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→
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I’ve noticed that there are a lot of blog posts on the internet with outdated information about childhood immunizations. Even the links on a whole lot of physicians web pages fail or point to outdated material.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.
This year (2015) the U.S. has suffered a huge increase in Measles. An increase unlike any other in recent years! The blame for much of it has been directly placed at the feet of California residents who exercised a “personal belief” exemption in the state’s childhood immunization requirements.
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I saw a 5-year-old purple-faced dragon at Sam’s Club trying to go ingognito. She was wearing the lace-up pink boots that everyone knows is what frogs wear when they want to go out on the town. She couldn’t fool me!
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I ran across a poignant article while researching the difficult topic of how parents should use the internet to gain medical information – truly, it sounds simple BUT IT’S NOT.
There is a mind-blowing amount of information exposed by a search on Google for about any medical condition! Unfortunately, there is also an incredible amount of crap exposed in that same search!
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We’re talking about ‘travel diseases’ which should be considered before taking a trip ‘abroad’ either with or without the family in tow. Yes, from the standpoint of living in the U.S. most of these seem vague and ‘out there somewhere’ but not associated with our daily worries.
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The summer travel season is upon us, at least here in the U.S., and for most of us it means dusting off the car games for the kids to use between bathroom stops as we cruise across the country on vacation.
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This post begins the series of TEN Travel Diseases you shouldn’t forget to consider if you’re lucky (and brave) enough to be taking a vacation this year which involves some degree of traveling – especially across some borders. And remember, the more borders you cross, the more of these you should consider.
You may or may not have even heard of them (hence writing these posts) but be assured, they are still alive and well in the world. And many still here in parts of the United States!
Here is the index to the Ten Travel Diseases series:
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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