[PROVE] RFD: Why Do Pediatricians Deny The Obvious?

[Guest guest]

”Vaccines may create nutritional failure by inflicting early and severe injury

to gut tissue and digestive function, (19,20) by increasing the risk for

bilirubin neurotoxicity at birth, (37-39) by setting off inflammatory responses

that consume nutrient stores (40-42) or secondarily via brain injuries impair

feeding skill and gut motility. (43) If over-vaccination is triggering food

allergies in children, this too creates nutritional risk: Children with food

allergies have significantly lower height for age and have poor intakes of

essential nutrients compared to kids without food allergy. (30) This means they

don’t grow as well and may not learn as well as peers. "

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Judy Converse is a licensed registered dietitian specializing in medical

nutrition therapies for children with developmental, growth, learning, behavior,

and allergy issues. Her private practice served children throughout the

northeastern United States from 1999 to 2005. She now lives in Colorado.

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Why Do Pediatricians Deny The Obvious? From Red Flags Daily March 8, 2006

http://www.redflagsdaily.com/articles/2006_mar08.php

By Judy Converse, MPH, RD, LD ©

It’s 2006, and for the first time in history, U.S. children are sicker than the

generation before them.

They’re not just a little worse off, they are precipitously worse off

physically, emotionally, educationally and developmentally. The statistics have

been repeated so often, they are almost boring. Obesity affects nearly a fifth

of children, triple the prevalence in 1980. (1,2) Juvenile diabetes is up 104

percent since 1980. (3,4) Autism, once regarded as having a purely genetic

etiology, increased more than a thousandfold in less than a generation. (5,6)

The incidence of asthma is up nearly 75 percent. (7,8) Life-threatening food

allergies doubled in the past decade. (9) The prevalence of allergies increased

nearly sixfold. (9) Almost one in 10 children — between four and five million

kids — have been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder. (10) Nutrient

deficiencies, not seen for decades in U.S. children, are prevalent again, or

still persisting. (11-14)

Much of this happens more often to boys than girls, between whom gaps have

widened steadily since 1990: Boys are 47 percent more likely to have learning

and developmental disabilities than girls, 60 percent more likely to have

repeated a grade, twice as at risk for autism, and 200 percent more likely to

commit suicide. (15) They may also have poor vitamin A status more often than

girls, (16), which increases risk of infection and life-threatening

complications like pneumonia. (17)

What happened? Many have argued that the increasingly aggressive vaccination

schedule is partly to blame. (18-23) In the 1980s, more vaccines were given

earlier in infancy, as were more multivalent doses, most of which contained

mercury. In the 1990s, genetically recombined vaccines came into use for the

first time, and were used universally on day-old infants, who had never before

been vaccinated with anything. Indeed, children are currently advised to get 54

vaccine doses by age 12 — a circumstance unprecedented in human history, and one

that coincides neatly with the escalation in child health problems. If true, by

vaccinating so zealously, rather than making children healthier, as school

districts, federal health programs, corporate health infrastructures, and

pediatricians insist, we have traded mostly benign or treatable childhood

illnesses for incurable, lifelong, extremely costly disability and disease. It

means that current vaccine policy and practice create more morbidity and

mortality than they prevent in U.S. children.

Compelling evidence to support this has been much discussed on this site, and

dutifully brought to the attention of vaccine policy authors: the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health’s

Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Advisory

Committee on Immunization Practices. Even governing public health bodies in the

U.K. have now heard the dissenting voice of Fletcher, MD, former chief

scientific officer at Britain’s Department of Health. He recently chastised his

peers for turning a blind eye to the avalanche of published science and

anecdotal evidence showing that MMR vaccine can cause inflammatory bowel disease

and autism. (24) Efforts to refute these concerns (25) were dubiously funded by

vaccine makers and had fatal design flaws that made autism incidence vanish in

the data set. (26) This rebuttal was never widely read by pediatricians, who

continue to believe MMR, and all other vaccines, are not only safe but

essential.

With our children’s very lives at stake, why do parents and governments remain

loyal to the medical culture that may have led them to this? And as the ship

sinks beneath their feet, how do pediatric providers manage to deny the obvious:

Many children in their highly vaccinated practices are sick a lot, don’t develop

normally, can’t sleep, can’t tolerate or won’t eat a typical diet, become

overweight, acquire preventable nutrition problems that cause lifelong damage?

Worse, how do they defend that they have virtually nothing to offer, other than

symptom-masking drugs?

When I was to become a mom, I asked a relative with three children what her most

sage advice might be. “Throw out your television,” she declared. To this I might

add, Fire your pediatrician. Besides stumbling under the influence of the

pharmaceutical trade, which positions itself alluringly at every step of a

doctor’s education and practice, pediatricians have succumbed to managed care

structures that discourage referrals, dictate visit duration and procedures, and

restrict prescribing.

As low-tech skills have faded from pediatric practice — things like spending

more than three minutes discussing questions, (27,28) listening to parents,

completing a thorough exam for signs and symptoms of nutrient deficiencies,

interpreting the growth chart rather than just adding a dot to it — so has

quality of care. This has left many children slipping through the cracks of a

fracturing health care system, (29) and dumped them into a bin where they

languish with autism, chronic illness and infection, growth regression,

unexplained skin rashes and allergies, and myriad, difficult to label

developmental, learning or functional delays — problems that place children at

even higher nutritional risk. (30,31)

It often felt like my office was this bin. Coming to me via referrals from my

state’s zero-to-three program, non-profits serving children with developmental

delays, schools, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and parents through

word of mouth, my nutrition practice served children from all northeast states

and beyond from 1999 to 2005. These children were from mostly insured, educated

families with good enough incomes to pay me, since most insurance policies

refused nutrition care, except for the most horrific of diagnoses in children.

They were also usually followed at one of the region’s major medical centers

because most of them had serious developmental delays and had to see a litany of

specialists. In other words, they got a lot of top-notch health care.

Every child I met had nutritional failure issues. Not one of their pediatricians

noticed.

Every child I encountered had a nutrition issue severe enough to impact growth,

learning, development, behavior — or all of the above. Nutrition problems in

these children preceded developmental lapses by several weeks, months or years.

In every case, the parent brought concerns for changing signs and symptoms to

the doctor’s attention. No treatment was offered these families regarding

appropriate nutrition measures. Indeed, parents usually reported being told it

was of no consequence or that there was “no proof” nutrition measures could

help.

This is astounding because it simply could not be more wrong. Decades of classic

nutrition science, too voluminous to cite here, are the bedrock of U.S.

government and worldwide programs that have existed for decades: World Health

Organization; UNICEF; Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and

Children; School Lunch; Head Start; Zero to Three; the National Health and

Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES); Pediatric National Nutrition Survey. The

creators of these programs knew that malnutrition in children affects weight

first, then height, then head circumference — i.e., the brain — last. More

subtly and especially in children, it affects cognition, self regulation,

epithelial tissues, hair, skin, nails, bowel habits, immune function and many

other functions and tissues even earlier. By the time a child’s development or

outward appearance has been impaired by a nutrition deficit, the deficit has

already been there a long time. This does not have to look like kwashiorkor to

create lifelong disabilities for kids: Chronic marginal nutrition status is a

powerful deterrent to growth, learning, infection fighting and development.

Pediatricians are not paying this much mind, if we are to believe our largest

data set on child nutrition status: According to the most recent NHANES, poor

status and/or poor intakes for iron and vitamins A, D, E, and C were present

(32) — all of these being, at the very least, critical micronutrients for immune

function. Even the most obvious of child nutrition issues — obesity — is

addressed by pediatricians with their overweight patients only about a third of

the time. (33)

Applied nutrition is a low-tech tool, and it pulled most children I worked with

out of the health care system dumpster. Why isn’t it part of every

pediatrician’s repertoire?

First, it takes too long. A nutrition care visit requires a bare minimum of 20

minutes; I typically took 90 minutes for new patients and an hour for

follow-ups. Parents were eager to pay for the help because it worked. Their

children stopped getting sick, grew again, stopped having allergy symptoms,

slept better, ate better, and focused better in school — all without medication.

Second, pediatricians — indeed, all physicians — are not required to study

nutrition beyond a cursory level, nor are they expected to apply it

therapeutically in practice. This means they may well miss subtle or overt signs

of nutrition problems and, if even if they notice them, they won’t know how to

correct them.

Third, unlike drugs, foods and nutrients can’t be patented, so there is no

profit in recommending them. No profit means precious few clinical trials, no

free conferences to educate doctors about nutrition, no complimentary lavish

buffets, no free air line tickets or corporate jet travel for senators or

doctors, no seductive sales reps in the office handing out samples of omega-3

oils for your kids — but if you wait a few minutes, you might score some free

Abilify or Risperdal.

Fourth, routine pediatric care is now focused on vaccination above all else —

this being the number one topic discussed at well baby visits (34) — and with

marginal to no training in clinical or applied nutrition, pediatricians let the

most pedestrian of child health problems metastasize unchecked, sometimes to

tragic proportions, as I routinely observed. See paragraph two.

In 1998, the American Dietetic Association released a position paper affirming

that health practitioners [be] able to identify nutrition risk and recognize

when nutrition referrals are necessary. (35) National child health trends — not

to mention the children in my own practice — unabashedly illustrate that this is

far from being a reality. When given a test on infant nutrition, pediatricians

scored just above an average grade and lower than medical residents. (36) They

showed “discrepancies” in their knowledge and practice of infant nutrition,

which prompted the survey authors to caution that quality of care could not be

maintained.

Perhaps this explains why a young toddler came to me with a gastrectomy tube

left in for 12 months, on the wrong formula, with no plan for transition to oral

feeding. Or why a constantly sick two-and-a-half-year-old I met was offered only

growth hormone injections for growth regression of a year’s duration, when a

simple lab test confirmed that he just needed a gluten-free diet. There was the

five-year-old who had gained 30 pounds because of a Neurontin prescription she

didn’t need (prescribed for “possible” seizures that were not detectable on EEG,

but concerning signs of which resolved with removal of dietary opiates). And

there were many infants who could not tolerate breast milk or cow’s milk formula

only to be given equally irritating soy milk, when what they really needed was

elemental formula — expensive, but effective; finally, their families could get

some sleep and the babies stopped getting ear infections. There was the

school-age boy who was incontinent, had garbled speech, dysgraphia, and a

developmental diagnosis that markedly impeded academic effort. No one noticed

that he ate fewer than half the calories he needed daily and had a litany of

food intolerances. A new meal plan, high-calorie hydrolyzed soy formula and

supplementation permitted him to remain dry all night and, at school, to write

neatly, and speak more clearly — all without Concerta or Straterra, which is

where his pediatrician’s referrals had led. Another child with autism on

multiple psychiatric medications saw vast improvement using nutrition measures —

for the first time in years, he stopped a daily ritual of smearing feces on his

bedroom wall. Still his psychiatrist was incredulous and refused to be

supportive when I asked if — given the improvements — this family could initiate

a review of his medication doses. In each case, nutrition measures reversed the

chronic health and even many of the developmental problems these children had,

but not soon enough to avoid preventable, egregious, and costly suffering for

entire families.

Vaccines may create nutritional failure by inflicting early and severe injury to

gut tissue and digestive function, (19,20) by increasing the risk for bilirubin

neurotoxicity at birth, (37-39) by setting off inflammatory responses that

consume nutrient stores (40-42) or secondarily via brain injuries impair feeding

skill and gut motility. (43) If over-vaccination is triggering food allergies in

children, this too creates nutritional risk: Children with food allergies have

significantly lower height for age and have poor intakes of essential nutrients

compared to kids without food allergy. (30) This means they don’t grow as well

and may not learn as well as peers. Biased to a belief that vaccine injuries

only exist as extremely rare and severe anaphylactic events, and lacking skill

to recognize disabling nutrition failures in children, pediatricians are least

equipped to help the burgeoning generation of sick children they are arguably

creating.

Vaccines do not create health in children. Nutrition status does. Immune

function depends on nutrition status, not on how many vaccines a child receives.

Even though adults and children are more vaccinated now than ever, the CDC found

a nearly 20 percent increase in number of reported “unhealthy” days between 1993

and 2001. (45) We’re just plain sicker than we used to be, despite using more

and more vaccines. The sooner families have more options for child health, the

better. Whether they find a pediatrician willing to listen and read independent

research on vaccines, or whether they work with a pediatric naturopath or other

providers skilled in tools beyond pharmaceuticals, change is urgently needed.

* * * *

Next: Vaccines, chronic inflammatory responses and nutrient status: Do shots rob

infants and children of critical nutrients?

References:

1 CDC. National Center for Health Statistics. National Health and

Nutrition Examination Survey Data. Hyattsville, MD: U.S. Department of Health

and Human Services, CDC, 1999-2002.

2 C.L. Ogden et al. “Prevalence and trends in overweight among US

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3 O. Hamiel et al. “Increased incidence of non-insulin-dependent

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4 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National diabetes fact

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7 D.M. Mannino et al. Surveillance for Asthma: United States, 1980—1999.

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14 C.E. et al. “Vitamin D intakes by children and adults in the US

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18 E.L. Hurwitz and H. Morgenstern. “Effects of

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19 A.J. Wakefield et al. “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia,

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21 A.S. Holmes et al. “Reduced Levels of Mercury in First Baby Haircuts

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22 J. Mutter et al. “Mercury and autism: accelerating evidence?” Neuro

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26 G.S. Goldman and F.E. Yazbak. “Investigation of the Association

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27 M.G. Burke. “Little time spent on anticipatory guidance.”

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28 E.N. Goldstein et al. Ambulatory Child Health. 1999; 5: 113.

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31 K.A. Pesce, L.A. Wodarski, M. Wang. “Nutritional status of

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32 CDC. National Center for Health Statistics. National Health and

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33 Children and teens told by doctors that they were overweight: United

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34 B. Katanova. New Survey reveals insights into unique relationship

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37 M.T. Niu et al. “Recombinant hepatitis B vaccination of neonates and

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38 Hepatitis B Vaccinations: Belkin Testimony to Congress

Tuesday, May 18, 1999. View at

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39 Notice to Readers: Fever, Jaundice, and Multiple Organ System Failure

Associated With 17D-Derived Yellow Fever Vaccination, 1996—2001. MMWR. Aug. 3,

2001. 50(30); 643-5.

40 C.L. Cody et al. “Nature and Rates of Adverse Reactions Associated

with DTP and DT Immunizations in Infants and Children.” Pediatrics. Nov. 1,

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41 R.I. Harik-Kahn et al. Serum vitamin levels and risk of asthma in

children. Am J Epidemiol 2004; 159: 351-357.

42 R. Yip, P.R. Dallman. “The roles of inflammation and iron deficiency

as causes of anemia.” Am J Clin Nutr. 1988; 41: 1203-12.

43 B.L. Fisher. “In the wake of vaccines.” Mothering. Sept/Oct 2004

(126).

44 C.B. sen and G. Gildengorin. “Serum retinol, the acute phase

response, and the apparent misclassification of vitamin A status in the third

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45 H.S. Zahran et al. MMWR Surveillance Summary. Oct 28, 2005; Vol

54(4): 1-35.

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Dawn

PROVE(Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education)

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