It seems like all I do is write “back-to-school” articles. I probably don’t but it sure seems like it.
We need, once again, to update you on back-2-school immunization strategies because – as nearly every telephone triage system in the world claims – “options have recently changed.”
Read more →
Ok, it’s been over a week and your 17-year-old Commotio Cordis patient who suffered a cardiac arrest on the baseball field is back for his follow-up and an answer to his question: “When can I go back to playing baseball?”
You knew he was coming and you’ve had a week to prepare what to tell him… so, go ahead, I’d like to hear this too…
We can treat the results of a “peanut allergy attack” but not prevent the issue. How could we? We don’t have a clue what is making such a health crisis now that didn’t occur 20-30 years ago.
There is no immunotherapy or pills to prevent it. Bee stings we know about. They cause anaphylaxis crises too. We’ve found that deliberately injecting miniscule amounts of bee sting venom into an allergic person (under controlled conditions of course) and then slowly increasing the strength of the injection can eventually help the person “get over” the sting allergy – or at least make it less severe.
Well, apparently they’ve been experimenting with a similar thing for peanuts. A skin patch – like a nicotine patch to stop smoking – with tiny amounts of peanut allergen is worn on the arm or somewhere. And, eventually, over time (perhaps a year or so) the persons reactions diminish to some extent.
Like the doc said in the video: “the patient is probably not going to be able to eat a peanut butter sandwich” but just making the reaction less extreme will give a very welcome buffer to what is a literally a life threatening event.
Here is a link to an article on another web site which discusses the “lying issue” some children have, particularly those with ADHD. As previous articles have shown, lying is a part of nearly every child’s life-copeing mechanism but a bit more problematic in children with attention deficit. Here is a fairly professionalized web page, by that I mean “monetized,” but not particularly “in-your-face.” I found the information useful if you have any problems with it please let me know.
Most of you let your children participate in sports so it’s critical that you know this. Bear with me, it’ll be fun – and something you want to talk to the coach about.
Read more →
Are children poor liars? Do you think you can easily detect their lying? Developmental researcher Kang Lee studies what happens physiologically to children when they lie. They do it a lot, starting as young as two years old, and they’re actually really good at it. Lee explains why we should celebrate when kids start to lie and presents new lie-detection technology that could someday reveal our hidden emotions.
Mr. Lee has devoted his career to understanding the development of social cognition and behavior.
With an international team based at the University of Toronto, he investigates the neurological and social basis of emerging social behaviors in young children. His two-pronged research focuses first on how and when children develop the capacity to lie, to detect lies and to feel guilty about it afterwards.
The second focus of Lee’s research is facial recognition, which has led to revelations of when children develop the ability to distinguish races and has helped explain why some people occasionally see Jesus’ face on a piece of toast.
We found that regardless of gender, country, religion, at two years of age, 30 percent lie, 70 percent tell the truth about their transgression. At three years of age, 50 percent lie and 50 percent tell the truth. At four years of age, more than 80 percent lie. And after four years of age, most children lie. So as you can see, lying is really a typical part of development. And some children begin to tell lies as young as two years of age.