved again when she was two and that next office was less enthusiastic, but by then she was mostly caught up. Of course, I had another baby and insisted on the two-shot limit. They lectured but complied.

Then, we moved again. And that’s when we landed in this pediatrician’s office. She was very much opposed to the delayed schedule but somehow I dragged it out while avoiding getting the boot.

At this same office, I listened as an uninsured mother was asking what the shots would cost out-of-pocket — the front office didn’t have a price list but gave estimates and it was in the hundreds of dollars. So that mom wanted to go piece-meal, too. But obviously for financial reasons. So I wonder what Goldstein would say about that? Unless they’re giving shots away for free …

We wound up switching to a lovely family doctor, who refers to the shot schedule, doesn’t mind spacing them out and yet still makes sure my kids are all current. Doesn’t seem complicated at all!

I think doctors are right to encourage their patients to understand the science behind immunizations and the junk science behind the autism connection — not easy, I realize, the way health care works right now. But in the end, if they want parents to have some agency in their children’s health, why would they undermine that by saying there’s only one way to have healthy kids?

Photo: dirvish via flickr

Babble Baby Guide: 10 Vaccines Recommended for Your Baby

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