Through it all, he directed a practice that he says delivered about 15,000 babies -- mostly at home. With demand for home births dropping, he said he is focusing more on families that want to avoid vaccines.

He said he became passionate about vaccine risks when years ago he listened to Leonard Horowitz, a dentist whose Web site describes him as a "prophet" and is now promoting the theory that bioengineers produced swine flu "in a conspiracy to commit genocide." Horowitz, Eisenstein said, "was talking about AIDS and Ebola and autism and asthma and allergies, and he linked it all to vaccines."

Eisenstein, who calls the American Academy of Pediatrics the "American Academy of Pharmaceuticals," dismisses the many peer-reviewed studies that failed to find a link between autism and vaccines as "fake studies."

Vaccine proponents won't admit this because, he said, "Every doctor now essentially in this country has done something as heinous as the Nazis did, unknowingly."

Most pediatricians, though, strongly advocate vaccines because they've saved lives, not ruined them. Refusing to vaccinate puts others at risk, especially infants too young to be fully vaccinated and children who can't get the shots for medical reasons, such as those on chemotherapy, said Saad B. Omer, an assistant public health professor at Emory University and an expert in infectious disease epidemiology.

A cluster of unvaccinated children can put even a vaccinated child at risk of getting sick, he said.

"We are a free society -- and that is a good thing," Omer said. "But I think vaccines are an issue where everyone else's behavior impacts my child."

Eisenstein said he decided to Lupron injections because his don't-vaccinate message couldn't help children who already got their shots. "I never saw it as a moneymaking venture," he said of the treatment, which can cost $6,000 a month. "It was more the angst I felt meeting so many of these families who were in a sense saying, 'Come on, Mayer, you've done so many things for so many people. Can't you help here?' "

But the long process of winning insurance approval for the treatments has frustrated him. He wonders how much longer he'll continue to treat patients with the drug.

"The concern in my mind is that Blue Cross will say, 'You can't do this,' " he said.

Getting caught 'in the wrong case'In advising parents to stay away from vaccines or out of hospitals, Eisenstein relies on a persuasive argument.

Paul Howey of Crete recalls it clearly. "I'm in marketing, and in looking back, they have a very clever marketing strategy," Howey said. "They get you to believe that mainstream obstetrics is fatally flawed and you're in great danger taking anesthesia and going to a normal hospital, but with them you're in safe hands."

Howey is among the parents who now regret buying into that philosophy after their children died or were severely disabled during home births and pediatric treatments allegedly botched by Homefirst doctors.

Howey's wife, Karen, was a Homefirst patient transferred to Weiss Memorial Hospital on Chicago's North Side after her labor failed to progress at home. Peter Rosi, a veteran of Eisenstein's practice, met her there. When Rosi delivered Nathan Howey, however, the baby was dead.

The Howeys contend that Rosi let labor drag on for more than 24 hours after Karen's water broke -- leading to Nathan's asphyxiation -- when Rosi should have ordered a Caesarean section much earlier.

Rosi said the fetal monitor showed that the baby was fine before birth and he still doesn't know why Nathan was born dead.

Nevertheless, Rosi later testified that some people at Weiss "felt that I was responsible for this child's demise." The hospital, he testified, instructed him never to come back.

Exactly a year after Nathan's death, Karen Howey gave birth to twin girls. She included a tribute titled "My Brother Nathan" in each girl's baby scrapbook.

Nathan, she wrote, "was born into heaven. He got to see Jesus right away. Daddy and Mommy were very sad. We asked God to heal us. And He did."

The Howeys sued and settled their case with Eisenstein's practice and with Weiss.