The list of topics in which I immersed myself before and immediately following the birth of our first child: nutrition, sleep patterns, attachment parenting and its discontents, the relative popularity of names we favored.
The list of topics I never got around to: epidemiology, toxicology, neurology, genetics… well, that list is very long.
For that stuff, I figured I’d rely on someone who actually went to medical school. Our pediatrician is a brisk woman in her 60s who has seen it all when it comes to parenting and tends to let you know that. I found that comforting in those early days, and I still do.
When I expressed some doubt about the heavy-duty vaccination schedule tiny babies face, trying to draw her out on the subject, she took a breath and gave a speech I suspect she had just given two doors down and would give again many many more times. She pulled her chest in with the deep, disturbing wheeze of a child with whooping cough. I glanced at my own tiny daughter’s chest. She talked about herd immunity. She told me that mercury preservatives had been removed from nearly all vaccines. We agreed to split up the shots; instead of batching two or three at a time, there would be a month in between shots so we could watch for adverse reactions. My baby had none.
I don’t know how I expected to engage the doctor in scientific debate or that I even knew which side I would take in it: She went to medical school. I didn’t. I admire Elizabeth Reisinger, who talked to reporter Beth Hawkins for her story "Afraid of Needles" on page 12. Reisinger did indeed take on heavy-duty medical reading so that she could walk into her pediatrician’s office "on equal footing," as she put it. Not everyone can do that.
I do, in retrospect, know what I wanted our pediatrician to say: "You can trust me." And I wanted to trust not only her but the whole medical and pharmaceutical establishments as well. But the truth is that — equal footing or no — it’s hard for a modern parent to do that.
