Christopher Johnson, MD

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.

Are antibiotics needed for your child with an ear infection?

Conditions

June 22, 2019

The common practice in this country (although not everywhere — Europe, for example) has long been to treat all acute middle ear infections (otitis media) with antibiotics. This is not necessarily needed. We now know that for many children another reasonable approach is to wait a day or so to see if the symptoms get better on their own without antibiotics. Parents have an important role in making this choice. …

Disproving the false claims of febrile seizures after vaccines

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

May 28, 2019

A seizure in response to a fever, called a febrile seizure, is an extremely common event in childhood. They affect 2 to 5 percent of children between 6 months and five years of age and have a peak incidence between 12 and 18 months of age. They generally occur after a rapid rise in temperature; it appears the rate of rise is more important than the actual …

How a Minnesota Supreme Court decision could affect curbside consults

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

May 16, 2019

“In a case that could have wide-reaching implications for medical practice in Minnesota, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a ruling on April 17 in the case of Warren v. Dinter holding that the existence of a physician-patient relationship is not a prerequisite for a medical malpractice action. Rather, a person may sue a physician for malpractice – even if that person was not a patient of the physician – if the harm …

The problem of disbelieving doctors

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

May 13, 2019

All good doctors learn to filter what parents say to them during history taking, to examine each parental statement for reliability, likelihood, and sheer outlandishness. Parents of sick children are a cross-section of humanity and, like all of us, vary in their observational skills, their ability to express themselves, and their tendency to exaggerate or minimize what they see. Parents, not being physicians, may not notice and comment on things …

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The problem of disbelieving doctors

The physician who is a poor conversationalist

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

April 23, 2019

This article concerns what I call the poor conversationalist. There are several common versions of this, and all of them have corresponding parallels in nonmedical settings. Often the most basic difficulty is one of manner. A good conversationalist is a person who, no matter what he is thinking, outwardly projects an air of interest in what the other person is saying. The doctor who acts distracted, hurried, or even uninterested …

When doctors are poor explainers

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

April 10, 2019

A physician, like anyone, can be a poor explainer of things for several reasons, but foremost among these is the tendency to use medical jargon. This is not a problem unique to doctors. When I take my car in for repairs, I often must ask the mechanic to explain what is wrong in a way I can understand. I have a rudimentary understanding of what the various parts of the …

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When doctors are poor explainers

Important new information in the tragic cases of child abuse

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

April 9, 2019

Like many pediatric intensivists, I care from time to time for victims of child abuse in the form of what is often called “shaken baby syndrome.” This syndrome is a characteristic constellation of finds that happen when a strong person grasps a child around the chest and aggressively shakes the infant. It was first described by Caffey, a pediatric radiologist, fifty years ago. The baby may have …

A disturbing study about children and guns

Christopher Johnson, MD

Policy

February 22, 2019

Children are relatively healthy overall. Although 25% of the American population is under the age of 19, only 2% of annual deaths occur in this age group. There was a time when the contributions of diseases to pediatric death rates were much higher. Declines in deaths from infectious disease or cancer, the result of early diagnosis, vaccinations, antibiotics, and medical and surgical treatment, have given way to increases in deaths from …

Be careful of assigning the diagnosis of ADHD to young children just entering school

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

February 19, 2019

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common diagnosis in children today, and is increasingly a diagnosis assigned to adults, too. ADHD is a real thing, despite some having some skeptics and a few outright denialists; differences in brain scans between persons who have it and who don’t show there is a definite physiological basis for the disorder.

But in practice, we don’t do brain scans. We base the diagnosis on …

Using probiotics in children: a pediatrician’s take

Christopher Johnson, MD

Meds

January 14, 2019

The over-the-counter sale of probiotics is a huge industry. They are heavily promoted on social media as a cure-all for a wide variety of ills. Probiotics are live cultures of what are often called “good bacteria,” and there are solid physiological reasons for recommending them. But, and this is a huge but, actual clinical data demonstrating their usefulness behind some well-defined disorders is pretty scant. Their potential usefulness in many …

The Wild West approach to PICU practice

Christopher Johnson, MD

Policy

December 10, 2018

I spent my early and mid-career years working in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at a large academic center. We did almost everything except for a few things esoteric at the time — small bowel transplants, a few kinds of experimental surgery. I’m now in my late career (but have no plans to quit anytime soon!) and work in a smaller PICU. I am frequently confronted with the issue …

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The Wild West approach to PICU practice

Everything you ever wanted to know about croup

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

November 20, 2018

Imagine this scenario. Your two-year-old son has had a runny nose for a day or two and an occasional cough, but seemed no worse to you that everyone else in his preschool class. Two hours after you put him to bed you hear him coughing, only this cough is like none you have ever heard from him before. It sounds like a barking seal at the circus — a brassy, …

The evolution of the stethoscope

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

November 13, 2018

The stethoscope. Nothings says “I’m a doctor” more than the stethoscope in a pocket or draped around the neck. Forty-five years ago when I got my first one, a gift from my physician-father, the former was more common. Then we were more likely to wear coats — white coats or suit coats — and pockets were available. I had suit coats in which the lining was worn out from the …

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The evolution of the stethoscope

Why demanding a randomized controlled trial for vaccines is disingenuous

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

November 1, 2018

I swiped this editorial cartoon by Steve Sack from the redoubtable Dr. David Gorski’s blog, who goes by the nom-de-web of Orac. Recent epidemiology shows reducing the fraction of vaccinated children in the population rather promptly leads to a resurgence of the diseases vaccines protect against. This is the concept of community or herd immunity. …

When babies cry, your tone matters

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

October 24, 2018

I first posted about this subject a couple of years ago but it’s so fascinating to me I’m writing about it again. I happened to run across this study containing some amazing information. It’s from a publication called The Journal of Voice. The link is to the abstract — the complete article is behind a paywall but I can get it for anybody who’s interested in reading the whole study in …

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When babies cry, your tone matters

Best practices in head CT imaging: How are we doing?

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

October 14, 2018

Computed tomography, or CT scanning, is one of the most powerful diagnostic tools to emerge during my medical career. Just look at the detail in the brain images above, taken at 90-degree angles through the brain. And I was there at the beginning. I remember well when I was a medical student taking neurology, and the first CT scanner arrived at the Mayo Clinic. By today’s standards, it was incredibly …

Burnout in pediatric intensive care physicians

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

August 26, 2018

Burnout has been a descriptive term for years, but lately, psychologists and others have assigned it specific characteristics with a view toward being able actually to study and measure it. One common definition of burnout is a state of chronic stress that leads to physical and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, detachment, and feelings of ineffectiveness. The PICU environment is often one of high stress, so it’s a place where this …

Can empathy be taught to physicians?

Christopher Johnson, MD

Education

August 2, 2018

We want competent physicians, but we also want compassionate ones. How do we get them? Is it nature or is it nurture? Is it more important to search out more compassionate students, or should we instill compassion somehow in the ones we start along the training pipeline? I think the answer lies in nurturing what nature has already put there.

My background is in pediatric critical care, which I have practiced …

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Can empathy be taught to physicians?

When you hear these words from an experienced clinician, believe them

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

July 27, 2018

Anyone who has worked in medicine for a long time well understands the power of the statement coming from an experienced person: “This kid looks sick.” That person could be a physician or nurse. Years of experience does tend to give one a sort of sixth sense for when to worry something serious is going on that just hasn’t shown itself fully yet. Seasoned parents can often provide the same …

Confronting sexism in medicine

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

June 25, 2018

The recent prominence of the #MeToo movement has shined a light at many places in our society where insidious or even obvious sexism against women has long gone unremarked. Even when noticed it’s just shrugged off as the way things are. In honor of this, #MeToo was named Person of the Year for 2017 by Time Magazine. Medicine is no exception to this pervasive problem. A very interesting recent essay in the New …

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Confronting sexism in medicine