It's a Dad's Life/Adam Brophy:We have been very lucky. Over the last five years, since the elder was born, we have only ever made one panicked emergency room trip. That was a frightening experience but it served a purpose - we don't panic anymore. We have also never had to administer an antibiotic to either child. Until this week.

If anything, we had become a little smug about our 100 per cent health record. We would listen to friends' tales about how their trips to the GP were so regular they were getting Starbucks- style stamps on arrival (free litre of Calpol with every five courses of penicillin completed), and we would smile knowingly. Everyone else's kids seemed to be hogging the ear infections, the asthma attacks, projectile vomiting and irredeemable diarrhoea. While sympathetic, we were obviously delighted for ourselves. The monsters are prone to walking into walls nose first and don't take kindly to teething, but my God are they healthy.

The Missus can stand up and take a bow on that score; all the organic food we have taken out second and third mortgages for has made us strangers with the GP. Also, whenever there is a hint of illness knocking on our door, out come the homeopathic witchdoctor books, tinctures are distilled and potions brewed. The coven is convened and lay diagnoses made.

The methods for this never fail to astound me. Questions to assess the required remedies include: is the temperament evil or sympathetic? Does cough hack or bark? Do you dress to the left or right? I made the last one up but I will probably be informed now that your natural inclination in that department has some bearing on your constitutional remedy. In any case, my point is that, fantastically, this approach usually works. Which is probably why we suffered three sleepless nights as the younger coughed and spewed her way through our whole linen cupboard before attending a surgery.

In times past I wouldn't have allowed this; if success didn't come quickly I would have become Mr Conventional and been down the road for the drugs. But now it feels like failure, like we've handed control of our family's health over to the system that spits antibiotics at you and hopes for the best.

Our GP is a professional, empathic, thorough woman. She tells me that her approach to vaccinations is to grab whatever is going, just in case. She knows that we come in at the other end of the spectrum in that we have not vaccinated, but she still respects our decision because she acknowledges it is one we thought hard on. Other medical professionals have reverted to patronising bully-boy tactics on this subject, but our doc rolls her eyes and wishes us the best. Which is fine, because she sees us rather rarely. When I presented with the younger, she diagnosed a chest infection and warned of the possibility of asthma, as it is in my family. I had the script filled and we made our way home.

The strange thing is that as soon as the younger took the antibiotic she seemed to give up the fight. It was as if she immediately realised that this stuff entering her body was on a search and destroy mission for the infection, and she no longer had to do any work. She crumpled like a jellyfish on my shoulder and barely moved for 12 hours in contrast to the previous three days when she had been bellowing as if to physically stave off the sickness.

That's what strikes me now, that we often don't struggle to be well. It's easy to put something in your mouth and wait for it to take care of business. I think to myself, well what's wrong with that? Then I look at my two-year-old, in supplication on the couch, and I prefer to see her fighting.