Christopher Johnson is a pediatric intensive care physician and author of Keeping Your Kids Out of the Emergency Room: A Guide to Childhood Injuries and Illnesses, Your Critically Ill Child: Life and Death Choices Parents Must Face, How to Talk to Your Child’s Doctor: A Handbook for Parents, and How Your Child Heals: An Inside Look At Common Childhood Ailments. He blogs at his self-titled site, Christopher Johnson, MD.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2018 noted the sad milestone that firearms were causing 15% of all deaths in children and adolescents. Somewhat encouraging, a later study showed states with stricter firearm laws correlated with lower numbers of firearm deaths in children. The relationship was quite linear, as you can see below. The authors had specific criteria for weak vs. strong gun laws: if …
As I’ve written before, I have to confess I’ve never been a huge fan of pathways and protocols. They often struck me as rigid and insensitive to the nuances of differences between patients. There are also times when they are just absurd when physicians, especially mid-level providers, implement them when analysis of the clinical situation clearly shows them to be inappropriate.
I suppose part of me …
A recent edition of Pediatrics has some disturbing research: “Trends in Capability of Hospitals to Provide Definitive Acute Care for Children: 2008 to 2016.” What the paper really does is document what many of us who work in referral hospitals have noted for some time: More and more community hospitals are transferring children who appear in their emergency departments to other, larger facilities instead of admitting them to …
Every day we get bombarded in the news with health statistics. Coffee causes cancer! Coffee cures cancer! And so on. Many of these are meant to grab headlines (and, these days, web page clicks), and the articles they accompany are often very poor at telling the reader what they mean. They often have statistics, and health statistics can be complicated. Sad to say, even many physicians are pretty poor and …
Let’s talk about the doctor who is excessively defensive.
I divide this kind of communication blocker into two varieties: physician personality and physician mode of practice. The physician with a defensive personality is one who interprets questions from parents as questioning of her medical judgment. Unlike the supremely egotistical doctor, who is often sufficiently secure in her image of herself that she is magnanimous toward parents who ask questions, the overly …
Most of us are, to some degree, procrastinators. We avoid or postpone doing unpleasant things. In this sense, physicians who are avoiders are no different from anyone else. For a doctor, however, avoiding things often leads to poor, or at least less than frank, communication with parents.
One kind of avoidance behavior is when the doctor avoids answering your questions. These doctors do not behave this way because they are poor …
Egotism is a common trait among doctors, although most of us keep it under adequate control when dealing with patients. The ideal doctor-parent encounter has been described as a collaboration among equals, each of which brings expertise to the exchange; the doctor knows medicine, the parent knows the child. This is the ideal, although sometimes the reality falls short of it. The way our medical system is now structured gives …
All of us are aware of what has been termed our “obesity epidemic.” The current prevalence of obesity among adults in the U.S. is around 40 percent, a dramatic increase over the past 50 years; it was about 15 percent in 1970. Rates are also increasing across first world countries, so we are not alone in this.
Obesity is defined as a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30. Values of …
The debate over the safety of giving birth at home, both for the mother and for the infant, has continued for years. I’ve written about the issue myself. From time immemorial until about 75 years ago or so, most babies were born at home. Now it’s around 1 percent in the USA, although it’s much higher than that in many Western European countries. The shift to hospital births …
Between 2011 and 2015 there were over 21,000 children killed by guns. This recent study in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, further analyzes the question; it compares pediatric firearm fatality rates among the various states and then tests for correlation between children killed and the degree of strictness or not of the state’s gun laws. There are extensive data on whole populations showing that stricter …
“We believe that the current entrepreneurial development model for antibiotics is broken and needs to be fundamentally transformed.”
This provocative opinion is from a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. The introduction of penicillin, the first antibiotic miracle drug, led to an 80 percent reduction in mortality from infectious diseases. Other antibiotics quickly followed, reducing death rates even further. Over the past several decades, however, the discovery …
I’m being sarcastic, of course, but that’s often how it seems some days. Those are days when I’ve been busy at patients’ bedsides all day and then struggle to get my documentation done later, typically many hours later. I jot notes to myself as I go along, but it can be hard to recall at 5 p.m. just what I did and why at 8 a.m.
It used to be very much the …
Randomness in life is inevitable because the universe is a pretty random place, although the extent to which you believe that depends upon your own value system. This notion comes into play almost every day of my practice in the PICU because many of the critically ill and injured children I care for experienced a sudden onset of the difficulties that landed them in the PICU. I do see a …
An interesting article in the journal Pediatrics is both intriguing and sobering. It is intriguing because it lays bare something we don’t talk much about or teach our students about; it is sobering because it describes the potential harm that can come from it, harm I have personally witnessed. The issue is overdiagnosis, and it’s related to our relentless quest to explain everything.
Overdiagnosis is the term the authors use to describe …
All physicians naturally make judgments regarding the parents they are interviewing. For example, we assess how accurate and plausible their history is. We try to decide if they are telling us the whole story and, if not, if they are inadvertently or deliberately holding something back from us for whatever reason. All experienced physicians do this. What we rarely do, however, is judge the parents’ worth as people, as individuals …
I wrote about this topic a few years back, but the recent outbreak of measles has once again ignited the debate of just what the government has the right to do or not do in compelling individual actions in support of public health. This is an old question, and it’s worth considering it in historical context.
One aspect of the endless vaccine debate is the aspect of coercion some parents feel …
Asthma is a common childhood condition. Estimates are that around 8 percent of all children have it. The incidence had been steadily increasing for many years, but some recent data suggest the burden of the disease in children may have leveled off over the past couple of years. That’s encouraging, but the number of children with asthma is still huge. The peak age group is 5 to 14. The …
A large number of pediatric practices these days use after-hours call centers for parents who have questions about a sick child. I’ve been looking around to find some data about how common this is, but my sense is that the majority of pediatricians use them. There is no question these call centers make life easier for the doctor; having somebody screen the calls, answer easy questions, and only call you …
Doctors who disparage, or even ridicule, what parents tell them are, fortunately, rare. Nevertheless, sometimes parents may infer from what the doctor says or how he acts that he does not value what they are telling him, even though he did not mean to imply such a thing. All physicians have had the experience of overly touchy parents inappropriately assuming from our questions that we do not respect their ability …
How doctors treat patients’ need for information has changed significantly over the past decades. Sixty years ago medical practice was much more paternalistic than it is now, although some would say it continues to be so in important ways. Still, not too long ago it was common for doctors to tell patients or their families next to nothing about what was going on. The presumption always was: the doctor knows …
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