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.

The language you speak can affect how your baby cries

Conditions

September 8, 2016

I found this study to be absolutely fascinating. 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 detail. Its title is “Fundamental frequency variation in crying of Mandarin and German neonates.” I have always assumed, like most people I suspect, that babies cry the same the world over. When they’re uncomfortable or …

It’s time to change the way we choose medical students

Christopher Johnson, MD

Education

June 24, 2016

The USA trains its physicians differently from every other Western country I know. Everyone (with rare exceptions) who goes to medical school first must get a four-year undergraduate college degree in something. There are no such degrees in medicine, although the overwhelming majority of students going on to medical school major in one of the sciences, such as chemistry, biochemistry, and biology. If they don’t major in a science, they generally …

It’s time to formally classify pediatric intensive care units

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

May 13, 2016

There are over 400 pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) in the USA, as most recently estimated by the Society of Critical Care Medicine. These units vary widely in size, from 4 or 5 beds to fifty or more. The smaller units are generally found in community hospitals; the larger ones are usually in academic medical centers, often in designated children’s hospitals, of which there are 220.

Given this size range, it is not …

How safe are home births? A pediatrician explains.

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

March 30, 2016

The debate over the safety of giving birth at home, both for the mother and for the infant, has been debated 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 U.S., although it’s much higher than that in many Western European countries.

The shift to hospital births …

The controversy about shaken baby syndrome actually isn’t one at all

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

June 14, 2015

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A recent series of articles in the Washington Post and a segment on NPR have caused quite a stir. The articles are about what we have called for decades shaken baby syndrome. It can be fatal. We now use the term non-accidental head trauma. This term replaced the older one because it is more specific; children can be …

The problem with cowboy doctors in health care

Christopher Johnson, MD

Policy

May 27, 2015

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Some months back I read an interesting interview with Jonathan Skinner, a researcher who works with the group at the renowned Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. More than anyone else I can think of, the people at the Dartmouth Atlas have studied and tried both to understand and to explain the amazing variations we see in how …

Did Obamacare make it easier for patients to see a doctor?

Christopher Johnson, MD

Policy

May 20, 2015

One of the goals of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) was to increase access to primary care physicians. The notion is that if people have insurance it would be easier for them to get appointments with primary care physicians. This is because many physicians are unwilling to accept new patients who are uninsured.

Further, a key component of the ACA was to increase physician reimbursement for Medicaid because this program …

Eliminating hypothyroidism from iodine deficiency

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

May 15, 2015

One of the words we don’t use anymore is cretin; it’s long been a derogatory slur rather than a precise description of something. But a century ago cretinism actually meant a specific thing: a person, generally a child, who was severely damaged by a lack of thyroid hormone during early development, particularly fetal development. Now we call the condition congenital hypothyroidism. A few cases still exist, which is why we …

Quality measures are going through growing pains

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

February 3, 2015

The quality-measurement enterprise in U.S. health care is troubled. Physicians, hospitals, and health plans view measurement as burdensome, expensive, inaccurate, and indifferent to the complexity of care delivery. Patients and their caregivers believe that performance reporting misses what matters most to them and fails to deliver the information they need to make good decisions.

Thus begins a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was accompanied by …

The math and politics of organ transplantation

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

January 21, 2015

We have a problem in this country with how precious organs for transplant are allocated. The problem has been brewing for years, and is well recognized in the transplant community, the physicians and institutions that perform them. Two recent opinion pieces review the issue well: “Very Complicated Math — Reconfiguring Organ Allocation,” and, “Transplantation Traffic — Geography as Destiny for Transplant Candidates.” Since PICUs such as mine are …

Hospital credentialing is one giant mess

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

December 19, 2014

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Everyone wants to be sure their physician is competent and appropriately trained. The way this is done is through credentialing. A new applicant for privileges to practice at a hospital or other health care facility fills out an application and submits a curriculum vitae that details when and where a physician trained and the certifications obtained, such as specialty boards, and a work …

Analyzing the new treatment recommendations for bronchiolitis

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

December 9, 2014

Every fall I write about bronchiolitis because it is one of the most common respiratory ailments affecting infants and children under about two years of age. It is the most common reason infants end up in the hospital during the winter and early spring months. Every year we get severe cases in the PICU. Pediatricians have struggled for decades to figure out how to treat bronchiolitis but we don’t have …

Autism’s cause: How much genetic? How much environmental?

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

November 27, 2014

Autism was first reported in the medical literature 70 years ago. In 1943 a child psychologist named Leo Kanner described a child with social difficulties and repetitive, stereotypic movements; the following year Hans Asperger described four such children. Since then we have gradually learned more about what we now call autism spectrum disorders (ASD), although we still do not know what causes it. From early on it was apparent that the …

A new drug to treat RSV bronchiolitis

Christopher Johnson, MD

Meds

October 1, 2014

Respiratory syncytial virus infection, aka RSV, is a common infection in children. A key aspect of RSV is how poor a job our immune systems do in fighting it off. Virtually all children are infected with RSV during the first few years of life. Not only that, all of us are reinfected multiple times during our lives. Attempts at devising a vaccine for RSV have all been unsuccessful. In fact, …

Read more…

A new drug to treat RSV bronchiolitis

Sleep apnea in children: A primer from a pediatric intensivist

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

August 26, 2014

Earlier this year a child died following a surgical procedure in California for a condition called obstructive sleep apnea. The case generated a great deal of concern among parents about both this condition and the surgery often done to treat it. I wrote a post myself about it at the time. I still get questions about it because I care for quite a few children immediately after they have had …

Is it more dangerous for your baby to be born at home?

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

August 21, 2014

From time immemorial until about 75 years ago or so most babies were born at home. Now it’s around 1% in the USA, although it’s much higher than that in many Western European countries. The shift to hospital births paralleled the growth of hospitals, pediatrics, and obstetrics. With that shift there has been a perceived decrease in women’s autonomy over their healthcare decisions.

There has also been an unsurprising jump in …

Procedure checklists work only if they are used

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

July 1, 2014

Complicated medical procedures can be dangerous, even when done by highly skilled and experienced people. Why? Because, irrespective of the procedural risk itself, all of us are human and we can overlook or forget things, no matter how many times we have done the procedure. This was recognized many years ago in the airline industry. Flying an airplane is a complicated and potentially dangerous activity and their are many steps …

Why patient satisfaction surveys are riddled with problems

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

June 23, 2014

Nearly all physicians are now subject to patient satisfaction ratings. In my case, and many thousands of my colleagues across the country, it is via the survey tool sold to health care facilities by the Press Ganey Company. There are also many, many online sources that rate physicians.

The idea is a good one: Physicians should be subject to feedback from patients about patient perceptions of how good a job the doctors …

Are today’s newly graduated residents ready to practice medicine?

Christopher Johnson, MD

Education

May 8, 2014

A newly minted physician, one who has just graduated from medical school, is not yet ready (or licensed) to practice medicine. The next phase in medical training is called residency, a 3 to 5 year span of time during which the new doctor is given teaching, supervision, and increasingly allowed to function independently in his or her chosen specialty.

Since 2003 residents have been limited to working 80 hours per week, averaged over …

Why do vaccines in particular give parents concern?

Christopher Johnson, MD

Meds

April 11, 2014

I’ve been involved in several boisterous Twitter debates about vaccines, at least to the extent that one can debate using snippets of 140 characters or less. I’ve also been a “super moderator” at a very large Internet message board for many years and have seen my share of passionate vaccine debates there. I’ve been a pediatrician for over 30 years and trained in the subspecialty of pediatric infectious diseases before I went …

Christopher Johnson, MD

Christopher Johnson, MD

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