It's wild to see the number of people who have formed their own opinions on whether or not to get something so simple as a flu vaccine, and even wilder still to see the reasoning behind those opinions. This is the very reason you have a doctor (if you do in fact have a doctor). This is a person who (likely) at the very least went to 4 more years of school and 3 more years of residency than you, and spends all of his or her time professionally dealing with these issues. That a celebrity, a professional opinion-spouter, or a politician could have any sway on any individual's decision at all is severely troubling. When tax time comes around, if I have more forms and issues than I know how to handle, I see an accountant. A pro. If the roof got blown off my house, I'd call a roofing contractor; you know, someone who fixes roofs all day, every day. I work in a field where I went to some extra school to get some specialized knowledge, and there is very little more irritating than having clients explain to me what their irrelevant neighbor or aunt said, and why don't I attempt to factor their non-professional, inexperienced viewpoints into my work... No. No, thanks. How about I do the job I am getting paid to do, which I do all day, every day, and is the reason you contacted me in the first place. Listen to your doctors, people. They have no impetus, whatsoever, to do you harm. Their business and their code compels them to give you good information, honest information. The level of respect and trust given to them seems wildly low, inappropriate even. I have yet to hear from a reasonable, practicing physician or pediatrician who doesn't intend to (a) get vaccinated, or (b) get their kids vaccinated. Where is the respect for professionals who have dedicated their time and effort to their work? I suppose it shouldn't, but sometimes this country still surprises me.

I agree with you. However, doctors are often wrong, nobody fails out of med school so the quality of doctor you have is always in question. In other words, just because it is someones job doesn't mean they are any good at it. I am an immunologist and I don't get flu shots, but I do get (or have) all the others including Hep B.

It is always good to ask questions and to be skeptical of everything, not just giving up critical thinking because you are talking to a "professional". Asking questions, challenging authority and not going with the flow is not anti-intellectual it is intellectual.

Please note, that being skeptical of doctors and then blindly following Rush, or some new age crackpot that tells you that vaccines are a vast conspiracy is not what i am suggesting at all.

I completely agree, and I think you are really just rounding out the point. Asking questions is always a great way to go. The problem is when you objectively take a step back and say, am I giving equal weight to the opinions of my favorite radio host and my primary care physician? At some point, you have to say, I am not going to go to school for another near-decade. I have to give this person's opinion some respect, or if I can't do that, I sure as hell better find a new doctor.

es, I agree. Being skeptical of doctors is not on its face a bad thing. Being skeptical of doctors and then not being critical of Rush or anyone else is.

Lets remember that it was a Doctor (Andrew Wakefield) that we can thank for the vaccine autism nonsense (which is far more dangerous than Rush's rantings).

Ohka:

I agree with you. However, doctors are often wrong, nobody fails out of med school so the quality of doctor you have is always in question. In other words, just because it is someones job doesn't mean they are any good at it. I am an immunologist and I don't get flu shots, but I do get (or have) all the others including Hep B.

out of a class of 160 some, 3 people failed out - people that it was pretty obvious weren't really great to start with. But not "nobody". and btw, people who get IN to med school in the u.s. are a pretty selected bunch. You don't get in without getting great grades, doing well on standardized testing (testing *against* others trying to get into medical school just like you) and have done some kind of volunteer work or internship in the field to show your desire and what experience you can get before entering in.

So your group of Successful applicants has ALREADY proven themselves to be people that succeed in what they do. How many of them would you expect would fail out of school?

They are all paying a lot of money to be there. They have proven that they have money and can take tests not that they can be doctors, some of my closest friends were in med school when I was in grad school and they told me that it was virtually impossible to fail out. You had to literally stop showing up.

Trust me, in grad school and in med school grades and testing don't mean a whole lot. I've been on the admissions committee (as a student rep when I was in grad school) for my immunology program and let me tell you, it is hard to tell from these metrics alone who is going to be good or not. Some with worse grades coming in are the best. Some that look like all stars suck something awful.

I've known (and taught) a lot of med students and many of them are not elite minds by any means. The one thing they have in common..money and beneficiaries of nepotism.

You've had an uncommon experience then. Most med students get out of school with over 100k in debt - just from med school. Doesn't sound like they are a bunch of trust fund babies to me.

The fact is that they DID beat out many others for their place. They might not all be Einstein, but very few aren't bright, and even less are lazy.

So you can imagine how I feel about creationists.....

What an odd grad school experience you must have had! When I went to grad school in economics, at a rising but still middle-tier university, the failure/dropout rate was something on the order of 30 to 40%. Students would get a grade of (say) D in a Master's level Microeconomic Theory course, would be required to take it again, get a C the second time through....and then the Chairman of the Department would politely tell them that they just didn't 'cut the mustard', and they would be asked to leave.

At least at that university, I think the failure rate was even higher in grad programs in such fields as Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.

Healthy skepticism might have prevented an awful lot of breast cancer, imo, back when women going through menopause routinely took estrogen, after years of taking it in their BC pills. I can't offer proof of a connection to increased breast cancer, but from all I have learned it seems a likely possibility. Skepticism followed by becoming informed and making a decision for oneself is each person's responsibility. If the vaccine kills me, well so be it. The scientists will learn something from me for the next batch, I hope. I think I'll take my chances with the vaccine rather than the actual swine flu. If it got a healthy specimen like Sanjay Gupta down so low, an old girl like me won't have a chance.

Ohka -

At risk of making this a love-fest, I agree with both of you - I too am a doc, and I too encourage skepticism (e.g., if my doctor ever recommended iridology-based tests or homeopathy as treatment, I'd change doctor).

However, as a reasonable rule of thumb, it seems unlikely to me that any individual doctor, except in very rare circumstances, is going to wisely second-guess the CDC on this topic...

iwiwiwa:

It's wild to see the number of people who have formed their own opinions on whether or not to get something so simple as a flu vaccine, and even wilder still to see the reasoning behind those opinions. This is the very reason you have a doctor (if you do in fact have a doctor). This is a person who (likely) at the very least went to 4 more years of school and 3 more years of residency than you, and spends all of his or her time professionally dealing with these issues. That a celebrity, a professional opinion-spouter, or a politician could have any sway on any individual's decision at all is severely troubling. When tax time comes around, if I have more forms and issues than I know how to handle, I see an accountant. A pro. If the roof got blown off my house, I'd call a roofing contractor; you know, someone who fixes roofs all day, every day. I work in a field where I went to some extra school to get some specialized knowledge, and there is very little more irritating than having clients explain to me what their irrelevant neighbor or aunt said, and why don't I attempt to factor their non-professional, inexperienced viewpoints into my work... No. No, thanks. How about I do the job I am getting paid to do, which I do all day, every day, and is the reason you contacted me in the first place. Listen to your doctors, people. They have no impetus, whatsoever, to do you harm. Their business and their code compels them to give you good information, honest information. The level of respect and trust given to them seems wildly low, inappropriate even. I have yet to hear from a reasonable, practicing physician or pediatrician who doesn't intend to (a) get vaccinated, or (b) get their kids vaccinated. Where is the respect for professionals who have dedicated their time and effort to their work? I suppose it shouldn't, but sometimes this country still surprises me.

But,But, jenny mcarthy said on larry king that even though her son was(according to her doctors just after his birth ) was probably going to be developmentally deficient(because of her previous drinking ,the fact that he was diagnosed as autistic BEFORE the specific vaccine that is usually blamed for casuing autism was used on him),is irrelevenat. i believe jenny over some silly doctors because she's cute and would not make claims without evidence>sarcasm off!

What do you expect from a [Conservative] culture that is absolutely convinced the universe is 6,000 years old?

I trust my doctors. I've never met one who wasn't working for my best health. I'm of the opinion that nobody would work that hard to get their medical degree, if they didn't have a mission to heal the sick. Yes, I said mission. There is this immunologist on the board that says doctors never get fired. Really. Never. This just strikes me as a very false statement. I'd say the competition of the successful doctoral students requires an utter disdain, and marginalization, of the less successful students. Its a zero sum game, and that is human nature.

I was talking about med school. My graduate program had about a 25% fail rate. However, even in grad school the program doesn't want to fail too many students because it makes the program look bad. Most programs in science, the first year student are supported by an NIH grant, this grant is dependent on the students performance in the program. A 40% or higher fail rate would not be a good thing for the program.