 | All health care professionals must practice in accord
with the state laws governing their health care discipline(s).
Be familiar with your state practice act, and if you have
questions or need clarification, contact your state board.
Contact information for chiropractic state boards is available
online at http://www.fclb.org.
|
| In such circumstance when the health care provider opts to
provide information or counsel to their patients about
vaccination, they have a professional responsibility to
provide their patients with current, accurate, unbiased
(balanced) information based on sound scientific evidence, to
support their patient's ability to make a truly informed
choice.
|
| The Internet has created an "information
explosion". Patients may express difficulty in sorting
through and "making sense of" the myriad of complex
and seemingly contradictory information about vaccination that
is readily accessible on the web. The following links provide
useful guides that can help health care consumers determine
whether various Internet-based information comes from a
credible, authoritative source. http://www.cdc.gov/od/nvpo/tips.htm
http://hitiweb.mitretek.org/docs/policy.html#eval
|
| Each vaccine needs to be considered separately and
uniquely, in terms of its potential benefits and risks and the
relevant scientific evidence base. Oversimplified generalizations
about "all vaccines" or "vaccination in
general" are neither accurate nor helpful. A new report from
the Institute of Medicine summarizes the available scientific
evidence on the possibility of cumulative effects from receiving
multiple vaccinations. The IOM report "Immunization Safety
Review: Multiple Immunizations and Immune Dysfunction" is
available online . Link to report.
|
| FAQ/Fact Sheets about vaccination are also available
online, and are one option used by many health care consumers who
seek reliable, authoritative, and "user-friendly"
summaries of scientific evidence-based information. Link
to more information.
|
| Most patients may not readily understand that "scientific
evidence" is a very different concept from "legal
evidence", and that each carries a very different
standard for weighing the benefits vs. risks of vaccination or
whether vaccination causes negative outcomes. We have
briefly described elsewhere in this website the different
types of scientific evidence for establishing causation
(Authoritative Sources)
and we have cited in our online bibliography the scientific
evidence on vaccination (Bibliography).
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a
national vaccine safety surveillance program that collects and
analyzes information from reports of adverse events following
immunization, which contributes to building the "scientific
evidence" about vaccination. VAERS encourages the
reporting of any clinically significant adverse event that
occurs after the administration of any vaccine licensed in the
United States. Patients and health care providers should
report clinically significant post-vaccination adverse events
even if they are unsure whether a vaccine caused the
event.
VAERS website: http://www.vaers.org/vaers.htm
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act created the
Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) to compensate
individuals whose injuries may have been caused by vaccines
recommended by the CDC for routine use. The standard of legal
evidence for compensation under VICP allows a statutory
"presumption of causation" which is a very different
standard than that of scientific evidence of causation. The
Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) is separate from
the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Reporting
an event to VAERS does not file a claim for compensation to
the VICP.
VICP website: http://bhpr.hrsa.gov/vicp |
