Vaccines

Close friends of ours, neighbours while living in Brunei, have experienced this bias first hand. They have two children, the eldest being a boy with autism. He, like so many others, started displaying distressing behaviour soon after receiving the mmr jab. 

The average Doctor or Pharmacist will not even have pondered the possibility that the very many such anecdotes similar to that above could possibly warrant serious consideration, or have validity. I think you are the same Linda. Ask yourself if my friends had come to you with very serious concerns about what was happening to their child, would you have kept an open mind?

I'm not sure what you are asking here. Clearly doctors pondered the possibility that the stories were valid and warranted serious consideration, because there has been considerable research on the subject. Most clinical questions come from observations such as these - something happened, and it was preceded by something else...was it causal? Sometimes the research confirms there may be a causal relationship, and oftentimes not. How does recognizing that the research in this case showed that there wasn't a causal relationship make me a bad doctor?

In any given month, thousands of children are diagnosed with autism in the absence of vaccination. Unless vaccines are highly effective at preventing autism, there should also be thousands of children diagnosed with autism in the month after a vaccination. I certainly agree that it's important to listen to patients/parents and treat their concerns seriously. But I also think it's important to be aware of what the research shows, or look to reliable sources for that information.
Linda