 faith, you have made a good decision, regardless of the outcome. For example, if a person investing in the stock market selected a stock on a whim with almost no information about the company, and the stock tripled in value, most people would say that it was a good decision. We would say that this was a bad decision with a good outcome. If someone else who has investigated a company very thoroughly, invested in its stock and, due to some unexpected bad news, the stock plummeted in value, people might say that this was a bad decision. We would say it was good a decision with a bad outcome. What makes a decision good or bad has nothing to do with the outcome because the person making the decision cannot possibly know what the outcome will be and therefore cannot factor the outcome into the decision.
What most parents are trying to figure out with vaccinations is how to secure the safest future for their child. However, no amount of intellectual knowledge increases one's ability to predict a future event. Imagine a person memorizing all of the past winning number combinations of a power-ball lottery. He would still have no better chance of selecting the next winning lottery combination than someone who knows nothing about the past winning numbers. So it is clear that no amount of knowledge will actually help someone determine what the future holds.
We are not suggesting that you should be uninformed about vaccines and the diseases that they prevent. On the contrary, we believe the more you know the more comfortable you will be with your decision and the outcome. However, there is such an extensive body of knowledge about vaccines that for us to educate our parents thoroughly is beyond the scope of our well child care visits. This is a task you must take on and accomplish for yourself. For that reason we will give you handouts to read that give a good overview of each vaccine and the disease or diseases it is intended to prevent. If you wish to read more, it is our recommendation that you visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) web site (cdc.gov) and go to the section on vaccines. Another valuable resource is the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) web site (aap.org) which also contains an extensive section on vaccines. These two resources contain a tremendous amount of information that supports the current immunization schedule.
Many parents will read something that discusses the negative sides of vaccines. Our most important advice to you in this regard is that you stay away from the internet as many of the resources there are not responsible in their discussions and claims.
It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all of the scientific support for vaccinating your child. One thing which can be said unequivocally is that an immunized community is significantly safer from a communicable disease than a community which is not immunized. The risk to the community from immunizing itself against a particular infectious disease is dramatically less than the risk which that disease poses to the unimmunized community. The fact that significantly more children will be harmed by an epidemic in an unvaccinated population than would ever have been harmed by the vaccinations, is the basis on which public health officials make their recommendations to vaccinate everyone. While this fact may comfort these officials in making their recommendations, it doesn't comfort those parents whose children suffered significant adverse effects from being vaccinated. This is why there is a controversy.
In our experience, parents fall into one of three basic categories. The majority of our families are so comfortable with their knowledge of vaccines and/or conventional medical science that they elect to vaccinate according to the recommended schedule. Second, there are those parents who after doing more research are still unsettled and many of them either do a partial vaccine program (taking the ones they feel the strongest about) or they may delay starting the vaccines to a later date. Finally there are those who, after th