Vaccines are a pain: What to do about it

Photo from flickr use Wayan Vota

As much as I support vaccines, I see the short term consequences. Vaccines can be painful. Kids don’t like them, and parents don’t like seeing their children suffer. That this transient pain is the most common consequence of gaining protection from fatal illnesses seems like a fair trade-off to me. But that’s not the case for every parent.

Today’s post isn’t going to focus on the extremes of the anti-vaccination movement. Rather, it’s going to look at ways to make vaccines less painful and more acceptable to children. The pain of vaccines can lead to anxiety, fear, and even nonadherence with vaccination schedules. Fear of needles and injections is not uncommon, it’s estimated that 10% of the population avoids vaccinations for this reason.

The vaccine schedules are intense. Where I live, the public vaccination schedule specifies seventeen injections of six different products over six visits in the first 18 months of life, plus influenza vaccinations and one-offs like H1N1. That’s a lot of visits, and a lot of tears if a child doesn’t handle them well.

In light of what’s known about the prevalence of needle fears, their potential effect on vaccination adherence (that could persist through adult life), and the possible impact on public health because of unvaccinated individuals, it makes sense to do whatever we can to minimize the pain and discomfort of vaccines, increasing their acceptance to children and their parents. But what works? I’ve personally found Smarties (the real ones) and Dora the Explorer stickers are effective distractions and bribes. But I’m not about to call my n=2 trial good science. Nicely, there’s much more evidence to guide our recommendations.

Good Idea, Bad Execution: Dosing Errors, A Preventable Harm

Crossposted at Science-Based Medicine, today’s post expands on a prior SBP post.

Our desire to practice in a science-based way can face many hurdles, and can even be thwarted at the last possible moment – in the form of dosing errors. The workup may have been comprehensive, the diagnosis could be correct, the most clinically and cost-effective intervention chosen, and whammo. An overdose or underdose, possible toxicity, and a failure to achieve the desired outcome. It’s a completely avoidable, but often overlooked aspect of the practice of medicine.

What’s with the new cough and cold products?

One of my earliest lessons as a pharmacist working in the “real world” was that customers didn’t always act the way I expected. Parents of sick children frequently fell into this category — and the typical vignette went like this for me:

1. Parent has determined that their child is sick, and needs some sort of over-the-counter medicine.
2. Parent asks pharmacist for advice selecting a product from the dozens on the shelves.
3. Pharmacist uses the opportunity to provide science-based advice, and assures parent that no drug therapy is necessary.
4. Parent directly questions the validity of this advice, and may ask about the merits of a specific product they have already identified.
5. Pharmacist explains efficacy and risk of the product, and provides general non-drug symptom management suggestions.
6. Parent thanks pharmacist, selects product despite advice, and walks to the front of the store to pay.

In many ways, a pharmacy purchase mirrors the patient-physician interaction that ends with a prescription being written — it’s what feels like the logical end to the consultation, and without it, feels incomplete. It’s something that I’m observing more and more frequently when advising parents about cough and cold products for children.