Edited version of a letter to Dr Brian Goldman, host of the CBC Radio show, White Coat Black Art.

I just heard you interviewed on CBC Halifax’s Mainstreet on the subject of vaccinations.

Your comment that the medical community should stop talking down to vaccination sceptics provoked some thought.

The discourse has become so very polarized.

On the one side are parents totally against injecting unknown chemicals and biological agents into their children’s bodies, and on the other side are medical people whose job it is to pronounce vaccinations as totally safe and absolutely necessary without reservation.

These hard stances leave both sides completely unable to hear, or give any credibility to, the other side’s arguments.

I fully appreciate the eradication or near-eradication of diseases such as smallpox and polio. My father had polio as a teenager and might have been crippled by it if it hadn’t been for a doctor who had heard of a then-novel therapy, and the 24-hour administration of that therapy by my grandparents and their friends. So I was grateful for the polio-laced sugar cubes we received in school to vaccinate us against the dreaded disease. Later, as a young adult, I was glad to be able to go to West Africa knowing that I wouldn’t succumb to yellow fever or typhoid, thanks to vaccinations.

Years later, I made a point of having my baby vaccinated before taking him abroad, but I made a point of having him get each needle several months later than the prescribed age. I refused to let him be given more than one needle per visit. I also made sure that he did not have a cold or other infection before the appointment, and I gave him acetaminophen in advance as a prophylactic against fever.

My vaccination choices for my child represented a nuanced response to the highly polarized debate around vaccinations.

I am dismayed that we hear very few nuances coming from the medical establishment on the subject of vaccinations.

The medical side’s latest tactic is to use the discrediting of Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s research as a means to discredit the entire anti-vaccination movement.

This tactic is overly simplistic and won’t work.

There are simply too many anecdotal stories of children, who had always interacted and responded normally, suddenly getting extremely sick or presenting as autistic after their vaccinations. I have met people who have had this tragic experience.

Also eroding the medical establishment’s credibility, in the eyes of the public, is the perception that it keeps changing its mind. In my lifetime, doctors have claimed that:

• diet has no effect on health,
• herbal medicines are at best placebos,
• topical corticosteroids can not have systemic effects,
• home births with midwives are inherently dangerous,
• baby formula is better than breast milk,
• highly processed foods provide good nutrition,
• countless things will not cause cancer,
• this or that now-banned pharmaceutical is safe and effective,

and many more notions that have since been heartily discredited.

There have always been people whose thinking has been different from the medical establishment on various issues. Those who advocated against the opinions mentioned above have been soundly vindicated.

For many people, vaccination is just another issue in this constellation. Soon, they are sure, more evidence will come forward to justify their feelings about not vaccinating their children.

To convince this large group of intelligent and loving people that vaccinations are useful and necessary, you are right, talking down to them will not work, but also they need to be heard and the hard stance of the medical community needs to be softened and qualified.

If a normally bright child’s eyes go vacant after a vaccination before she has even left the doctor’s office, and she never makes eye contact again, the parents’ experience must be acknowledged and taken seriously.

To not do so is to create yet another passionate opponent of medical orthodoxy.

It seems very suspicious that the age when children are getting a lot of vaccinations is the age that autism is considered to be diagnosable.

One root of this problem is the disdain of some physicians towards parents’ knowledge, particularly mothers’ knowledge, about their children.  I was once told by a septuagenarian doctor that as a mother, “you cannot have any perspective on the psychology of your own child,” despite my age, experience and interests. Younger doctors are hopefully less guilty of this fault.

My university degrees, both researched-based, are in chemistry and sociology. I understand the gulf between quantitative and qualitative research and the “soft” and “hard” sciences. There are qualitative research methods, however, that could uncover very interesting and useful information from such stories. Medical researchers should be studying claims of bad reactions to vaccines with an open mind.

One reason that Canadian children are vaccinated at such a young age is to facilitate compliance, since that is when they are seeing doctors for checkups anyway. Apparently, Japan experienced a decline in infant mortality when they delayed vaccination until after the age of two, as a doctor once informed me.

Why can’t the medical establishment acknowledge that there are indeed problems with how, when and with what we vaccinate our children, and move to understand and address the concerns of the anti-vaccination movement? The ball is in its court.