Pediatricians and the clinicians who care for children writing on KevinMD about child health: childhood illness, development, vaccines and the parents who refuse them, breastfeeding and the pressure around it, childhood obesity, prevention, and the realities of caring for young patients and their families. Most contributors are pediatricians. For a maintained record of what pediatricians have said about children's health since 2004, from fever and sleep through obesity, abuse, teenagers, and Medicaid, see Children's health: what pediatricians say, in their own words. For what physicians have said about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy, from the autism claim through measles, exemptions, and federal policy, see Vaccines: what physicians say, in their own words. For what child psychiatrists and pediatricians have said about children's and teens' mental health, see Mental health: what psychiatrists and physicians say, in their own words. For what pediatricians have said about breastfeeding and postpartum care, see Women's health: what physicians say, in their own words.
Nearly every American is touched by serious chronic illness, either as a patient or as a caregiver. The federal government recognizes the far-reaching effects of such conditions, and agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conduct surveillance of these diseases. Such research allows us to better understand the burden of different diseases, develop new treatments and prevention practices, and protect the public’s health. …
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Food allergies are a public health crisis we can no longer ignore
I find myself spending close to an hour on the computer each morning at the hospital. I spend this time dutifully looking up vital signs, labs, recent radiology or pathology results as well as many other valuable pieces of information about each of my patients. I watch as my colleagues frantically record values, while making sure to point out important trends and gross abnormalities.
When we round, there is always a …
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This doctor spends more time at a computer than with patients
Sexuality can be hard to talk about. I think this is true for adults far more than for children. Children are naturally curious and nonjudgmental. They just want to know: What is that, what’s it for, why are yours different from mine, and why does he have one of those and I don’t? It’s we adults who squirm and dodge, deflect and bolt. From a very early age, children learn …
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Skirting around language is a disservice to your patients
Dr. Tara Zandvliet was inundated with calls and emails from parents last year, after California passed a law nixing personal beliefs as an exemption from school vaccinations. Suddenly, many parents sought exemptions for medical reasons.
Someone even faked two medical exemption forms purportedly written by the San Diego pediatrician, copying a legitimate document she’d provided for a patient and writing in the names of students she’d never treated, she said. She …
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How anti-vaccine parents are finding doctors willing to exempt their kids
Two months into my pediatric residency, while working on an overnight call, I encountered my first medical mistake. We, fortunately, had had a very good night, and all patients had remained stable. It was an hour before sign-out to the morning team, that I received a page. I quickly held my pager and dialed the 4-digit number, only to find a busy dial tone. I was a little surprised and …
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A safe space is needed to talk about medical errors
I sat on my floor, surrounded by boxes in various states of organization and disarray, sifting through a pile of papers. I was moving for my surgical fellowship and, of course, put off packing to the last minute. However, in the middle of the hectic and scattered process, a particular stack of papers caught my eye; I felt the need to pause and go through them. They were old and …
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What rejection taught this doctor
#Tweetiatrician is a common hashtag used by pediatricians as a way I assumed to find advocates for children’s issues.
Recently, I used this hashtag to start a new Twitter account. I sought educated dialogue on Medicaid, health care reform, vaccination, and other pediatric topics.
I am a pediatric emergency medicine physician and consider myself a strong advocate for children and seldom agree with any political party. My advocacy work in many forms …
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A pediatrician was bullied by his fellow physicians on Twitter
As a pediatrician, I have always known the value of my presence. At least, that is how I remember feeling during long nights in the hospital taking care of sick children, in the clinic or in any situation that required pediatric expertise. “How can I help?” I would always ask as I entered an exam room. Answering questions from wide-eyed parents about their foreign and frightening new bundle of joy, …
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Being a CEO isn’t that different from being a clinician
As a pediatrician in training, I’ve seen countless instances in which parents, in both the ED and inpatient/outpatient care settings, have presented with deep concern regarding their child’s fever. It’s an age-old concern. But why exactly does fever cause so much distress in a parent’s world?
As a medical student, I distinctly remember rotating with an attending physician who had strong feelings regarding fever. He became angry with me when I …
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This pediatrician doesn’t fear fevers and neither should you
For American conservatives, Britain’s NHS is an antiquated Orwellian dystopia. For Brits, even those who don’t love the NHS, American conservatives are better suited to spaghetti westerns, such as Fistful of Dollars, than reality.
The twain are unlikely to meet after the recent press surrounding Charlie Gard, the infant, now deceased, with a rare, fatal mitochondrial disorder in which mitochondrial DNA is depleted — mitochondrial depletion disorder (MDD). In this condition, …
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Did doctors know best in the Charlie Gard case?
One of the most difficult situations for a parent is one in which your child is sick. To be in a situation where you cannot control how the child responds to interventions is very challenging. Under normal circumstances, you follow your normal daily routine: up in the morning, breakfast, get dressed, off to school or daycare or activities for the day, a nap in the afternoon, pick up from school …
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Being a resident and a parent is hard when your child gets sick
Cold, sterile and well … clinical. Three words that neatly describe hospitals as many of us know them. In books, on TV and in movies, we see and experience hospitals as impersonal, solemn and sterile institutions — designed only to treat disease.
Interestingly enough, while our society has begun shifting away from thinking of health as just the treatment of disease, our hospitals fail to reflect these changes. This is particularly …
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The surprising way that architecture and the art of healing intersect
More and more health care practitioners are turning to social media for their medical education. Fellows are learning ultrasound from Snapchat, nurses are learning how to insert NG tubes from watching YouTube, and learners are learning pathophysiology from blogs and podcasts. To reach this audience with credible and reliable content, it is important for medical educators to be present where the learners are, and that means social media.
Users are also …
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Gamification of medical education: Choose Your Own Medventure
I don’t think I would be the first resident to claim that residency is hard. Anyone who has gone through, or is currently participating in residency, will attest to the challenge of medical training. Efforts have been made on national and institutional levels to address this with work hour restrictions limiting the number of hours a resident can work or the number of calls a trainee can take. These rules …
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When medical training stresses you: Write it out
On a particularly sultry day in a hospital of the Peruvian Amazon, I found myself with the task of telling a group of parents that their babies, who had been waiting in the hallways for days without eating in preparation for surgery, would not be able to have their cleft lip and palate fixed. We, a group of American doctors and medical staff offering this procedure free of charge to …
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The fine line between do no harm and do nothing
I was rotating through an infectious disease elective at an outside hospital during my fourth year of medical school when I encountered a startling situation. We were called to evaluate a patient who was suffering from an infection called Haemophilus influenzae. Now, I knew that most children were vaccinated against this pathogen, so I was surprised by the consult.
I was working on a team with three others: one attending, one …
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Stories to help parents think critically about the importance of vaccinations
When health officials learned that the 2015 measles outbreak was caused by clusters of unvaccinated children, Americans once more wanted to understand why some parents do not vaccinate their children. In our highly polarized culture, media commentators and even academics began to connect opposition to vaccination to either the left or right of politics.
So a question arises: Who is more likely to be opposed to vaccination, liberals or conservatives? As …
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Anti-vaccination beliefs don’t follow the usual conservative and liberal lines
Being a physician is hard. Really hard. Four years of medical school, multiple years of residency and perhaps fellowship training add up to years of working endless days in a row and powering through exhausting nights. For many of us, this need to be able to power through continues even when we finally make it as an attending.
But being a patient is harder. Being the daughter or son or husband …
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A reminder of how important bedside manner is
It was an ordinary day in clinic — I had gotten very behind schedule when a 90-year-old gentleman, who was in for his third visit in a month related to falls, came in with his equally frail wife. We had to spend extra time discussing his placement in a nursing home for safety concerns.
I hastily entered the room of a 46-year-old attractive female, who was here to meet me as …
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A patient becomes the teacher
