We must convince our physicians and nurses to write letters to medical journals reporting our adverse reactions to vaccines.

I'm a grad student at a medical school campus. All students here must get a Hep B vaccine. After my first dose last August, chronic fatigue set in. After my second dose in September, I got vertigo and Arthritis in my neck and I began to fatigue mentally very quickly while reading. After the third dose this February, I have become even more fatigued, now sleep about 16 hours per day, and have headaches with an "itchy brain" feeling. My EEG shows very high amplitude theta activity in especially the frontal and left temporal lobes; I haven't gotten an MRI yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it showed MS.

I have decided to go back to the student health clinic where I got my vaccine. I am going to tell them, "I've had this reaction to the Hep B vaccine. Please report it to a journal."

This is not a popular statement in Public Health, the department through which I'm enrolled. Public Health is about the greater good, and the greater good will be jeopardized if a few people's adverse reactions scare off others who are at less or zero risk of such reactions. It might be more expedient to look the other way.

What do you suppose will happen? Will I get the brush-off? How many of our doctors and nurses will tell us "we haven't heard of such a thing" and then neglect to report such a thing, a self-fulfilling prophecy?

There have been a few published reports in the "real" medical journals but it will take a lot more reports before this issue is taken seriously. For medical and nursing students and professionals to report their own reactions will lend credibility to the reports.

For insight into the paternalistic "establishment" mindsets of medicine and public health I recommend two books: _The Social Transformation of American Medicine_ by Paul Starr and _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ by Karl Popper.

The internet is shifting the balance of power toward consumers, but don't imagine that playing here in our CureZone sandbox will be enough: Not everyone reads CureZone, right? Let's regroup here for moral support, but let's also take the info-battle to the enemy front lines. This is just a fancy way of saying: Insist that your medical professional report (and therefore acknowledge) your symptoms. If they refuse, do it yourself. Some journals (bmj.com is one; see their "Rapid Response") will publish well-reasoned comments by practically anyone.

-Anonymous in the Kansas City area