Talk to Your Patients About…

Vaccines are all about reducing the risk of getting a disease; anti-vaccine arguments are designed to downplay how risky those diseases can be.

Every so often, physicians encounter a patient who still gets sick despite getting vaccinated against that disease. Patients naturally ask, how could this happen?

Herd immunity – also known as community immunity − is simple: Vaccines protect the people who get them but also anyone those people are near – even those with no immunity – because the illness can’t spread.

“What continues to amaze me is that people are really not educated about [vaccines],” said Trish Perl, MD, chief of the infectious diseases division at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “Some of [vaccine hesitancy] has been propagated by the anti-vaxxers, but some of it is just frankly not knowing.”

It’s hard to find a medical myth that’s been more thoroughly debunked than the notion that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism.

Thanks to the success of vaccines, some diseases are long forgotten, like polio and diphtheria. As a result, patients and physicians may not know how these diseases look and the ravages they can cause. TMA’s first Talk to Your Patients About series can equip you to talk to your patients and help them better understand childhood and adult diseases.