BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) - Lori Buher will never forget the night her healthy teenage son Carl fell terribly ill and had to be rushed to the hospital. The diagnosis: bacterial meningitis.
"We couldn't even conceive that it happened so quickly," Buher says. "We were busy worrying he was going to miss his next football game or next fall basketball game or his social studies test and here they were telling us he was going to die."
Carl didn't die, but he lost both his legs and three of his fingers to a disease he could have been vaccinated against.
Carl's heartbreaking story is exactly the kind of thing Vestavia Hills Pediatrician Dr. Joe Hamm wants to prevent. He's made childhood vaccinations mandatory at his practice.
"My personal opinion is they're not asking for good medicine to be practiced on their children," he says. "They're looking for something else. Why would I watch your station if I thought you weren't telling the truth?"
He says parents should be able to trust their physicians and take their advice. But not everyone feels the same way.
Barbara Loe Fisher works with the National Vaccine Information Center. "(Pediatricians) need to have a civil rational conversation with parents and not be bullying and threatening toward them."
But the American Academy of Pediatrics says they do understand where doctors like Dr. Hamm are coming from. They're trying to protect their patients from disease.
They do hope, however, that doctors will continue the conversation with parents who are wary of vaccines. As for Lori, she's now a firm believer in vaccinations.
"What I would say to them is there are so many things we can't protect our children from," she says. "Why not protect them from things that we can?"
