Vaccines?
Choosing whether or not to vaccinate my baby was one of the most difficult parenting decisions I had to make. Back in the day, people were happy just to have vaccines, but nowadays, there is so much controversy around them, you can’t take it lightly. When it was time to take my daughter to her first doctor appointment, I knew that I had to go equipped with the necessary knowledge or be bulldozed by an M.D.
If you read my blog, you know that I am a strong supporter of Dr. Sears. It is nice to know that with all the poor medical care out there and sketchy health care plans, that there is one doc I can rely on. So, of course I read The Vaccine Book by Dr. Sears from cover to cover absorbing all the information (and there is a lot) until I knew what I wanted to do. Sears goes into great detail about each vaccine; how necessary they are, all the ingredients in them, the risks, etc. He also has a website for all the most current info.
Even still, at our first appointment, I allowed the doctor to use fear to get me to give my daughter a vaccine that I wanted to put off. She told me how many cases of whooping cough she had seen that year. My husband, more pragmatic than I, thought we should go ahead and give her the dTap. I squirmed, so nervous that my pure little being would be injected with foreign viruses and toxins, but in the end, she didn’t even cry or have any reaction.
Since then, we’ve given her dTap, HIB and PN vaccines. We gave the dTap separately and spaced them out to be every other month instead of giving them all together. This decreases the toxins and gives her body more time to process the amounts she gets. I chose these vaccines because the diseases were serious or fatal to infants, but after her first year, I stopped the series. She has not had any other vaccines since. However, I will reconsider giving her Polio if we travel overseas and I will give her MMR and Varcella if she does not contract these by age five. I have chosen moderation. I am not sure what I will be up against when it is time to put her in school, but that is not my priority. What is important is that I feel she is protected as best as I see fit. That is every parent’s goal, and we all have to make knowledgable choices and follow our hearts.
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