Recently, my son had a bad patient experience with a local Pediatrician over a case of whooping cough. I know that part of the problem centered on the fact that we did not want to give our son the vaccination. I have some real concerns about what they can do to a child over time. I know I made our first doctor very mad. In fact, she finally said we could not come and see her anymore, if we were not willing to get immunizations for our child. It didn't seem very fair.

So, we became a statistic. Our son contracted whooping cough. We took our son to a Pediatric Urgent Care, and they about came unglued on me. All they could do was talk about the fact that this was my fault as a parent. In the meantime, my son was not doing well at all. He has a horrible cough that was even causing little blood vessels to break in his face.

He kept telling me his right side hurt, and he wanted me to make the pain go away. I shared this information with the doctor who saw my son that night, but he kind of dismissed the issue. He said is probably was due to a pulled muscle from all the coughing. He wanted to focus on giving us antibiotics for the problem, and then send us home. I argued with him for a bit, and finally decided that I had dealt with him enough. So, we went home with medication.

The problem we found, though, was my son kept complaining about the fact that his right side hurt, and that it was not going away. Over time, the coughing was getting better, but he was still crying over his sides hurting. Finally, we decided that we needed to take him back to the doctor.

We went back in to the Pediatric Urgent Care, and got an older doctor this time. After some examination, he decided that he wanted to get an X-ray on my son. After he did, we found out that our son had been coughing so hard that he cracked a rib. Come to find out, this is often a side effect of whooping cough. This new doctor did not sit and lecture my about the vaccinations that my son did not receive. I appreciate that he actually listened to us, and figured out what was wrong with my son.

I realize that not every doctor in the world agrees with me on our decision to be cautious about using immunizations, but that should not have influenced the treatment of my son at the time. It almost makes the health care community seem a bit self- righteous. At any rate, bad news about vaccines continues to be published. Who are you supposed to believe?