How a respected pediatrician lost his medical license - for endorsing informed consent (2023)

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EDITOR'S NOTE:On June 3, the Oregon Medical BoardHe is retiredhis suspension from Dr. Pablo Tomas. However, Thomas still faces an escalation.litigation.

On December 3, 2020, the Oregon Medical Board issued a "emergency order” to Dr. Paul Thomas, pediatrician, who along with science writer, to suspendjennifer perlen, Ph.D., co-author of “The vaccine-friendly plan.“

Affectionately called "Dr. Paul,” the council accused Thomas of posing a public health threat by pressuring parents to accept his alternative vaccination schedule instead of the routine one.Child vaccination schedulerecommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The obvious impetus for the "emergency" meeting, however, was its release just days beforeA studyThis shows that vaccinated patients have a significantly lower incidence of diagnoses and physician visits for a broad spectrum of diseases compared to their vaccinated patientschronic health conditions- IncludingAsma,allergies, eczema, dermatitis, hives, anemia, eye disorders, ear infections, respiratory infections, other infections, breathing problems, and behavioral problemsHyperactive Disorder and Attention Deficit(ADHD).

Thomas received institutional review board approval to use his unidentified patient data for research and publication of the study, which he co-authored.James Lyons-Weiler, Physician.

The study population consisted of all patients born in their consultation. Justified "Relative incidence of doctor visits and cumulative rates of billed diagnoses along the vaccination axis", was published on November 22, 2020 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Although the study did not show that vaccination was the cause of the higher incidence and severity of chronic diseases in vaccinated children, the results show with reasonable certainty that Thomas's unvaccinated children are healthier and require less medical care. System.

Among the patients born at his practice, the autism rate was one-fifth the CDC.estimated national prevalencefrom 1 in 54 children. For ADHD, there were zero cases among their unvaccinated patients compared to 5.3% of their variably vaccinated patients, again compared to the US national rate.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, von 9,4 %.

Looking at the diagnoses of diseases that the CDC-recommended vaccines are designed to protect against, the study authors found a total of 41:29 for varicella (or chickenpox), 10 for whooping cough (or whooping cough), and two for rotavirus. The number of diagnoses for the unvaccinated group was 23, nine and two, respectively.

That's what these numbers indicated17,2 Kinderwho was born in his practice needed to be vaccinated in order for a child to have protection against a vaccine-related disease.

In other words, out of 17 children vaccinated, 16 did not benefit from a risky pharmaceutical intervention. There have been no deaths at the Thomas practice from diseases for which the CDC recommends vaccination.

Importantly, in a complaint letter dated December 26, 2018, the Oregon Medical Board asked Thomas to provide peer-reviewed evidence to support his alternative vaccine approach. When it did, however, the board rejected evidence that clearly showed that no public health emergency arose from their vaccination approach.

Equally important, the medical board itself, while giving Thomas the burden of proof, cannot provide peer-reviewed evidence showing that children vaccinated under the CDC schedule are healthier than children vaccinated under the CDC schedule have been vaccinated. They remain completely unvaccinated.

whileInstitute of Medicine(IOM) recognized in 2013Analyse, "No study has compared differences in health outcomes... between populations of fully immunized and fully immunized children."

The IOM reiterated that "existing studies were not designed to test the entire vaccination schedule" and "no studies were conducted aimed at examining the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the vaccination schedule."

The Oregon Medical Board's "emergency" stay-at-home order accused Thomas of "bullying" patients into accepting an alternative vaccination schedule, but this may be proven wrong.

First of all, it is logically unacceptable for the Medical Association to oppose doctors intimidating patients. This is evidenced by the fact that doctors across the state are urging parents to get vaccinated strictly on the CDC schedule, with some even going so far in their intimidationGet out of practicefamilies who refuse.

Far from the Medical Association revoking the license of physicians who engage in such conduct, the suspension order itself indicates that the Medical Association expects precisely this behavior from licensed physicians.

Second, logically, Thomas cannot be urging parents to accept the alternative program presented in his book The Vaccine Friendly Plan, because that would go against the whole principle of the need for risk assessment. Risk-benefit for each vaccine and each individual.

The specific programming described in the book is just one possible approach to reduce the cumulative exposure of childrenAluminium, A friendNeurotoxinused in vaccines as an adjuvant, a substance designed to induce a stronger immune response.

The board accused Thomas of pressuring parents to adopt a consistent alternate schedule, which goes against the whole concept of an individualized approach.

The medical board's cognitive dissonance is illustrated by the fact that the board's suspension order accused Thomas of not administering the vaccines recommended in his book. Therefore, logically, it cannot be true that the reason these children did not receive these vaccinations is because Thomas pressured them to stop.

The truth is that families have flocked to Thomas' clinic in Portland, Oregon, precisely because they don't want to be intimidated into accepting a one-size-fits-all approach to vaccination. They seek him out precisely because he is known in the community to respect the lawinformed consent.

To the day of Thomas's awakening

Paul Thomas was born in Portland in 1957. In 1961 his family moved to a village in what was then British territory Rhodesia on the northern border of South Africa in what is now Zimbabwe. They were the only white people living in town.

In 1964 a party came to power in Rhodesia opposed to the transition to a democratic regime that would have meant the end of white minority rule. The regime implemented racial segregation policies similar to apartheid and never received international recognition.

When it was discovered in 1966 that Thomas was attending the village school, he was transferred to an all-white school, where he excelled in science and physical education, eventually receiving the honor of the First Year Award.

In 1968 the regime held a ceremony to lower the Union Jack and raise the new Rhodesian flag in its place. At school, 11-year-old Thomas was expected to perform this ceremony as part of his duty as Head Boy. Considering that the new government was an illegal regime, he declined. In 1973, at the age of 15, he was arrested for distributing educational material that the regime considered "revolutionary".

In 1974, Thomas returned to the United States and entered medical school, where he received his M.D. at Dartmouth Medical School. He returned to Portland in 1988 and entered private practice in 1993. In 1986 he adopted his first child and is now the father of nine children, three biological and six adopted.

Thomas says his children are fully vaccinated. In private group practice he did things as he was trained. "I come from a past where I wasn't aware of the risk of vaccines," Thomas explained. “Coming from an environment where I was taught very well that vaccines are 'safe and effective.' I believed in it.

He attributes his initial awakening to readingAndrew Wakefields Studio, published in The Lancet in 1998.

Although the media consistently reported that Wakefield's article fraudulently claimed to have found a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, Wakefield and his co-authors specifically stated that they showed no link . Instead, they raised parents' concerns that their children had developed backwards after receiving the MMR vaccine and hypothesized that there might be a link. They called for further studies to investigate this question.

The main finding of the article was that 12 children who had a developmental disability also had a gastrointestinal disorder. Today there is a connection between intestinal diseases and autismWell established, with much research now focused on questions likethe role of the gut microbiomeregardingneurological problems.

In particular, Wakefield is never credited by the media for pioneering research in this area.

In 2010, The Lancet withdrew Wakefield's article after Britain's General Medical Council (GMC) revoked the medical licenses of Wakefield and his co-author John Walker-Smith.

Walker-Smith, the study's lead author, was the gastroenterologist who examined the children. EITHERgiven reasonfor the retraction was that the GMC found that the authors had erroneously claimed that the children were "sequentially referred" and that their research on the children was not approved by the local ethics committee.

The GMC charged the perpetrators with "professional misconduct" rather than fraud. What the mainstream media never mentioned in their coverage of the study is that Walker-Smith appealed the GMC's decision and won. It was restored in 2012 with the Supreme CourtDecisionThe GMC's allegations against him were "unfounded" and not supported by any evidence.

Indeed, the children in the study were collected sequentially rather than as a single batch and did not require ethical approval for the procedures that the children under Walker-Smith's care underwent because the procedures were clinically indicated for research purposes.

Wachfelddid not joinher co-plaintiff to appeal because the legal costs were not covered by her insurance.

Thomas credits Wakefield with alerting him to the possibility that vaccines could cause long-term damage. He began attending educational conferences and delving into the medical literature. He then followed four of his own patients who reverted to autism after vaccination, with one case per year beginning in 2004.

The fourth case hit him hard. "That was the last straw for me," Thomas recalls. "I just couldn't carry on as usual."

The experience led to what he described as his "divorce" with private group practice. The other doctors felt it was unethical to do anything other than what the CDC said. Thomas felt it was unethical to continue the "standard of care" practice of treating immunizations as a one-size-fits-all solution.

Thomas left to open his own practice, Integrative Pediatrics, based on core principles of providing personalized care and respecting his patients' right to informed consent. He says more than 1,500 patients have come to him and the clinic has quickly grown to over 15,000, with more than 30 employees.

Thomas's clinic attracted many parents whose children had chronic illnesses or developmental disabilities and who were concerned about continuing immunizations according to CDC recommendations. He noticed a marked difference in the health of patients whose parents chose not to participate in the CDC program.

"We started to see that our less vaccinated or unvaccinated children seemed to be healthier," he said. "I mean, it was tangible, it was just palpable."

In 2015, Thomas commissioned a quality control analysis of his patient data, which confirmed his observation. His experience led him to write a book that will help parents navigate the vaccination decision-making process and give them the knowledge they need to make their own decisions.

Thomas's book, published in 2016, proposed an individualized approach to vaccination. He says he knew at the time that he was jeopardizing his medical career because the book "assumes CDC programming" and "CDC programming is sacred."

The vaccinated vs. unvaccinated

The Oregon Medical Board's first allegation came in 2018, and more letters of complaint followed. When asked to provide peer-reviewed evidence to support his vaccination approach, Thomas hired an independent pediatrician and computer scientist to conduct a quality control project, examining the health outcomes of all patients born at his practice.

This was an important inclusion criterion. As Thomas explained: “Most of the patients who come to our practice, or at least a very significant percentage of them, come because they have health issues that they are concerned about that are being caused by the vaccines and are not reaching them can pediatrician wherever they are. they are, slow down or stop vaccinating so they get to the only safe place they can find.”

That meant Thomas already "had a lot of damaged children," while "very, very few" of those born at his clinic had comparable health problems.

Including children who came to him from other practices would introduce a confounding factor that would affect the results. He wanted to know what the results of the different vaccination rates are in patients who were initially in a clinic that practices informed consent.

Thomas then received approval from the state's institutional review board to release the anonymized data. He contrasts the approach he takes in his practice of focusing on achieving good health outcomes with the state's myopic focus on achieving high immunization rates.

"We shouldn't pay attention to how well someone can follow a protocol," Thomas said. "Monkeys can do that. We should look at actual health outcomes, which is what our study did."

As he explained: "My duty is to my patients and we have a lot of loyal patients who love it, you know we honor their consent and we give informed consent and we provide excellent care and we have excellent results that are now in a published study and peer review are documented.”

As co-author of the study and data analyst Lyons-Weilerexplained:

“This study represents a major methodological advance in vaccine safety studies. The results show how often vaccinated patients need to see a doctor for conditions that many suspect could be caused by vaccines. Our measure, relative incidence of physician visits (RIOV), is sensitive to disease and disorder severity, particularly disease burden.”

A problem with observational studies is that they are prone to selection bias. A possible bias when comparing data from vaccinated to unvaccinated patients is the difference in health-oriented behavior. Given the lower diagnosis rates in unvaccinated children, the question arises, either because family lifestyles lead to better health outcomes, or because their children are being underdiagnosed by avoiding doctor appointments.

In order to control for possible confusion between the different health-oriented behaviors of parents who decide against vaccination, Thomas and Lyons-Weiler analyzed the incidence of fever and daycare attendance. because the fever is knownundesirable eventIn connection with vaccination, it was expected that the unvaccinated would have fewer visits for fever.

If the differences in health outcomes could be explained by the fact that parents of unvaccinated children simply do not visit the pediatrician, one would also expect these patients to have fewer day care visits.

As expected, they found that children who received more vaccinations had a higher relative incidence of doctor visits than children who did not receive them. However, there was a stable trend for the relative incidence of day care visits, suggesting that differences in health-seeking behavior do not explain the lower incidence of fever in children who received fewer or no vaccinations.

Another confounding factor they considered was the relationship between the number of vaccinations received and age. Of course, older children would tend to get more vaccines than younger children. To avoid comparing vaccinated children with long-term care at Thomas's practice and unvaccinated children with short-term care, they matched patients between the two groups on the basis of "days of care" at the practice. Since all patients were born at the practice, this was correlated with age.

Matching patients to days of care also served to protect against the pursuit of different health outcomes due to different caregiving behaviors.

It's hard to see how their study results could be attributed to differences in health-focused behaviors or lifestyle choices aside from parental choices not to get vaccinated. As Lyons-Weiler and Thomas point out, if their findings are explained by different lifestyle choices, “it would be objective to conclude that everyone should adopt the lifestyle followed by the unvaccinated if they want to have healthier children. These lifestyle choices involve avoidance of some or all vaccines for many families, and thus concerns about lifestyle choices are intrinsically linked to exposure to vaccines.”

They summarized their findings: “We could not detect any widespread adverse health effects in unvaccinated individuals, with the exception of rare but significant vaccine-targeted diagnoses. We can conclude that children who are not vaccinated in this practice are generally no less healthy than those who are vaccinated, and indeed vaccinated children appear to be significantly less healthy than unvaccinated children.”

Diploma

The Oregon Medical Board, short-sightedly focused on the policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake in pediatric practices statewide, asked Thomas to provide peer-reviewed evidence to support his approach to vaccines.

The board presumably assumed that this would constitute an insurmountable obstacle. However, Thomas rose to the challenge and released the data showing his unvaccinated patients were the healthiest children at his practice.

Rather than review the requested study, the board ignored the evidence and held an emergency meeting within days of the study's release, at which board members decided to suspend Thomas's license under the false pretense that his approach to vaccination posed a threat to the public represents health. .

To back up those charges, the board accused Thomas of "bullying" patients into accepting the alternative outlined in his book, Vaccine Friendly Plan. But this is also a demonstrably false pretense used to obscure the real reason for his license rescission, which is that the board is intolerant of physicians who approach vaccination based on the principles of individual care and respect for the law.

Contrary to what the board alleges, the health results Dr. Thomas' achievements in his pediatric practice are enviable and should serve as a model for pediatricians across the country. The threat that Dr. Thomas advocated was not for public health but for the political goal of achieving high vaccination rates. His suspension was obviously intended to send the message to other pediatricians that they risk having their license revoked if they practice informed consent. The message is that pediatricians must force parents to get vaccinated according to the CDC schedule or risk their medical careers.

The real threat to public health comes from those who willfully ignore scientific evidence and advocate the use of coercion to achieve political ends. It is those who adhere to this short-sighted and unscientific approach, based on denial of the need for individualized risk-benefit analysis and denial of the right to informed consent, who are the real culprits and pose the real threat to health and health. . . our children. our precious freedom.

This article is an abridged adaptation of the author's detailed account of Dr. Paul Thomas of the Oregon Medical Board.Click here to read the full story.