What Doctors Don't Tell YouA recent issue of GP (22 May) exhorted all doctors to go get their hep B shots. In a perfect example of the old adage that doctors make the most timid of patients the editorial even assured its professional readers that they would not be tested beforehand to see if they actually had the disease. There is even a Hepatitis Awareness week, scheduled for the time we are going to press.
All this lobbying is for good reason. Doctors nurses and other “high risk” health care workers are avoiding this vaccine like the plague. The British Medical Journal published the results of a questionnaire which had gone to 595 GPs. Although 528 believed all GPs should be vaccinated against hepatitis B, only about half had submitted to the jab themselves. The track record for medics on the other side of the Atlantic in America is just as low.This sort of double standard is similar to the one that exists for the MMR and the DPT, with many doctors urging their patients to vaccinate their babies while citing all sorts of medical reasons for not vaccinating their own.
Daniel Redwood DC
Tom Ferguson MD
