Boys and puberty – what a topic. We’re told that only two people in the history of planet earth got to skip puberty, so it’s obviously a phenomenon which has been afflicting earth children since … forever.
We’re still trying to figure it out, but the task was made much easier around 1948 when Dr. James M. Tanner, a British pediatric endocrinologist trained in the U.S., was asked to Read more→
An article with the above title appeared in a medical news mashup site that I read frequently and gave some interesting facts and insight.
I’ve been mulling them over in my mind since; so thought that I’d take another opportunity to talk about the difference between Read more→
The original study of childhood growth and maturity done by Dr. Tanner at the Harpenden orphanage in England during WWII has been replicated and verified many times since then.
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I’ve noticed that there are a lot of blog posts on the internet with outdated information about childhood immunizations. Even the links on a whole lot of physicians web pages fail or point to outdated material.
It’s really not surprising due to the many new ‘official recommendations’ published recently following the frequent recurrences of diseases we thought we had eradicated. Un-immunized children are making new epidemics Read more→
Pretty much the second question you field from a parent during your pediatric clerkship in medical school (right after “what’s this yukky looking rash”) is: “Do you think (insert name here) is growing well enough?” or, some equivalent question.
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It’s hard to believe, but less than eighty years ago humanity didn’t even have a clue about nutrition let alone what constituted adequate nutrition for a child, let alone a child in puberty!
During the war, there were developing so many refugee children that needed to be cared for by institutions that Great Britan decided to undertake a simple study about what “growth” looked like in children. Nothing was known about that of substance either.
Dr. James Mourilyan Tanner was asked to take over a nutrition study of institutionalized children with the intent of seeing to it that the children still grew well—whatever “well” looked like. He agreed to do it, used the scientific method, devised what is now still the definitive study on growth and puberty (the Tanner Scale) and the rest is history.
This series of posts is all about that. What it is, how it came to be, how it’s used and what we know about the study of puberty.
New research has provided a bit more validation and credibility to the Developmental Milestone questions we’re asking at all the “Well Baby Checks” we’ve been doing.
We already seem to have a bit of a handle on the risk factors for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); but, Read more→
July 4th is upon us in ‘the states.’ The day with the largest concentrations of explosions and other pyrotechnics of any; and the day with the greatest numbers of burn and explosive related injuries of any other in our parts.
Many areas have illegalized certain classes of fireworks for safety reasons. Of late much of the new legislations Read more→