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.

What is a concussion, and what does it mean for the child?

Conditions
January 14, 2011

When it comes to football season,  it’s time to think about sports injuries. We frequently have children admitted to the PICU (or to what we call the intermediate or step-down unit) for observation, typically overnight, who have struck their head. They have had concussions. What is a concussion, and what does it mean for the child?

The term itself is centuries old, but even thirty-five years ago, when I was in …

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What is a concussion, and what does it mean for the child?

EMR is here to stay, which will be good for doctors and patients

Tech
November 17, 2010

The electronic medical record, the EMR, is upon us.

For those of us who learned medicine entirely with paper charts, some have enthusiastically embraced the EMR and some have refused, to the extent they can, to deal with it at all. But most of us have plowed ahead into learning how to use it as best we can. It seems to me that the degree of enthusiasm physicians show for the …

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EMR is here to stay, which will be good for doctors and patients

Nurses expect to be called by their first names, should doctors follow?

Patient
September 29, 2010

I’ve worked in hospitals since I was 16 years old — 42 years ago now. I was first an orderly, then a nurse’s aid, then a practical nurse, and a finally a surgical technician before I became a physician.

When I started, female nurses wore caps, the details of which identified which nursing school they had graduated from, as well as a pin that gave the same information. They wore starched, …

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Nurses expect to be called by their first names, should doctors follow?

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