Hello, and welcome to Pediatric House Calls. I am…
A Physician board certified in Pediatric medicine with Clinical experience including caring for infants, children and teens – well these days mostly children and teens up to twenty-one;
An Administrator experienced in top medical management for several national health insurance companies;
An Author of health care manuals, newspaper columns and even children's stories;
A Business Medical Consultant for drug companies, insurance companies and
physician practices;
A Veteran of the US Navy in the Vietnam era;
And…
I make House-Calls.
If nothing else, doctors are a bit concrete. We love boxes, categories, lists and health proverbs; but most of all… answers!
So, things a bit askew, catawampus, off kilter or out of place make the average physician a bit nauseous if not outright wonky and catapulted into a search for the rationale. You give us an aphorism and we’ll design a research study.
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In the U.S., old Ben Franklin published a series of articles in his Old Richard’s Almanac which, even if he didn’t come out right and say it, people took as the truth and became Medical Proverbs still with us today.
Perhaps it’s because a lot of these medical proverbs had their roots in vintage manuscripts like the bible and early writings of the pioneering healers/doctors throughout time.
How about it? Should we take sayings like: “early to bed…”, “an apple a day…”, “pay attention to seasons…”, “doctors’ best book is the patient”, “health checks don’t add anything meaningful…”, “eight glasses of water…”, “cold hands…”, “cigarettes stunt your…” and “feed a cold…” as truth or with a huge grain of salt?
Let’s do some proverb-busting!
I answered a question of a 16 year-old patient who had been the subject of some school-girls’ highly personal and intrusive questioning: “What kind of Underwear do you wear? boxers, briefs or commando?” He wrote into an answer-line: “Which is best?” and I told him I’d think about it and see if there was an informed answer that covered all the Tanner Stages.
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Here is professor Jack Horner, the technical advisor for the Jurassic Park movies and the inspiration for the film’s lead character, Dr. Alan Grant, who says: “I’m extremely dyslexic… reading is the hardest thing I do.”
We should all be so afflicted! He loves to talk to sixth-graders because they love dinosaurs… almost as much as he does; and he’s going to tell us how to build a dinosaur!
See the video…
[An “almost 16” year old boy out on a church group date is set about by a girl he likes and a couple of her friends who ask him what type of underwear he wears “boxers briefs or commando”. Having a good relationship with his doctor’s office he texted their “answer-line” to see if there was a particular type that might be better. He really hasn’t given it too much thought and basically just picks “the top one out of the drawer that’s clean that still fits” out of many Christmas and Birthday gifts from the past.
His doctor, a friend of mine, was a bit perplexed about how to answer, so I offered to take a stab at it on the blog.]
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Sophie is a neuroscientist who studies laughter. In this TED talk she teaches us about why we laugh – and gives a whole lot of examples
See the video…
Although, as explained, personal issues prevent me from posting as regularly as I have always done; none-the-less, I still try to keep up with the new developments in pediatrics and one such area is Diabetes in childhood.
I’ll try and update several “discoveries” related to “Diabetes” in the pediatric population that should be posted in this site: 1 – New naming conventions; 2 – that adolescent diabetes is much more refractory to treatment than we had thought; and, 3 – that the FDA has now approved the “artificial pancreas” for use in children with “type 1” diabetes.
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