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.
Over 15 years ago I wrote an article bemoaning the fact that we were into a generation where even grandmas, the traditional mentor of first-time parents, hadn’t seen a case of measles; and what a loss of valuable information passing across generations.
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After the world barely dodged the bullet of Ebola, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, described to a TED audience just how close we came and what needs to be done in order to dodge the next global outbreak of whatever comes next.
See the video…
Due to editing and space constraints, my (newspaper) article on tonsillectomy two weeks ago did not present the entire picture of how physicians feel about this surgical procedure… and generated several additional questions – which we will cover here.
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I have been asked several times this week about tonsillectomy – whether or not a child should have their tonsils taken out by surgery. Usually the question is in response to a sore throat of some kind, whether or not there is an infected tonsil.
There are just so many variables (i.e. whether it is acute or chronic, allergic or contagious etc.) that my reply must be largely individualized; so, a short article cannot adequately cover the topic.
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“Chocolate Bar” means awesome to Dylan Siegel, the boy who wrote CHOCOLATE BAR, the book. At just 6 years old Dylan wrote it to raise money towards a cure for his best friend Jonah Pournazarian’s rare liver condition, Glycogen Storage Disease (GSD) Type 1b. His magnanimous act of friendship “went viral” into spots on prime-time news and sold enough copies to truly (and dramatically) make a difference in the research effort. What struck such a chord with the millions of viewers? Jonah’s struggle against a rare disease he didn’t deserve; or, Dylan exercising the pure faith of a child to be a true friend – you decide.
I’ve already given a link to an article describing how to be a friend to someone with a baby in the NICU; but, I’m a bit between a rock and a hard place with this article.
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What would you think if your child, who had been toilet-trained for many years, began wetting the bed but was otherwise healthy and in no discomfort; or, if your little girl, 2 1/2 years old, began refusing to sit on the toilet, had a low-grade fever, and was extremely irritable; or, if your 15-year-old boy told you that he had pain on urination for the past four or five days and was now passing bloody urine; Read more→