I wish there was just more compassion. No, we don't want to make something difficult. We just want to be acknowledged
My daughter was a victim and she's being punished
Hi, my name is Marissa Gold
I am a parent
I have two girls, ten and thirteen and I'm also a parenting expert with my own parenting company 'Intuit Parenting'.
My name is David Epstein and I'm a pediatric intensive care physician.
I'm Gary Shlifer. I'm an internal medicine physician
I'm Bob Sears. I'm a pediatrician. I guess my greatest passion is just to help encourage a full complete informed consent for vaccinations.
I'm also Marissa.
By trade am a designer. I am also an activist and a mother
I'm Melissa Floyd and I would consider myself an informed consent advocate
I just want to make sure this conversation can be open for people and continue to inform people and to listen to everyone to understand
Why we each come to our opinion on this
The first statement is: I am vaccinated
So I actually wasn't fully vaccinated interestingly I grew up with two parents that were into alternative medicine
So I was not vaccinated as a child, but as I got older I vaccinated myself. Marisa: Well, I was
Vaccinated as a child
But my last vaccine was about 15 years ago when I returned to
college and I had a severe reaction and that I
became
arthritic in my hands. Went to many many doctors and
Nobody knew what was going on and why it was happening and just shocked like it doesn't make sense
You're too young to have arthritis and it wasn't until having kids and sort of digging into my own research for them
That a lot of answers started coming up and I think it's unfortunate that a lot of it is overlooked
For me and I'll continue to get vaccinated
regardless of
The risks because I've seen too many things on the other side
I've seen kids, you know come into the ICU and die from being, uh, getting the flu
I've always felt like the the risks are far outweighed by the benefits of getting the protection
Not getting vaccinated endangers other people
I Will acknowledge, of course as a pediatrician I know vaccines work. I know they give you protection
They vary greatly in what that protection is. It's not like 100% magical shield over you completely but I do acknowledge
there are some vaccines like the measles vaccine and the chickenpox vaccine, that honestly if you don't get those vaccines
Yeah, you do risk catching the disease and passing it to others. It's such a complicated topic
Vaccines and you're starting to get micro with each individual vaccine
and definitely the question was
Talking about the big picture and I think yeah
If you get micro, probably some of these vaccines I think when you're giving kids medication you have to get micro about it
I don't think it's doing your kids any service to
just say X things are all made the same and they're all safe and healthy good for you that everybody's
Benefiting from it because that's false it's not true
Well, we study them before we release them to the public we study them so we do know they're safe
That's the thing is we know. Safe-ish.
You know being an intensive us I see the worst of the worst and so seeing
The other side of kids who don't get vaccinated. I saw a kid walking in with meningococcemia
Which I haven't seen in decades. He had all four limbs cut off
They had to be amputated because it was all dead tissue. You forget how bad things were
before we had vaccines
I didn't step forward for that because I don't like the assumption that
If a child is unvaccinated somehow they are of risk to everyone and also knowing that
Vaccinated individuals can also be caring and spreading diseases
I think it's very polarizing to separate the two as if if you're vaccinated. You're totally fine. You're not risking
Anybody anything unvaccinated children don't just have diseases hanging out in their bodies waiting to unload at any moment
Anybody could be spreading diseases, especially things like polio and pertussis that are not completely covered by the vaccine.
I'd do anything to keep my child safe
I agree I don't have kids but when I think about it, you know
The idea with vaccines is you're protecting all of us you're protecting the group, you know
There's this idea of herd immunity. And so I think that's why it's really important to talk about because
This is an issue. That doesn't just affect you
It affects everyone around you because there's people that aren't vaccinated that are sick or have immune issues
Or they're too young to get a vaccine and they count on her immunity
I think most people too like I started out
Vaccinating my daughter because I believed all the same things that you said
it wasn't until she had a reaction and several reactions that I actually had to look at it differently where I
I realized by continuing vaccinating for her that actually would hurt her and yet everyone wants me to do it for the population
As if I'm supposed to continue to sacrifice my child for everyone else
well
I mean there are medical exemptions for for vaccines and if your child has a reaction and then there's some there's concern
I think that's valid but I think a larger population is using other
Justifications to not get the vaccines, you know a number of families who look into vaccines
they will decide to opt out of vaccines because they feel they are just not willing to
Risk the side effects, but the side effects are the side effects are like one in a million one in two million
whereas the side effects from the diseases when I see all these
outbreaks and things like I'm gonna choose vaccines every time and that's I think right there is the disservice to this conversation because
It is a risk benefit analysis. And what's unfortunate is how downplayed those risks are
I only started investigating vaccines because I ended up with a kid with an autoimmune disorder
So, what does that mean and instead of finding answers? I found more questions. The one in a million is not a real number
And so you're more that that is put out
Is it so people think that no, well not when you're talking about the different kind of reactions
I think the number you're referring to is anaphylactic shock that anaphylactic shock is of course extremely rare
Whereas you when you look at seizures from the MMR vaccine are one in 3,000
But again this creates fear in parents. Well we worry what we worry that you get those on your side kind of downplay those
so my daughter had seizures. Seizures for most people are considered kind of a big deal, you know when it happens to you that that
Downplayed element of well, that's not anaphylactic shock. It's just a seizure. It is just a seizure but seizures can be dangerous
I don't think it's an idea of downplay
I think it comes back to what we were saying with the risk benefit analysis
and I think the data is very clear that the
Benefits of giving vaccines by far outweigh the risks so I don't think it's a question of downplaying the risks. They're there
but we also know that children were dying and now they're not and yes, there's side effects, but they're not as bad as
what we had before vaccines
I don't always trust my doctor's opinion
Anytime anyone whether it's a teacher a friend something I read online my mom, you know my doctor anytime anyone tells me
Oh, you should do this
especially if it has to do with their health I'm going to do research and it's I would be
Careful about saying it's that I don't trust my doctor, but that has that trust has been developed over time
And so I would say in the early years when my children were very young when they would say this is what we recommend
Yes, of course
there were times where I got a second opinion or did the research on my own and asked the questions and I think that as
parents
We have to do that
well, it's hard to trust someone who sees your child for 10 minutes twice a year in the end parents know their children best and
That little office visit where your pediatrician looks at your child
He does not know your child the way you know your child, so it's really hard for whatever recommendation
He's making to be really based and individualized for your kid
So if you were to come to your doctor and say hey, my child's acting differently after this this well visit appointment
Something's wrong
You want them to trust that you have an established
Relationship and listen to you and hear you and understand that as a mother
Just because you don't have the dr in front of your name. It doesn't make your opinion somehow less valuable
yeah, I mean I think like anyone doctors are fallible and they don't know everything and I think it's very important like you're
Mentioning to have a really strong
Doctor-patient relationship. I think that's really hard in today's
ten-minute appointment age, you know makes it really difficult but like as a young doctor
I think there's a lot of distrust when it comes to physician
Recommendations it sucks because you know you spend decades
training and learning and your heart is in this place where you want to like be of service to people and then
You're not trusted but you know to answer the question
You shouldn't just blindly trust anyone's opinion your doctor or anyone. Ironically the doctors are the ones that- Well,
I trust my physicians
My daughter has epilepsy and in March she was also
diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis
I went to the rheumatologist and the rheumatologist said we're gonna put her on methotrexate and I looked at her I'm like methotrexate
That's a chemotherapy
Kimber therapeutic agent that you know kids with cancer again and she's like, yes
But we use it in a low dose and it doesn't cause harmful side effects. You have to trust me.
I said okay and
I trusted her
And I am so glad that I did before all this happened. She was a competitive gymnast and
She used to walk up and down the stairs. Like she was 90 years old. She couldn't hold a pencil in her hand now
she's back on the bars and back on the on the beam doing things which my wife and I
Never thought that she would do again. So yes, do I trust my physicians? Yes. Do I question them?
Yes, I will say look can we do this for her? Can we do this instead?
And yes, you know
I, I can appreciate what you guys have said as
far as people hearing you and I think that's the biggest problem in medicine is that
Time is short clinicians aren't listening and I think that as as a pediatrician
You know
one of the most important jobs
That we have is to listen to parents and I think that if any pediatrician isn't doing that, they're not doing their job
I don't like it I don't I want us to be able to talk I want us to be able to have
Relevant and educated conversations and I think at the core of this
conversation is
What is at the core of humanity and being a parent?
Which is that we all want to do right by our children and we want to lead happy healthy and productive lives
Yeah, I have no
doubts in my mind of how I've come to my decision making on the subject which has been
Tedious and thorough to say the least I did not expect to go down this path in my life
But I have people who won't be friends with me who I've had death threats on social media
I might not even be able to send my kids to school depending on how legislation changes because of the way I
think it just it's insane to me how hostile this has become and it's not doing a service to
Research and science moving forward and just the overall dialogues we have in our culture
whatever the subject what I think is lacking in this debate or conversation is really
Compassion from the pro vac side or pro mandate side. I'll say the people who
Refuse to acknowledge that vaccine reactions are happening or that the things that happened to my daughter were
Connected because maybe it was just a coincidence and I just needed something to pin it on you are socially isolated
You can be isolated by your family
isolated by the medical community
isolated by society as a whole because they assume you're
Unintelligent uneducated and irrational. I wish there was just more compassion that no
We don't want to make something difficult. We just want to be acknowledged
My daughter was a victim and she's being punished what I signed up for this it was a little bit of trepidation
Coming into this because you do hear things in the media
You know about the people who are anti vaccine and the way they respond to physicians and it is a little bit scary
you know as
Physicians we care about people there is compassion on on the medical community side
We wouldn't do this if we if we didn't care
but again, you know
I do have compassion for the families that have gone through issues with you know, with vaccines and
I have a great deal compassion for the families that had children die from preventable diseases
There shouldn't be any hostility. There should be discussion. I mean we can always question things
That's how we of all that's how we get better. If we didn't question anything we'd be still in the dark ages
Hey guys, I'm Kendra I'm Erin and we're from Jubilee media. Thank you so much for watching this episode of middle ground
We try to encourage radical empathy in our work
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