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I Want It That Way
Who can really take the Backstreet Boys’ 20th anniversary tour seriously? To be fair, the band saw this moment coming 2 decades ago when they insisted that they were a “male vocal ensemble” and not a “boy band.” Their lament might have been more persuasive had their name not included the word “boys.”
I think if all these former Tiger Beat heartthrobs insist on continuing to entertain their fans and their fans’ teenage children, they must at least update their names. In addition to the Backstreet Dads, we can enjoy Men II Middle-Age Men; New Kids This Is Our Block So Stay Off of Our Lawns; and We’ll Be Out of the Bathroom in Just a Menudo. If this goes on long enough, eventually 98 Degrees will simply be 98.
Cannonball!
There are certain facts we have to ignore in order to enjoy life. Like that hot dogs are filled with the stuff that didn’t make the cut for Spam. Like that all it takes to bring down a commercial airliner is one goose having a bad day. Now, just in time for summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want to rip away the veil that allows us to enjoy swimming. In a convenience sample of 161 Atlanta swimming pools (“Hey, we’re headquartered in Atlanta! That’s convenient!”) CDC microbiologists proved that most of us are doing the backstroke in other people’s fecal matter. Thanks, y’all!
It makes me feel a little better to know that the researchers didn’t actually check the pool water, but the filters, looking for DNA from bugs like Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Giardia instestinalis. If it’s in the filters, doesn’t that mean the water is exactly where it’s not? I know, it had to come from somewhere, which is why the investigators stress that people really should obey those signs about showering before you swim and avoiding the pool if you have diarrhea (or if you suspect anyone else at the pool has it or even looks the least bit queasy).
Of course, only 58% of pools tested positive, which means 42% of the time you’re good! Pools were further categorized by public vs. private status and by whether mainly children or both adults and children swam there. Based on the P values (yes, P values, go ahead and laugh), the only difference between the pool at your exclusive country club and the public one is that the private E. coli can trace its lineage to the Mayflower. Grown-up pools were no less contaminated than those full of toddlers, but they were less life-affirming. The good news is that none of these findings were correlated in any way with clinical gastroenteritis, so until that study gets done, jump in; the water’s fine (but seriously, shower first)!
All the rest
If there’s one thing I’ve learned never to say to a pregnant woman on bed rest, it’s “that must be nice!” (My injuries would have been more severe had she been allowed to run.) Now, however, it appears this knowledge may be wasted. Move over, prone infant sleep and antibiotics for green snot, you need to make some space in the dust bin of medical history for bed rest to prevent preterm labor!
A Northwestern University team led by Dr. William Grobman evaluated 657 women with short cervices who were at risk for preterm delivery. A total of 252 women were placed on activity restriction, and the others were able to hop up and get a glass of water any old time they got thirsty without feeling the least bit guilty. Not only did activity restriction fail to prevent preterm birth, it actually seemed to cause preterm deliveries in addition to the known complications of bone loss, blood clots, and wanting to kill the next person who says, “that must be nice!” Dr. Grobman was circumspect in his criticism of doctors who still recommend bed rest, but other commentators not involved in the study suggested anyone prescribing the practice be locked in one room for 2 months and forced to text a spouse every time they finish a magazine. Sounds relaxing!
Inflation rate
Have you ever been up late in the hospital, near-delusional from sleep deprivation, and gotten into one of those arguments with a colleague that can only be solved with grant funding and a publication in a reputable peer-reviewed journal? That appears to be what happened in the emergency department of Tallaght Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, a little while back, and now the winner can claim his pint of Guinness.
That’s right, according to a study published in the Emergency Medicine Journal, injured Irish children were better distracted from their pain when a glove balloon was drawn with a face to resemble the Irish pop duo Jedward (Americans can substitute Good Charlotte) as opposed to what the researchers simply called a Mohawk (not Blink 182?). I think, however, that in the spirit of comparative effectiveness, we need more research. If I can just find five out-of-date exam gloves, I’m determined to test the distraction power of balloons that resemble the Backstreet Boys.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
Who can really take the Backstreet Boys’ 20th anniversary tour seriously? To be fair, the band saw this moment coming 2 decades ago when they insisted that they were a “male vocal ensemble” and not a “boy band.” Their lament might have been more persuasive had their name not included the word “boys.”
I think if all these former Tiger Beat heartthrobs insist on continuing to entertain their fans and their fans’ teenage children, they must at least update their names. In addition to the Backstreet Dads, we can enjoy Men II Middle-Age Men; New Kids This Is Our Block So Stay Off of Our Lawns; and We’ll Be Out of the Bathroom in Just a Menudo. If this goes on long enough, eventually 98 Degrees will simply be 98.
Cannonball!
There are certain facts we have to ignore in order to enjoy life. Like that hot dogs are filled with the stuff that didn’t make the cut for Spam. Like that all it takes to bring down a commercial airliner is one goose having a bad day. Now, just in time for summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want to rip away the veil that allows us to enjoy swimming. In a convenience sample of 161 Atlanta swimming pools (“Hey, we’re headquartered in Atlanta! That’s convenient!”) CDC microbiologists proved that most of us are doing the backstroke in other people’s fecal matter. Thanks, y’all!
It makes me feel a little better to know that the researchers didn’t actually check the pool water, but the filters, looking for DNA from bugs like Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Giardia instestinalis. If it’s in the filters, doesn’t that mean the water is exactly where it’s not? I know, it had to come from somewhere, which is why the investigators stress that people really should obey those signs about showering before you swim and avoiding the pool if you have diarrhea (or if you suspect anyone else at the pool has it or even looks the least bit queasy).
Of course, only 58% of pools tested positive, which means 42% of the time you’re good! Pools were further categorized by public vs. private status and by whether mainly children or both adults and children swam there. Based on the P values (yes, P values, go ahead and laugh), the only difference between the pool at your exclusive country club and the public one is that the private E. coli can trace its lineage to the Mayflower. Grown-up pools were no less contaminated than those full of toddlers, but they were less life-affirming. The good news is that none of these findings were correlated in any way with clinical gastroenteritis, so until that study gets done, jump in; the water’s fine (but seriously, shower first)!
All the rest
If there’s one thing I’ve learned never to say to a pregnant woman on bed rest, it’s “that must be nice!” (My injuries would have been more severe had she been allowed to run.) Now, however, it appears this knowledge may be wasted. Move over, prone infant sleep and antibiotics for green snot, you need to make some space in the dust bin of medical history for bed rest to prevent preterm labor!
A Northwestern University team led by Dr. William Grobman evaluated 657 women with short cervices who were at risk for preterm delivery. A total of 252 women were placed on activity restriction, and the others were able to hop up and get a glass of water any old time they got thirsty without feeling the least bit guilty. Not only did activity restriction fail to prevent preterm birth, it actually seemed to cause preterm deliveries in addition to the known complications of bone loss, blood clots, and wanting to kill the next person who says, “that must be nice!” Dr. Grobman was circumspect in his criticism of doctors who still recommend bed rest, but other commentators not involved in the study suggested anyone prescribing the practice be locked in one room for 2 months and forced to text a spouse every time they finish a magazine. Sounds relaxing!
Inflation rate
Have you ever been up late in the hospital, near-delusional from sleep deprivation, and gotten into one of those arguments with a colleague that can only be solved with grant funding and a publication in a reputable peer-reviewed journal? That appears to be what happened in the emergency department of Tallaght Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, a little while back, and now the winner can claim his pint of Guinness.
That’s right, according to a study published in the Emergency Medicine Journal, injured Irish children were better distracted from their pain when a glove balloon was drawn with a face to resemble the Irish pop duo Jedward (Americans can substitute Good Charlotte) as opposed to what the researchers simply called a Mohawk (not Blink 182?). I think, however, that in the spirit of comparative effectiveness, we need more research. If I can just find five out-of-date exam gloves, I’m determined to test the distraction power of balloons that resemble the Backstreet Boys.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
Who can really take the Backstreet Boys’ 20th anniversary tour seriously? To be fair, the band saw this moment coming 2 decades ago when they insisted that they were a “male vocal ensemble” and not a “boy band.” Their lament might have been more persuasive had their name not included the word “boys.”
I think if all these former Tiger Beat heartthrobs insist on continuing to entertain their fans and their fans’ teenage children, they must at least update their names. In addition to the Backstreet Dads, we can enjoy Men II Middle-Age Men; New Kids This Is Our Block So Stay Off of Our Lawns; and We’ll Be Out of the Bathroom in Just a Menudo. If this goes on long enough, eventually 98 Degrees will simply be 98.
Cannonball!
There are certain facts we have to ignore in order to enjoy life. Like that hot dogs are filled with the stuff that didn’t make the cut for Spam. Like that all it takes to bring down a commercial airliner is one goose having a bad day. Now, just in time for summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want to rip away the veil that allows us to enjoy swimming. In a convenience sample of 161 Atlanta swimming pools (“Hey, we’re headquartered in Atlanta! That’s convenient!”) CDC microbiologists proved that most of us are doing the backstroke in other people’s fecal matter. Thanks, y’all!
It makes me feel a little better to know that the researchers didn’t actually check the pool water, but the filters, looking for DNA from bugs like Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Giardia instestinalis. If it’s in the filters, doesn’t that mean the water is exactly where it’s not? I know, it had to come from somewhere, which is why the investigators stress that people really should obey those signs about showering before you swim and avoiding the pool if you have diarrhea (or if you suspect anyone else at the pool has it or even looks the least bit queasy).
Of course, only 58% of pools tested positive, which means 42% of the time you’re good! Pools were further categorized by public vs. private status and by whether mainly children or both adults and children swam there. Based on the P values (yes, P values, go ahead and laugh), the only difference between the pool at your exclusive country club and the public one is that the private E. coli can trace its lineage to the Mayflower. Grown-up pools were no less contaminated than those full of toddlers, but they were less life-affirming. The good news is that none of these findings were correlated in any way with clinical gastroenteritis, so until that study gets done, jump in; the water’s fine (but seriously, shower first)!
All the rest
If there’s one thing I’ve learned never to say to a pregnant woman on bed rest, it’s “that must be nice!” (My injuries would have been more severe had she been allowed to run.) Now, however, it appears this knowledge may be wasted. Move over, prone infant sleep and antibiotics for green snot, you need to make some space in the dust bin of medical history for bed rest to prevent preterm labor!
A Northwestern University team led by Dr. William Grobman evaluated 657 women with short cervices who were at risk for preterm delivery. A total of 252 women were placed on activity restriction, and the others were able to hop up and get a glass of water any old time they got thirsty without feeling the least bit guilty. Not only did activity restriction fail to prevent preterm birth, it actually seemed to cause preterm deliveries in addition to the known complications of bone loss, blood clots, and wanting to kill the next person who says, “that must be nice!” Dr. Grobman was circumspect in his criticism of doctors who still recommend bed rest, but other commentators not involved in the study suggested anyone prescribing the practice be locked in one room for 2 months and forced to text a spouse every time they finish a magazine. Sounds relaxing!
Inflation rate
Have you ever been up late in the hospital, near-delusional from sleep deprivation, and gotten into one of those arguments with a colleague that can only be solved with grant funding and a publication in a reputable peer-reviewed journal? That appears to be what happened in the emergency department of Tallaght Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, a little while back, and now the winner can claim his pint of Guinness.
That’s right, according to a study published in the Emergency Medicine Journal, injured Irish children were better distracted from their pain when a glove balloon was drawn with a face to resemble the Irish pop duo Jedward (Americans can substitute Good Charlotte) as opposed to what the researchers simply called a Mohawk (not Blink 182?). I think, however, that in the spirit of comparative effectiveness, we need more research. If I can just find five out-of-date exam gloves, I’m determined to test the distraction power of balloons that resemble the Backstreet Boys.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
Americano
I know what you’ve been thinking, because I’ve been thinking the same thing: “Hasn’t it been a long time since a not-very-famous starlet was paid to endorse a dubious-sounding cosmetic?” Our wait is over, as 24-year-old Nina Dobrev has lent her personage to what I sincerely hope is both the world’s first and also last caffeine-infused facial cream. In a clever marketing pitch, Ms. Dobrev explained to a reporter how she manages to look so stunning even early in the morning: “Just being happy. Happiness is the best thing [for looking fresh in the morning]." She added, “And also, being 24. It really helps if you’re a 24-year-old actress. But mainly, it’s the happiness.”
Changes in attitudes
Anyone can tell you the difference between ignorance and apathy: “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” But Dr. Brit Anderson of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center made headlines last week at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting by providing a more detailed answer. An emergency medicine fellow, Dr. Anderson wondered whether high school football players put themselves at risk of death and permanent brain damage because they were uninformed about concussions or because they felt death and permanent brain damage were small prices to pay for the esteem of their teammates and fans. Surprising those of us who knew football players in high school, apathy beat ignorance in a blowout.
In a survey of 120 high school athletes, Anderson’s team (of researchers, not football players) found that 70% recalled receiving concussion education, and nearly 91% understood that returning to play too quickly could lead to serious injury. More than 91%, however, said that it was okay for an athlete to play with a concussion, and nearly 60% said they would not report a concussion to their coach immediately. Additionally 73% patted the investigators’ butts, saying, “Good interview, man.”
These results suggest a serious deficit in our concussion education efforts for young athletes. In addition to teaching the symptoms and consequences of concussion, we also need to convince young football players that brain damage and death are undesirable outcomes of a football game. I think we’re going to have to get tough: “If you play with a concussion and die out there, you absolutely may not wear your letter jacket!” Of course, we could alter the rules of youth football so that we don’t risk injuring millions of young, developing brains every year, but ... ah, who cares?
REMless
Keeping the United States #1 in the world on so many measures is hard work. Sure, having the world’s highest rates of obesity and teen pregnancy is easy, but leading humanity in divorce, incarceration, and death by reptile? These things take work! Maybe that’s why our kids now rank first in the world in sleep deprivation according to newly released data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).
The TIMSS and PIRLS projects don’t just track how far our students are falling behind their peers in other countries in math, science, and literacy. They also collect other data, including information about students’ sleep habits. It appears that if only American kids would put down their iPhones and get some sleep, they might start gaining ground on those cursed, well-rested Finns. But, really, what are you going to do but sleep in a country where night lasts all winter? Personally, I blame the design of the TIMSS and PIRLS tests; if there were fewer questions about math, science, and reading and more about Angry Birds and YouTube, can anyone doubt we’d be #1?
Buzzkill
As though we needed any more proof that those wonks at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) were anti-fun, they appear to have strong-armed the Wrigley division of Mars Inc. into suspending sales of Alert Energy Caffeine Gum (in tasty fruit and refreshing mint flavors!). Each stick of the gum provides a rapidly absorbed dose of caffeine roughly equal to that in a half-cup of coffee.
Citing the deaths associated with consumption of some “energy beverages” and the young age of many gum consumers, FDA Deputy Commissioner Michael Taylor presumably draped his arm over the shoulders of Wrigley’s executives and invited them to picture what might happen when a class full of sleep-deprived American eighth-graders crammed whole packs of the stuff in their mouths just before sitting down to take the TIMSS and PIRLS. I guess for now caffeine-craving U.S. citizens will be limited to coffee, tea, soda, more than 500 brands of energy beverages, chocolate, diet pills, headache medicines, SumSeeds sunflower seeds, Morning Spark Instant Oatmeal, Perky Jerky dried meats, Foosh breath mints, and, of course, caffeinated facial moisturizer. If none of those things appeal, I guess they’ll have to just be happy.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
I know what you’ve been thinking, because I’ve been thinking the same thing: “Hasn’t it been a long time since a not-very-famous starlet was paid to endorse a dubious-sounding cosmetic?” Our wait is over, as 24-year-old Nina Dobrev has lent her personage to what I sincerely hope is both the world’s first and also last caffeine-infused facial cream. In a clever marketing pitch, Ms. Dobrev explained to a reporter how she manages to look so stunning even early in the morning: “Just being happy. Happiness is the best thing [for looking fresh in the morning]." She added, “And also, being 24. It really helps if you’re a 24-year-old actress. But mainly, it’s the happiness.”
Changes in attitudes
Anyone can tell you the difference between ignorance and apathy: “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” But Dr. Brit Anderson of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center made headlines last week at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting by providing a more detailed answer. An emergency medicine fellow, Dr. Anderson wondered whether high school football players put themselves at risk of death and permanent brain damage because they were uninformed about concussions or because they felt death and permanent brain damage were small prices to pay for the esteem of their teammates and fans. Surprising those of us who knew football players in high school, apathy beat ignorance in a blowout.
In a survey of 120 high school athletes, Anderson’s team (of researchers, not football players) found that 70% recalled receiving concussion education, and nearly 91% understood that returning to play too quickly could lead to serious injury. More than 91%, however, said that it was okay for an athlete to play with a concussion, and nearly 60% said they would not report a concussion to their coach immediately. Additionally 73% patted the investigators’ butts, saying, “Good interview, man.”
These results suggest a serious deficit in our concussion education efforts for young athletes. In addition to teaching the symptoms and consequences of concussion, we also need to convince young football players that brain damage and death are undesirable outcomes of a football game. I think we’re going to have to get tough: “If you play with a concussion and die out there, you absolutely may not wear your letter jacket!” Of course, we could alter the rules of youth football so that we don’t risk injuring millions of young, developing brains every year, but ... ah, who cares?
REMless
Keeping the United States #1 in the world on so many measures is hard work. Sure, having the world’s highest rates of obesity and teen pregnancy is easy, but leading humanity in divorce, incarceration, and death by reptile? These things take work! Maybe that’s why our kids now rank first in the world in sleep deprivation according to newly released data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).
The TIMSS and PIRLS projects don’t just track how far our students are falling behind their peers in other countries in math, science, and literacy. They also collect other data, including information about students’ sleep habits. It appears that if only American kids would put down their iPhones and get some sleep, they might start gaining ground on those cursed, well-rested Finns. But, really, what are you going to do but sleep in a country where night lasts all winter? Personally, I blame the design of the TIMSS and PIRLS tests; if there were fewer questions about math, science, and reading and more about Angry Birds and YouTube, can anyone doubt we’d be #1?
Buzzkill
As though we needed any more proof that those wonks at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) were anti-fun, they appear to have strong-armed the Wrigley division of Mars Inc. into suspending sales of Alert Energy Caffeine Gum (in tasty fruit and refreshing mint flavors!). Each stick of the gum provides a rapidly absorbed dose of caffeine roughly equal to that in a half-cup of coffee.
Citing the deaths associated with consumption of some “energy beverages” and the young age of many gum consumers, FDA Deputy Commissioner Michael Taylor presumably draped his arm over the shoulders of Wrigley’s executives and invited them to picture what might happen when a class full of sleep-deprived American eighth-graders crammed whole packs of the stuff in their mouths just before sitting down to take the TIMSS and PIRLS. I guess for now caffeine-craving U.S. citizens will be limited to coffee, tea, soda, more than 500 brands of energy beverages, chocolate, diet pills, headache medicines, SumSeeds sunflower seeds, Morning Spark Instant Oatmeal, Perky Jerky dried meats, Foosh breath mints, and, of course, caffeinated facial moisturizer. If none of those things appeal, I guess they’ll have to just be happy.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
I know what you’ve been thinking, because I’ve been thinking the same thing: “Hasn’t it been a long time since a not-very-famous starlet was paid to endorse a dubious-sounding cosmetic?” Our wait is over, as 24-year-old Nina Dobrev has lent her personage to what I sincerely hope is both the world’s first and also last caffeine-infused facial cream. In a clever marketing pitch, Ms. Dobrev explained to a reporter how she manages to look so stunning even early in the morning: “Just being happy. Happiness is the best thing [for looking fresh in the morning]." She added, “And also, being 24. It really helps if you’re a 24-year-old actress. But mainly, it’s the happiness.”
Changes in attitudes
Anyone can tell you the difference between ignorance and apathy: “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” But Dr. Brit Anderson of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center made headlines last week at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting by providing a more detailed answer. An emergency medicine fellow, Dr. Anderson wondered whether high school football players put themselves at risk of death and permanent brain damage because they were uninformed about concussions or because they felt death and permanent brain damage were small prices to pay for the esteem of their teammates and fans. Surprising those of us who knew football players in high school, apathy beat ignorance in a blowout.
In a survey of 120 high school athletes, Anderson’s team (of researchers, not football players) found that 70% recalled receiving concussion education, and nearly 91% understood that returning to play too quickly could lead to serious injury. More than 91%, however, said that it was okay for an athlete to play with a concussion, and nearly 60% said they would not report a concussion to their coach immediately. Additionally 73% patted the investigators’ butts, saying, “Good interview, man.”
These results suggest a serious deficit in our concussion education efforts for young athletes. In addition to teaching the symptoms and consequences of concussion, we also need to convince young football players that brain damage and death are undesirable outcomes of a football game. I think we’re going to have to get tough: “If you play with a concussion and die out there, you absolutely may not wear your letter jacket!” Of course, we could alter the rules of youth football so that we don’t risk injuring millions of young, developing brains every year, but ... ah, who cares?
REMless
Keeping the United States #1 in the world on so many measures is hard work. Sure, having the world’s highest rates of obesity and teen pregnancy is easy, but leading humanity in divorce, incarceration, and death by reptile? These things take work! Maybe that’s why our kids now rank first in the world in sleep deprivation according to newly released data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).
The TIMSS and PIRLS projects don’t just track how far our students are falling behind their peers in other countries in math, science, and literacy. They also collect other data, including information about students’ sleep habits. It appears that if only American kids would put down their iPhones and get some sleep, they might start gaining ground on those cursed, well-rested Finns. But, really, what are you going to do but sleep in a country where night lasts all winter? Personally, I blame the design of the TIMSS and PIRLS tests; if there were fewer questions about math, science, and reading and more about Angry Birds and YouTube, can anyone doubt we’d be #1?
Buzzkill
As though we needed any more proof that those wonks at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) were anti-fun, they appear to have strong-armed the Wrigley division of Mars Inc. into suspending sales of Alert Energy Caffeine Gum (in tasty fruit and refreshing mint flavors!). Each stick of the gum provides a rapidly absorbed dose of caffeine roughly equal to that in a half-cup of coffee.
Citing the deaths associated with consumption of some “energy beverages” and the young age of many gum consumers, FDA Deputy Commissioner Michael Taylor presumably draped his arm over the shoulders of Wrigley’s executives and invited them to picture what might happen when a class full of sleep-deprived American eighth-graders crammed whole packs of the stuff in their mouths just before sitting down to take the TIMSS and PIRLS. I guess for now caffeine-craving U.S. citizens will be limited to coffee, tea, soda, more than 500 brands of energy beverages, chocolate, diet pills, headache medicines, SumSeeds sunflower seeds, Morning Spark Instant Oatmeal, Perky Jerky dried meats, Foosh breath mints, and, of course, caffeinated facial moisturizer. If none of those things appeal, I guess they’ll have to just be happy.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
Unscripted
Like so many self-appointed social critics, I worry about the role models on TLC’s hit reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Will we soon be a nation of road-kill-eating, pig-petting beauty pageant contestants? Right, too late. But, in a victory for the traditional family, Honey Boo Boo’s parents, Mama June and Honey Bear, have finally tied the knot after spending more than 8 years as “shack ’em up mates.” Leaked photos reveal that both the bride and the groom wore camouflage. The ceremony was prolonged, as it took the couple several hours to locate each other in the brush.
The girl who played with pacifiers
Speaking of petting pigs, it’s not only a fun and rewarding hobby, it’s a great way for kids to avoid developing allergies, asthma, and eczema. The “hygiene hypothesis” of allergic disease seems to grow stronger every day, proving that I was right when as a child I told my mom, “But if you make me take a bath, I’ll require inhaled corticosteroids for the rest of my life!” (I was precocious.) This week’s biggest pediatric headline provides yet more evidence to suggest that when it comes to kids and allergies, the grosser the better.
The new, rigorously conducted study comes from Sweden, which is pretty much the last place that comes to my mind when you say “germs.” And yet, in a country so spotless that even their rock bands wear white jumpsuits, half the parents clean their babies’ pacifiers with their own spit. The other half do what I would do, which is to boil them, only because home autoclaves are so pricey. But the joke is on us: Who was most protected from developing allergic rhinitis, asthma, and eczema? Yep, those kids whose parents saw their binkies fall in the gutter then picked them up, gave them a quick lick, and popped them right back in their infants’ mouths. Who’s gagging now?
Which brings me to my newest business venture: Swedish parent saliva. That’s right, the oral secretions of mothers in the land of ice and snow are the only drool scientifically proven to prevent potentially deadly asthma. Carefully maintained at body temperature so as not to kill the precious microbes within, I will make this stuff available to select American parents too squeamish to lick dog hair off their own babies’ pacifiers. I’m still recruiting donors, but my brother-in-law is a Swedish MBA, and he assures me that if we offer a January trip to the Bahamas we can fill a tanker truck. Skål!
Fears for tears
Is there anything more depressing for a parent than having a baby with colic? I still have dark circles under my eyes, and my daughter is thirteen. But apparently there is one thing even worse: inconsolable crying. I know, isn’t colic inconsolable crying? According to the authors of a new study in Pediatrics, no, and the difference matters even more than picking a high-quality eye cream.
The authors asked mothers of newborns to record their babies’ habits in a research tool called the Baby’s Day Diary (“Tuesday: Cried until I thought my eyes would bleed. Took a breath. Cried again. Mom picked me up, changed me, tried to nurse me. Cried until my face was purple. So far a pretty good day.”) Then they correlated the entries at age 5-6 weeks to moms’ scores on the Edinburg Postnatal Depression Scale at 8 weeks. (The Edinburg scale determines whether new mothers are more or less depressed than Scottish people.) Compared with garden-variety colic, inconsolable crying turned out to be much more depressing, presumably because mothers like to console crying babies.
The researchers suggest pediatricians should be especially attuned to the possibility of maternal depression when they hear reports of inconsolable crying. If mom also has eye bags and a brogue, drive her to the psychiatrist yourself.
You must be this tall
Who doesn’t love the cheap thrill of amusement park rides? Me, that’s who. If it goes around in circles then it goes faster and then upside down, I’ll be waiting by the little gate labeled “Exit,” asking the carny where he got that cool tattoo. We all know to be terrified of the rides at large amusement parks and traveling fairs, but what about the little ones at the mall? Or at that pizza restaurant with the costumed characters where your child absolutely must have his next birthday party on Migraine Night? Does anyone know how many children get hurt at those places?
Actually, no, not until last week when Gary Smith and his colleagues from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital published their findings in Clinical Pediatrics. Of the 93,000 children treated in US emergency room for ride-related injuries between 1990 and 2010, 11,000 were hurt at malls, restaurants, and arcades. Fewer than 2% of injuries required hospitalization, a rate that probably compares favorably to those restaurants’ rates of food poisoning.
I suppose I should find those results reassuring, but I still have a recurring nightmare about a TLC reality show in which a backwoods beauty pageant contestant is filmed on a mall merry-go-round. In my dream the show is called, “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, Here Comes Honey....”
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
Like so many self-appointed social critics, I worry about the role models on TLC’s hit reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Will we soon be a nation of road-kill-eating, pig-petting beauty pageant contestants? Right, too late. But, in a victory for the traditional family, Honey Boo Boo’s parents, Mama June and Honey Bear, have finally tied the knot after spending more than 8 years as “shack ’em up mates.” Leaked photos reveal that both the bride and the groom wore camouflage. The ceremony was prolonged, as it took the couple several hours to locate each other in the brush.
The girl who played with pacifiers
Speaking of petting pigs, it’s not only a fun and rewarding hobby, it’s a great way for kids to avoid developing allergies, asthma, and eczema. The “hygiene hypothesis” of allergic disease seems to grow stronger every day, proving that I was right when as a child I told my mom, “But if you make me take a bath, I’ll require inhaled corticosteroids for the rest of my life!” (I was precocious.) This week’s biggest pediatric headline provides yet more evidence to suggest that when it comes to kids and allergies, the grosser the better.
The new, rigorously conducted study comes from Sweden, which is pretty much the last place that comes to my mind when you say “germs.” And yet, in a country so spotless that even their rock bands wear white jumpsuits, half the parents clean their babies’ pacifiers with their own spit. The other half do what I would do, which is to boil them, only because home autoclaves are so pricey. But the joke is on us: Who was most protected from developing allergic rhinitis, asthma, and eczema? Yep, those kids whose parents saw their binkies fall in the gutter then picked them up, gave them a quick lick, and popped them right back in their infants’ mouths. Who’s gagging now?
Which brings me to my newest business venture: Swedish parent saliva. That’s right, the oral secretions of mothers in the land of ice and snow are the only drool scientifically proven to prevent potentially deadly asthma. Carefully maintained at body temperature so as not to kill the precious microbes within, I will make this stuff available to select American parents too squeamish to lick dog hair off their own babies’ pacifiers. I’m still recruiting donors, but my brother-in-law is a Swedish MBA, and he assures me that if we offer a January trip to the Bahamas we can fill a tanker truck. Skål!
Fears for tears
Is there anything more depressing for a parent than having a baby with colic? I still have dark circles under my eyes, and my daughter is thirteen. But apparently there is one thing even worse: inconsolable crying. I know, isn’t colic inconsolable crying? According to the authors of a new study in Pediatrics, no, and the difference matters even more than picking a high-quality eye cream.
The authors asked mothers of newborns to record their babies’ habits in a research tool called the Baby’s Day Diary (“Tuesday: Cried until I thought my eyes would bleed. Took a breath. Cried again. Mom picked me up, changed me, tried to nurse me. Cried until my face was purple. So far a pretty good day.”) Then they correlated the entries at age 5-6 weeks to moms’ scores on the Edinburg Postnatal Depression Scale at 8 weeks. (The Edinburg scale determines whether new mothers are more or less depressed than Scottish people.) Compared with garden-variety colic, inconsolable crying turned out to be much more depressing, presumably because mothers like to console crying babies.
The researchers suggest pediatricians should be especially attuned to the possibility of maternal depression when they hear reports of inconsolable crying. If mom also has eye bags and a brogue, drive her to the psychiatrist yourself.
You must be this tall
Who doesn’t love the cheap thrill of amusement park rides? Me, that’s who. If it goes around in circles then it goes faster and then upside down, I’ll be waiting by the little gate labeled “Exit,” asking the carny where he got that cool tattoo. We all know to be terrified of the rides at large amusement parks and traveling fairs, but what about the little ones at the mall? Or at that pizza restaurant with the costumed characters where your child absolutely must have his next birthday party on Migraine Night? Does anyone know how many children get hurt at those places?
Actually, no, not until last week when Gary Smith and his colleagues from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital published their findings in Clinical Pediatrics. Of the 93,000 children treated in US emergency room for ride-related injuries between 1990 and 2010, 11,000 were hurt at malls, restaurants, and arcades. Fewer than 2% of injuries required hospitalization, a rate that probably compares favorably to those restaurants’ rates of food poisoning.
I suppose I should find those results reassuring, but I still have a recurring nightmare about a TLC reality show in which a backwoods beauty pageant contestant is filmed on a mall merry-go-round. In my dream the show is called, “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, Here Comes Honey....”
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
Like so many self-appointed social critics, I worry about the role models on TLC’s hit reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Will we soon be a nation of road-kill-eating, pig-petting beauty pageant contestants? Right, too late. But, in a victory for the traditional family, Honey Boo Boo’s parents, Mama June and Honey Bear, have finally tied the knot after spending more than 8 years as “shack ’em up mates.” Leaked photos reveal that both the bride and the groom wore camouflage. The ceremony was prolonged, as it took the couple several hours to locate each other in the brush.
The girl who played with pacifiers
Speaking of petting pigs, it’s not only a fun and rewarding hobby, it’s a great way for kids to avoid developing allergies, asthma, and eczema. The “hygiene hypothesis” of allergic disease seems to grow stronger every day, proving that I was right when as a child I told my mom, “But if you make me take a bath, I’ll require inhaled corticosteroids for the rest of my life!” (I was precocious.) This week’s biggest pediatric headline provides yet more evidence to suggest that when it comes to kids and allergies, the grosser the better.
The new, rigorously conducted study comes from Sweden, which is pretty much the last place that comes to my mind when you say “germs.” And yet, in a country so spotless that even their rock bands wear white jumpsuits, half the parents clean their babies’ pacifiers with their own spit. The other half do what I would do, which is to boil them, only because home autoclaves are so pricey. But the joke is on us: Who was most protected from developing allergic rhinitis, asthma, and eczema? Yep, those kids whose parents saw their binkies fall in the gutter then picked them up, gave them a quick lick, and popped them right back in their infants’ mouths. Who’s gagging now?
Which brings me to my newest business venture: Swedish parent saliva. That’s right, the oral secretions of mothers in the land of ice and snow are the only drool scientifically proven to prevent potentially deadly asthma. Carefully maintained at body temperature so as not to kill the precious microbes within, I will make this stuff available to select American parents too squeamish to lick dog hair off their own babies’ pacifiers. I’m still recruiting donors, but my brother-in-law is a Swedish MBA, and he assures me that if we offer a January trip to the Bahamas we can fill a tanker truck. Skål!
Fears for tears
Is there anything more depressing for a parent than having a baby with colic? I still have dark circles under my eyes, and my daughter is thirteen. But apparently there is one thing even worse: inconsolable crying. I know, isn’t colic inconsolable crying? According to the authors of a new study in Pediatrics, no, and the difference matters even more than picking a high-quality eye cream.
The authors asked mothers of newborns to record their babies’ habits in a research tool called the Baby’s Day Diary (“Tuesday: Cried until I thought my eyes would bleed. Took a breath. Cried again. Mom picked me up, changed me, tried to nurse me. Cried until my face was purple. So far a pretty good day.”) Then they correlated the entries at age 5-6 weeks to moms’ scores on the Edinburg Postnatal Depression Scale at 8 weeks. (The Edinburg scale determines whether new mothers are more or less depressed than Scottish people.) Compared with garden-variety colic, inconsolable crying turned out to be much more depressing, presumably because mothers like to console crying babies.
The researchers suggest pediatricians should be especially attuned to the possibility of maternal depression when they hear reports of inconsolable crying. If mom also has eye bags and a brogue, drive her to the psychiatrist yourself.
You must be this tall
Who doesn’t love the cheap thrill of amusement park rides? Me, that’s who. If it goes around in circles then it goes faster and then upside down, I’ll be waiting by the little gate labeled “Exit,” asking the carny where he got that cool tattoo. We all know to be terrified of the rides at large amusement parks and traveling fairs, but what about the little ones at the mall? Or at that pizza restaurant with the costumed characters where your child absolutely must have his next birthday party on Migraine Night? Does anyone know how many children get hurt at those places?
Actually, no, not until last week when Gary Smith and his colleagues from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital published their findings in Clinical Pediatrics. Of the 93,000 children treated in US emergency room for ride-related injuries between 1990 and 2010, 11,000 were hurt at malls, restaurants, and arcades. Fewer than 2% of injuries required hospitalization, a rate that probably compares favorably to those restaurants’ rates of food poisoning.
I suppose I should find those results reassuring, but I still have a recurring nightmare about a TLC reality show in which a backwoods beauty pageant contestant is filmed on a mall merry-go-round. In my dream the show is called, “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, Here Comes Honey....”
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.
Generous helping
This last week has been among the most boring ever in pop culture. Is Pink becoming more chaste? Does Tori Spelling keep a pet chicken in her bedroom? Do I care? Heck, I have a pet chicken, and I still don’t care! But then I find a headline that warms my heart: In lieu of baby gifts, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have asked their friends and well-wishers to donate to the neonatal intensive care unit of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. What, exactly, the preemies will do with a diamond-encrusted platinum baby rattle is anyone’s guess, but the Tom Ford onesies should nicely complement the Gucci diapers.
Déjà vu
I’ve always wanted to start a charity, mainly so that I can host a black tie ball and invite celebrities to share embarrassing personal stories. Now, thanks to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition (NASPGHAN), I’d like to ask you all to be founding members of my new nonprofit. While I strongly considered the “Society to Find a Shorter Acronym for the NASPGHAN,” I settled on the Gastroesophageal Reflux Is Not a Disease Foundation (GERINADF). Our mission: to save endangered proton pump inhibitors by keeping them in their natural environment, bottles.
More than a quarter of routine 6-month pediatric wellness exams involve discussions of spitting up (the baby’s, not the doctor’s), and upwards of 2/3 of healthy infants experience some spitting. An article published in Pediatrics earlier this month demonstrated that simply calling reflux a “disease” inspired parents to seek medication, even when they were told the medicine was probably useless. Is it any wonder we overprescribe for spitting? Are you ready to give yet? Wait until I show you a video of Ana, a beautiful happy spitter who contracted pneumonia that may have been caused by excessive antacid use.
The May issue of Pediatrics includes a clinical report from the Section on Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition that strongly supports the mission of the GERINADF. It suggests that few infants who spit up require any sort of treatment, and those who do should start with a trial of feeding modifications rather than medications. Of course, our dream at GERINADF is that all pediatricians will read and comply with the suggested guidelines, but until discussing feeding modifications takes less time than dashing off an antacid script, I’ll keep looking for a D-list celebrity in need of a charity. Don’t give to GERINADF for me. Do it for Ana.
Sweet home
Those of us who grow up in the South know that wherever we go, the region will always be in our hearts. A new study suggests it also lingers in our carotids. According to Virginia Howard, Ph.D., and her team of researchers at the University of Alabama (woo woo woo), Tuscaloosa, just spending your teenage years in the South (a.k.a., “the stroke belt”) is enough to increase your risk of stroke at age 65 years, even if you live the rest of your life in a region where pork belly is not considered a vegetable.
The study looked at 24,544 older Americans who had not yet had a stroke, following them to see what differentiated those who eventually suffered cerebrovascular accidents from those who didn’t. Spending their teen years in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee or Virginia increased the risk of stroke by 17%, even in patients who subsequently moved away. The risk appeared multifactorial, due in part to diet, tobacco use, and exposure to the Charlie Daniels Band. As I’ve heard all my life, the South shall rise again. Starting with our blood pressure.
Coddled or hard boiled?
As if helicopter parents needed one more thing to obsess about, they now have to worry that their kids will be bullied. A new literature review in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect confirms the conventional wisdom that children whose parents shield them too much from negative experiences are more likely to be picked on by their peers. On the flip side, children who grow up in neglectful or abusive environments are also at higher risk of bullying. Moms and dads from Park Slope to Palo Alto right now are tying themselves in knots trying to figure out how to provide their little princes and princesses just the right degree of childhood adversity.
I foresee business opportunities galore in this trend. Just at birthday parties alone, we’ll observe a spike in demand for angry clowns, underinflated bouncy houses, and double-thickness piñatas. Only the rudest kids will be invited to playdates. Creative arts programs will empty out to be replaced by boot camps with demanding-yet-supportive drill sergeants. I’d like to say I’m joking here, but seriously, bookmark this blog and check back in a year. Kim Kardashian’s baby is going to be cleaning up after Tori Spelling’s chicken, and it won’t even be news.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
This last week has been among the most boring ever in pop culture. Is Pink becoming more chaste? Does Tori Spelling keep a pet chicken in her bedroom? Do I care? Heck, I have a pet chicken, and I still don’t care! But then I find a headline that warms my heart: In lieu of baby gifts, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have asked their friends and well-wishers to donate to the neonatal intensive care unit of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. What, exactly, the preemies will do with a diamond-encrusted platinum baby rattle is anyone’s guess, but the Tom Ford onesies should nicely complement the Gucci diapers.
Déjà vu
I’ve always wanted to start a charity, mainly so that I can host a black tie ball and invite celebrities to share embarrassing personal stories. Now, thanks to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition (NASPGHAN), I’d like to ask you all to be founding members of my new nonprofit. While I strongly considered the “Society to Find a Shorter Acronym for the NASPGHAN,” I settled on the Gastroesophageal Reflux Is Not a Disease Foundation (GERINADF). Our mission: to save endangered proton pump inhibitors by keeping them in their natural environment, bottles.
More than a quarter of routine 6-month pediatric wellness exams involve discussions of spitting up (the baby’s, not the doctor’s), and upwards of 2/3 of healthy infants experience some spitting. An article published in Pediatrics earlier this month demonstrated that simply calling reflux a “disease” inspired parents to seek medication, even when they were told the medicine was probably useless. Is it any wonder we overprescribe for spitting? Are you ready to give yet? Wait until I show you a video of Ana, a beautiful happy spitter who contracted pneumonia that may have been caused by excessive antacid use.
The May issue of Pediatrics includes a clinical report from the Section on Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition that strongly supports the mission of the GERINADF. It suggests that few infants who spit up require any sort of treatment, and those who do should start with a trial of feeding modifications rather than medications. Of course, our dream at GERINADF is that all pediatricians will read and comply with the suggested guidelines, but until discussing feeding modifications takes less time than dashing off an antacid script, I’ll keep looking for a D-list celebrity in need of a charity. Don’t give to GERINADF for me. Do it for Ana.
Sweet home
Those of us who grow up in the South know that wherever we go, the region will always be in our hearts. A new study suggests it also lingers in our carotids. According to Virginia Howard, Ph.D., and her team of researchers at the University of Alabama (woo woo woo), Tuscaloosa, just spending your teenage years in the South (a.k.a., “the stroke belt”) is enough to increase your risk of stroke at age 65 years, even if you live the rest of your life in a region where pork belly is not considered a vegetable.
The study looked at 24,544 older Americans who had not yet had a stroke, following them to see what differentiated those who eventually suffered cerebrovascular accidents from those who didn’t. Spending their teen years in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee or Virginia increased the risk of stroke by 17%, even in patients who subsequently moved away. The risk appeared multifactorial, due in part to diet, tobacco use, and exposure to the Charlie Daniels Band. As I’ve heard all my life, the South shall rise again. Starting with our blood pressure.
Coddled or hard boiled?
As if helicopter parents needed one more thing to obsess about, they now have to worry that their kids will be bullied. A new literature review in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect confirms the conventional wisdom that children whose parents shield them too much from negative experiences are more likely to be picked on by their peers. On the flip side, children who grow up in neglectful or abusive environments are also at higher risk of bullying. Moms and dads from Park Slope to Palo Alto right now are tying themselves in knots trying to figure out how to provide their little princes and princesses just the right degree of childhood adversity.
I foresee business opportunities galore in this trend. Just at birthday parties alone, we’ll observe a spike in demand for angry clowns, underinflated bouncy houses, and double-thickness piñatas. Only the rudest kids will be invited to playdates. Creative arts programs will empty out to be replaced by boot camps with demanding-yet-supportive drill sergeants. I’d like to say I’m joking here, but seriously, bookmark this blog and check back in a year. Kim Kardashian’s baby is going to be cleaning up after Tori Spelling’s chicken, and it won’t even be news.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
This last week has been among the most boring ever in pop culture. Is Pink becoming more chaste? Does Tori Spelling keep a pet chicken in her bedroom? Do I care? Heck, I have a pet chicken, and I still don’t care! But then I find a headline that warms my heart: In lieu of baby gifts, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have asked their friends and well-wishers to donate to the neonatal intensive care unit of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. What, exactly, the preemies will do with a diamond-encrusted platinum baby rattle is anyone’s guess, but the Tom Ford onesies should nicely complement the Gucci diapers.
Déjà vu
I’ve always wanted to start a charity, mainly so that I can host a black tie ball and invite celebrities to share embarrassing personal stories. Now, thanks to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition (NASPGHAN), I’d like to ask you all to be founding members of my new nonprofit. While I strongly considered the “Society to Find a Shorter Acronym for the NASPGHAN,” I settled on the Gastroesophageal Reflux Is Not a Disease Foundation (GERINADF). Our mission: to save endangered proton pump inhibitors by keeping them in their natural environment, bottles.
More than a quarter of routine 6-month pediatric wellness exams involve discussions of spitting up (the baby’s, not the doctor’s), and upwards of 2/3 of healthy infants experience some spitting. An article published in Pediatrics earlier this month demonstrated that simply calling reflux a “disease” inspired parents to seek medication, even when they were told the medicine was probably useless. Is it any wonder we overprescribe for spitting? Are you ready to give yet? Wait until I show you a video of Ana, a beautiful happy spitter who contracted pneumonia that may have been caused by excessive antacid use.
The May issue of Pediatrics includes a clinical report from the Section on Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition that strongly supports the mission of the GERINADF. It suggests that few infants who spit up require any sort of treatment, and those who do should start with a trial of feeding modifications rather than medications. Of course, our dream at GERINADF is that all pediatricians will read and comply with the suggested guidelines, but until discussing feeding modifications takes less time than dashing off an antacid script, I’ll keep looking for a D-list celebrity in need of a charity. Don’t give to GERINADF for me. Do it for Ana.
Sweet home
Those of us who grow up in the South know that wherever we go, the region will always be in our hearts. A new study suggests it also lingers in our carotids. According to Virginia Howard, Ph.D., and her team of researchers at the University of Alabama (woo woo woo), Tuscaloosa, just spending your teenage years in the South (a.k.a., “the stroke belt”) is enough to increase your risk of stroke at age 65 years, even if you live the rest of your life in a region where pork belly is not considered a vegetable.
The study looked at 24,544 older Americans who had not yet had a stroke, following them to see what differentiated those who eventually suffered cerebrovascular accidents from those who didn’t. Spending their teen years in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee or Virginia increased the risk of stroke by 17%, even in patients who subsequently moved away. The risk appeared multifactorial, due in part to diet, tobacco use, and exposure to the Charlie Daniels Band. As I’ve heard all my life, the South shall rise again. Starting with our blood pressure.
Coddled or hard boiled?
As if helicopter parents needed one more thing to obsess about, they now have to worry that their kids will be bullied. A new literature review in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect confirms the conventional wisdom that children whose parents shield them too much from negative experiences are more likely to be picked on by their peers. On the flip side, children who grow up in neglectful or abusive environments are also at higher risk of bullying. Moms and dads from Park Slope to Palo Alto right now are tying themselves in knots trying to figure out how to provide their little princes and princesses just the right degree of childhood adversity.
I foresee business opportunities galore in this trend. Just at birthday parties alone, we’ll observe a spike in demand for angry clowns, underinflated bouncy houses, and double-thickness piñatas. Only the rudest kids will be invited to playdates. Creative arts programs will empty out to be replaced by boot camps with demanding-yet-supportive drill sergeants. I’d like to say I’m joking here, but seriously, bookmark this blog and check back in a year. Kim Kardashian’s baby is going to be cleaning up after Tori Spelling’s chicken, and it won’t even be news.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Illegally blonde
Here’s a good rule for life: No matter how important you are, never, ever ask an authority figure, “Do you know who I am?” That’s what actress Reese Witherspoon inquired of the Atlanta police officer arresting her husband Jim Toth last week for (very) drunk driving. Worse was the officer’s response, left out of the police report for the sake of brevity: “Lindsay Lohan? Wait, no! Britney Spears? No, then, uh, Matthew Perry? Look, I give up! Just get in the squad car!” The bottom line is that if you ask a cop, “Do you know my name?” chances are good the answer will be, “Yes. The Defendant.”
Gripe water
The cause of colic is totally the Higgs boson of pediatrics. We can all describe colic, but what is it really? Intestinal gas? The angst of the “fourth trimester”? A complex electro-neutral doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c having + parity and zero spin? Wait, that last one actually was the Higgs, but who’s to say the Higgs boson, in addition to providing strong support to the Standard Model of particle physics, is not also the cause of infantile colic?
Dr. Luigi Titomanlio from Paris Diderot University and his colleagues, that’s who. They published a study in JAMA suggesting a strong link between infantile colic and childhood migraines. Dr. Titomanlio's group surveyed parents of children who presented to French and Italian emergency departments in 2012 with either minor trauma, migraines, or non-migraine headaches. The kids with migraines were nearly seven times more likely to have had colicky crying during infancy than were those with minor trauma or non-migraine headaches. All patients were reassured that, since they lived in France and Italy, nothing could be all that bad.
This study makes the fourth one to link colic to migraines, building on a model of pain sensitivity that is starting to explain a lot of syndromes that were classified when I was in medical school as “hogwash,” or, for our vegan classmates, “potato wash.” Maybe colicky infants cry because they don’t yet have the words to say, “For Pete’s sake, would someone turn off those lights and get me some ear plugs, two ibuprofen, and a Diet Coke?!” I’d like to see future studies that correlate colic to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. In the babies. There is already a well-established link to chronic fatigue in the parents.
All in the family
In some ways, we had it easy when I was a medical student. Sure, we worked hours that the World Court eventually classified as war crimes, and no one cared if our preceptors browbeat us until we slunk into a linen closet weeping and wondering why the universe had allowed us to be conceived. But at least we didn’t have to present in front of patients and their families. A review in this month’s Pediatrics makes the case that, for the several minutes each day medical students and residents are in the hospital, those not spent in self-empowerment support groups should be passed right in patients’ rooms. Has author Suresh Nagappan, M.D., M.S.P.H., from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro ever actually been in a patient room?
I mean it’s hard enough to spout arcane facts, subtly imply that your team members are intellectually deficient, and flatter your attending in a sterile conference room at the end of the hall. With Dr. Nagappan’s “Family-Centered Care,” you have to do all that in front of actual parents, surrounded by discarded fast food wrappers and talking over a Total Gym infomercial. Do parents really want to hear medical students diagnose every child on the ward with acute intermittent porphyria?
Apparently they do, by a margin of 85%. Predictably, family-centered rounds take 20% longer than traditional rounds do, as the attending has to explain that no, no one actually has acute intermittent porphyria, it’s just a disease medical students made up to give the appearance of having generated a differential diagnosis. On the other hand, families and nurses were less likely to call team members back to the room after rounds, presumably because by the time rounds were over, the patients had been discharged. Half of medical students remain suspicious of family-centered care, fearing both that they might look foolish in front of patients and that they might actually purchase the Total Gym.
Fatal attraction?
I have to wonder what this country is coming to when retailers are afraid to sell a toy -- a really, really fun toy -- just because it might kill small children. Overstock.com and Toys “R” Us are among the latest outlets to stop selling Buckyballs and Buckycubes, sets of tiny, super-powerful neodymium magnets, because when a child swallows two or more of the magnets, they tend to stick together in the intestines, which is where the fun stops. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can find only 33 cases requiring emergency surgery and only one death from what the manufacturers keep pointing out is a seriously entertaining toy.
This trend must be stopped, or we risk living in a world where infants are forced to ride in approved car seats, medication bottles have nearly impossible-to-open caps, and there are some modest restrictions on the sale of military-grade assault weapons to people with mental illness and criminal records. Ah, who am I kidding? If that last one ever happens, you can arrest me and call me “Charlie Sheen.”
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Here’s a good rule for life: No matter how important you are, never, ever ask an authority figure, “Do you know who I am?” That’s what actress Reese Witherspoon inquired of the Atlanta police officer arresting her husband Jim Toth last week for (very) drunk driving. Worse was the officer’s response, left out of the police report for the sake of brevity: “Lindsay Lohan? Wait, no! Britney Spears? No, then, uh, Matthew Perry? Look, I give up! Just get in the squad car!” The bottom line is that if you ask a cop, “Do you know my name?” chances are good the answer will be, “Yes. The Defendant.”
Gripe water
The cause of colic is totally the Higgs boson of pediatrics. We can all describe colic, but what is it really? Intestinal gas? The angst of the “fourth trimester”? A complex electro-neutral doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c having + parity and zero spin? Wait, that last one actually was the Higgs, but who’s to say the Higgs boson, in addition to providing strong support to the Standard Model of particle physics, is not also the cause of infantile colic?
Dr. Luigi Titomanlio from Paris Diderot University and his colleagues, that’s who. They published a study in JAMA suggesting a strong link between infantile colic and childhood migraines. Dr. Titomanlio's group surveyed parents of children who presented to French and Italian emergency departments in 2012 with either minor trauma, migraines, or non-migraine headaches. The kids with migraines were nearly seven times more likely to have had colicky crying during infancy than were those with minor trauma or non-migraine headaches. All patients were reassured that, since they lived in France and Italy, nothing could be all that bad.
This study makes the fourth one to link colic to migraines, building on a model of pain sensitivity that is starting to explain a lot of syndromes that were classified when I was in medical school as “hogwash,” or, for our vegan classmates, “potato wash.” Maybe colicky infants cry because they don’t yet have the words to say, “For Pete’s sake, would someone turn off those lights and get me some ear plugs, two ibuprofen, and a Diet Coke?!” I’d like to see future studies that correlate colic to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. In the babies. There is already a well-established link to chronic fatigue in the parents.
All in the family
In some ways, we had it easy when I was a medical student. Sure, we worked hours that the World Court eventually classified as war crimes, and no one cared if our preceptors browbeat us until we slunk into a linen closet weeping and wondering why the universe had allowed us to be conceived. But at least we didn’t have to present in front of patients and their families. A review in this month’s Pediatrics makes the case that, for the several minutes each day medical students and residents are in the hospital, those not spent in self-empowerment support groups should be passed right in patients’ rooms. Has author Suresh Nagappan, M.D., M.S.P.H., from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro ever actually been in a patient room?
I mean it’s hard enough to spout arcane facts, subtly imply that your team members are intellectually deficient, and flatter your attending in a sterile conference room at the end of the hall. With Dr. Nagappan’s “Family-Centered Care,” you have to do all that in front of actual parents, surrounded by discarded fast food wrappers and talking over a Total Gym infomercial. Do parents really want to hear medical students diagnose every child on the ward with acute intermittent porphyria?
Apparently they do, by a margin of 85%. Predictably, family-centered rounds take 20% longer than traditional rounds do, as the attending has to explain that no, no one actually has acute intermittent porphyria, it’s just a disease medical students made up to give the appearance of having generated a differential diagnosis. On the other hand, families and nurses were less likely to call team members back to the room after rounds, presumably because by the time rounds were over, the patients had been discharged. Half of medical students remain suspicious of family-centered care, fearing both that they might look foolish in front of patients and that they might actually purchase the Total Gym.
Fatal attraction?
I have to wonder what this country is coming to when retailers are afraid to sell a toy -- a really, really fun toy -- just because it might kill small children. Overstock.com and Toys “R” Us are among the latest outlets to stop selling Buckyballs and Buckycubes, sets of tiny, super-powerful neodymium magnets, because when a child swallows two or more of the magnets, they tend to stick together in the intestines, which is where the fun stops. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can find only 33 cases requiring emergency surgery and only one death from what the manufacturers keep pointing out is a seriously entertaining toy.
This trend must be stopped, or we risk living in a world where infants are forced to ride in approved car seats, medication bottles have nearly impossible-to-open caps, and there are some modest restrictions on the sale of military-grade assault weapons to people with mental illness and criminal records. Ah, who am I kidding? If that last one ever happens, you can arrest me and call me “Charlie Sheen.”
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Here’s a good rule for life: No matter how important you are, never, ever ask an authority figure, “Do you know who I am?” That’s what actress Reese Witherspoon inquired of the Atlanta police officer arresting her husband Jim Toth last week for (very) drunk driving. Worse was the officer’s response, left out of the police report for the sake of brevity: “Lindsay Lohan? Wait, no! Britney Spears? No, then, uh, Matthew Perry? Look, I give up! Just get in the squad car!” The bottom line is that if you ask a cop, “Do you know my name?” chances are good the answer will be, “Yes. The Defendant.”
Gripe water
The cause of colic is totally the Higgs boson of pediatrics. We can all describe colic, but what is it really? Intestinal gas? The angst of the “fourth trimester”? A complex electro-neutral doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c having + parity and zero spin? Wait, that last one actually was the Higgs, but who’s to say the Higgs boson, in addition to providing strong support to the Standard Model of particle physics, is not also the cause of infantile colic?
Dr. Luigi Titomanlio from Paris Diderot University and his colleagues, that’s who. They published a study in JAMA suggesting a strong link between infantile colic and childhood migraines. Dr. Titomanlio's group surveyed parents of children who presented to French and Italian emergency departments in 2012 with either minor trauma, migraines, or non-migraine headaches. The kids with migraines were nearly seven times more likely to have had colicky crying during infancy than were those with minor trauma or non-migraine headaches. All patients were reassured that, since they lived in France and Italy, nothing could be all that bad.
This study makes the fourth one to link colic to migraines, building on a model of pain sensitivity that is starting to explain a lot of syndromes that were classified when I was in medical school as “hogwash,” or, for our vegan classmates, “potato wash.” Maybe colicky infants cry because they don’t yet have the words to say, “For Pete’s sake, would someone turn off those lights and get me some ear plugs, two ibuprofen, and a Diet Coke?!” I’d like to see future studies that correlate colic to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. In the babies. There is already a well-established link to chronic fatigue in the parents.
All in the family
In some ways, we had it easy when I was a medical student. Sure, we worked hours that the World Court eventually classified as war crimes, and no one cared if our preceptors browbeat us until we slunk into a linen closet weeping and wondering why the universe had allowed us to be conceived. But at least we didn’t have to present in front of patients and their families. A review in this month’s Pediatrics makes the case that, for the several minutes each day medical students and residents are in the hospital, those not spent in self-empowerment support groups should be passed right in patients’ rooms. Has author Suresh Nagappan, M.D., M.S.P.H., from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro ever actually been in a patient room?
I mean it’s hard enough to spout arcane facts, subtly imply that your team members are intellectually deficient, and flatter your attending in a sterile conference room at the end of the hall. With Dr. Nagappan’s “Family-Centered Care,” you have to do all that in front of actual parents, surrounded by discarded fast food wrappers and talking over a Total Gym infomercial. Do parents really want to hear medical students diagnose every child on the ward with acute intermittent porphyria?
Apparently they do, by a margin of 85%. Predictably, family-centered rounds take 20% longer than traditional rounds do, as the attending has to explain that no, no one actually has acute intermittent porphyria, it’s just a disease medical students made up to give the appearance of having generated a differential diagnosis. On the other hand, families and nurses were less likely to call team members back to the room after rounds, presumably because by the time rounds were over, the patients had been discharged. Half of medical students remain suspicious of family-centered care, fearing both that they might look foolish in front of patients and that they might actually purchase the Total Gym.
Fatal attraction?
I have to wonder what this country is coming to when retailers are afraid to sell a toy -- a really, really fun toy -- just because it might kill small children. Overstock.com and Toys “R” Us are among the latest outlets to stop selling Buckyballs and Buckycubes, sets of tiny, super-powerful neodymium magnets, because when a child swallows two or more of the magnets, they tend to stick together in the intestines, which is where the fun stops. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can find only 33 cases requiring emergency surgery and only one death from what the manufacturers keep pointing out is a seriously entertaining toy.
This trend must be stopped, or we risk living in a world where infants are forced to ride in approved car seats, medication bottles have nearly impossible-to-open caps, and there are some modest restrictions on the sale of military-grade assault weapons to people with mental illness and criminal records. Ah, who am I kidding? If that last one ever happens, you can arrest me and call me “Charlie Sheen.”
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Then I saw her face
Okay, y’all, I know this is ironic coming from me, but it’s time to lay off Justin Bieber. The jejune pop star has endured an onslaught of criticism for visiting the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam and writing in the guest book that he hoped Anne Frank (in some alternate reality) would have been a “Belieber,” which is not as bad a spelling error as it first appears. In fact, it was just a musing on how the trapped 14-year-old amused herself with pictures of contemporary celebrities. Imagine, for example, what a big star Frank Sinatra might have been if only he’d had Bieber’s haircut!
Rankling
The United States is the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country, right? And we love our children, right? So when the United Nations released their ranking of children’s well-being among the world’s 29 richest countries last week, there’s no question where we fall, right? Put your hands in the air and chant it, people: “We’re number 26! We’re number 26! In your face, Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania! And hey, Greece, Slovakia, Estonia, watch your backs, because we’re coming for you! Just as soon as we finish cutting funding even further for education, health care, and environmental safety! Booyah!”
Of course, when you break well-being down into five categories, the U.S. rises much higher in the rankings, all the way to 23rd for both Behaviors & Risks and Housing & Environment. For Education, however, we drop to 27th; if that’s not a reason to fire even more teachers, I don’t know what is! There was one measure on which the U.S. did actually rank at the top: The U.S. and Ireland were the only two countries in which at least 25% of children reported exercising at least an hour each day. It is not clear from the report whether the survey clarified that “exercise” does not technically include playing Call of Duty III.
Who, then, is on top? It’s those stinking Northern Europeans again, particularly the Dutch. I suppose we, too, could have healthier children if we chose to submit to a Communist dictatorship that forces people to ride bicycles, wear wooden shoes, and smoke marijuana (if you’ve ever tried to ride a bicycle in wooden shoes stoned, you know that only the strongest survive). Besides, what have all those healthy, brilliant Dutch children produced for the world that even comes close to the Big Mac or Ted? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
The social network
You know how some people put a huge amount of resources into the wrong things because they’re missing the bigger picture? Like that guy who buys a Porsche when what he really needs is to not be a jerk? A groundbreaking new study suggests that pediatricians and other vaccine advocates may want to refocus our efforts. We don’t need more data on vaccine safety. We need more friends.
Dr. Emily Brunson at Texas State University, San Marcos, applied the novel approach of social network analysis to determine just who it is that influences parents to delay or forgo vaccines in favor of life-threatening diseases. To find enough such parents, she went to the mother lode of measles, the wealth of whooping cough that is King County, Washington. There, she found 126 parents who vaccinate their children on time (conformers) and 70 who delay or skip vaccines (nonconformers) and asked them to list and rank every person and source that informed their decisions. It turns out that health care providers remain an important influence on parents’ vaccine choices, just less important than spouses, friends, Reiki masters, baristas, parking lot attendants, and dog-eared paperbacks passed on over cups of organic chai latte.
Nonconforming parents, in fact, reported having more friends and seeking more sources on vaccines than did conforming parents. Many of the sources nonconformers turned to actually did support on-time and complete vaccination, but it appears they kept looking until they found a resource that confirmed the biases of their friends and family members. What we need, it appears, is not better websites and handouts for parents. Instead, right now, every pediatrician in America needs to go out and marry at least one vaccine nonconformer, more if local statutes allow. If this seems like too much trouble, then at least have them over for chai and Reiki. And hide your Porsche.
Eine kleine
In what has to be possibly the single most pleasant study ever conducted in a neonatal intensive care unit, music therapists and physicians at Beth Israel Medical Center determined that premature infants respond to live music with improved heart rates and respiratory function and enhanced sucking and caloric intake. Researchers also played a whooshing sound on something called the Remo Ocean Disk and a heartbeat sound on something called a “gato box,” which I must assume does not contain an actual Mexican cat.
The best responses came when a parent sang a culturally relevant lullaby; when they couldn’t think of one, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” was suggested. I just have to wonder, however, what if your mom is, say, Ke$ha? We can only hope she knows “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Or maybe she could ask Justin Bieber to swing by the NICU to sing a few tunes. Could it really happen? Never say never.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Okay, y’all, I know this is ironic coming from me, but it’s time to lay off Justin Bieber. The jejune pop star has endured an onslaught of criticism for visiting the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam and writing in the guest book that he hoped Anne Frank (in some alternate reality) would have been a “Belieber,” which is not as bad a spelling error as it first appears. In fact, it was just a musing on how the trapped 14-year-old amused herself with pictures of contemporary celebrities. Imagine, for example, what a big star Frank Sinatra might have been if only he’d had Bieber’s haircut!
Rankling
The United States is the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country, right? And we love our children, right? So when the United Nations released their ranking of children’s well-being among the world’s 29 richest countries last week, there’s no question where we fall, right? Put your hands in the air and chant it, people: “We’re number 26! We’re number 26! In your face, Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania! And hey, Greece, Slovakia, Estonia, watch your backs, because we’re coming for you! Just as soon as we finish cutting funding even further for education, health care, and environmental safety! Booyah!”
Of course, when you break well-being down into five categories, the U.S. rises much higher in the rankings, all the way to 23rd for both Behaviors & Risks and Housing & Environment. For Education, however, we drop to 27th; if that’s not a reason to fire even more teachers, I don’t know what is! There was one measure on which the U.S. did actually rank at the top: The U.S. and Ireland were the only two countries in which at least 25% of children reported exercising at least an hour each day. It is not clear from the report whether the survey clarified that “exercise” does not technically include playing Call of Duty III.
Who, then, is on top? It’s those stinking Northern Europeans again, particularly the Dutch. I suppose we, too, could have healthier children if we chose to submit to a Communist dictatorship that forces people to ride bicycles, wear wooden shoes, and smoke marijuana (if you’ve ever tried to ride a bicycle in wooden shoes stoned, you know that only the strongest survive). Besides, what have all those healthy, brilliant Dutch children produced for the world that even comes close to the Big Mac or Ted? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
The social network
You know how some people put a huge amount of resources into the wrong things because they’re missing the bigger picture? Like that guy who buys a Porsche when what he really needs is to not be a jerk? A groundbreaking new study suggests that pediatricians and other vaccine advocates may want to refocus our efforts. We don’t need more data on vaccine safety. We need more friends.
Dr. Emily Brunson at Texas State University, San Marcos, applied the novel approach of social network analysis to determine just who it is that influences parents to delay or forgo vaccines in favor of life-threatening diseases. To find enough such parents, she went to the mother lode of measles, the wealth of whooping cough that is King County, Washington. There, she found 126 parents who vaccinate their children on time (conformers) and 70 who delay or skip vaccines (nonconformers) and asked them to list and rank every person and source that informed their decisions. It turns out that health care providers remain an important influence on parents’ vaccine choices, just less important than spouses, friends, Reiki masters, baristas, parking lot attendants, and dog-eared paperbacks passed on over cups of organic chai latte.
Nonconforming parents, in fact, reported having more friends and seeking more sources on vaccines than did conforming parents. Many of the sources nonconformers turned to actually did support on-time and complete vaccination, but it appears they kept looking until they found a resource that confirmed the biases of their friends and family members. What we need, it appears, is not better websites and handouts for parents. Instead, right now, every pediatrician in America needs to go out and marry at least one vaccine nonconformer, more if local statutes allow. If this seems like too much trouble, then at least have them over for chai and Reiki. And hide your Porsche.
Eine kleine
In what has to be possibly the single most pleasant study ever conducted in a neonatal intensive care unit, music therapists and physicians at Beth Israel Medical Center determined that premature infants respond to live music with improved heart rates and respiratory function and enhanced sucking and caloric intake. Researchers also played a whooshing sound on something called the Remo Ocean Disk and a heartbeat sound on something called a “gato box,” which I must assume does not contain an actual Mexican cat.
The best responses came when a parent sang a culturally relevant lullaby; when they couldn’t think of one, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” was suggested. I just have to wonder, however, what if your mom is, say, Ke$ha? We can only hope she knows “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Or maybe she could ask Justin Bieber to swing by the NICU to sing a few tunes. Could it really happen? Never say never.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Okay, y’all, I know this is ironic coming from me, but it’s time to lay off Justin Bieber. The jejune pop star has endured an onslaught of criticism for visiting the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam and writing in the guest book that he hoped Anne Frank (in some alternate reality) would have been a “Belieber,” which is not as bad a spelling error as it first appears. In fact, it was just a musing on how the trapped 14-year-old amused herself with pictures of contemporary celebrities. Imagine, for example, what a big star Frank Sinatra might have been if only he’d had Bieber’s haircut!
Rankling
The United States is the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country, right? And we love our children, right? So when the United Nations released their ranking of children’s well-being among the world’s 29 richest countries last week, there’s no question where we fall, right? Put your hands in the air and chant it, people: “We’re number 26! We’re number 26! In your face, Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania! And hey, Greece, Slovakia, Estonia, watch your backs, because we’re coming for you! Just as soon as we finish cutting funding even further for education, health care, and environmental safety! Booyah!”
Of course, when you break well-being down into five categories, the U.S. rises much higher in the rankings, all the way to 23rd for both Behaviors & Risks and Housing & Environment. For Education, however, we drop to 27th; if that’s not a reason to fire even more teachers, I don’t know what is! There was one measure on which the U.S. did actually rank at the top: The U.S. and Ireland were the only two countries in which at least 25% of children reported exercising at least an hour each day. It is not clear from the report whether the survey clarified that “exercise” does not technically include playing Call of Duty III.
Who, then, is on top? It’s those stinking Northern Europeans again, particularly the Dutch. I suppose we, too, could have healthier children if we chose to submit to a Communist dictatorship that forces people to ride bicycles, wear wooden shoes, and smoke marijuana (if you’ve ever tried to ride a bicycle in wooden shoes stoned, you know that only the strongest survive). Besides, what have all those healthy, brilliant Dutch children produced for the world that even comes close to the Big Mac or Ted? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
The social network
You know how some people put a huge amount of resources into the wrong things because they’re missing the bigger picture? Like that guy who buys a Porsche when what he really needs is to not be a jerk? A groundbreaking new study suggests that pediatricians and other vaccine advocates may want to refocus our efforts. We don’t need more data on vaccine safety. We need more friends.
Dr. Emily Brunson at Texas State University, San Marcos, applied the novel approach of social network analysis to determine just who it is that influences parents to delay or forgo vaccines in favor of life-threatening diseases. To find enough such parents, she went to the mother lode of measles, the wealth of whooping cough that is King County, Washington. There, she found 126 parents who vaccinate their children on time (conformers) and 70 who delay or skip vaccines (nonconformers) and asked them to list and rank every person and source that informed their decisions. It turns out that health care providers remain an important influence on parents’ vaccine choices, just less important than spouses, friends, Reiki masters, baristas, parking lot attendants, and dog-eared paperbacks passed on over cups of organic chai latte.
Nonconforming parents, in fact, reported having more friends and seeking more sources on vaccines than did conforming parents. Many of the sources nonconformers turned to actually did support on-time and complete vaccination, but it appears they kept looking until they found a resource that confirmed the biases of their friends and family members. What we need, it appears, is not better websites and handouts for parents. Instead, right now, every pediatrician in America needs to go out and marry at least one vaccine nonconformer, more if local statutes allow. If this seems like too much trouble, then at least have them over for chai and Reiki. And hide your Porsche.
Eine kleine
In what has to be possibly the single most pleasant study ever conducted in a neonatal intensive care unit, music therapists and physicians at Beth Israel Medical Center determined that premature infants respond to live music with improved heart rates and respiratory function and enhanced sucking and caloric intake. Researchers also played a whooshing sound on something called the Remo Ocean Disk and a heartbeat sound on something called a “gato box,” which I must assume does not contain an actual Mexican cat.
The best responses came when a parent sang a culturally relevant lullaby; when they couldn’t think of one, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” was suggested. I just have to wonder, however, what if your mom is, say, Ke$ha? We can only hope she knows “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Or maybe she could ask Justin Bieber to swing by the NICU to sing a few tunes. Could it really happen? Never say never.
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Mojito?
Some politicians are upset that pop super-couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé just celebrated their 5th wedding anniversary in Cuba. As required by law, the U.S. Department of Treasury preapproved their trip to the rogue state, but anti-Cuba activists are demanding to know which category of approved travel applied to the couple’s jaunt: academic, religious, journalistic, or cultural exchange. Neither star is considered a reporter, but both are tenured at the University of Awesome. The trip did not appear to serve a religious purpose, although Beyoncé is widely worshiped. I’m guessing the junket was a “cultural exchange,” on the basis that 5 days of Jay-Z and Beyoncé is a fair trade for a lifetime of Gloria Estefan.
Lead zeppelin
Have you noticed that a lot of kids these days think they’re smarter than their parents? Like how my 13-year-old daughter applauds and praises me with clear, one-syllable words every time I successfully use Bluetooth? A disturbing study from the Centers for Disease Control suggests these kids may actually be right: Most adults in their 30s and 40s are brain damaged. At least something finally explains Congress!
Those of us who have clear memories of the 1970s may think the whites were whiter, the colors brighter, and the gasoline cheaper. That’s not the rosy sheen of nostalgia. It’s lead. It turns out that between 1976 and 1980 a full 88% of American children aged 1-5 years had blood lead levels ≥10 mcg/dL, a concentration associated with irreversible loss of IQ, shortening of attention span, and lifelong disruptions in behavior (I wasn’t kidding about Congress). Toxicologists have now lowered the “lead level of concern” to 5 mcg/dL, and only 2.6% of U.S. preschoolers have levels above that. This does nothing to explain the popularity of Yo Gabba Gabba.
But before we become complacent about how far we’ve come in the battle against environmental lead, we have to recognize that 535,000 U.S. kids with elevated lead levels during the study period (2007-2010) are still likely to suffer lifetime cognitive impairments, and only one-thousandth of them can serve in the Legislature. Naturally, poorer kids and minorities remain more likely to suffer lead toxicity, because what do they need more than another challenge? And who is taking over the reins of power and can therefore solve this problem? That’s right: we of Generation X or, as I like to call us, Generation Pb.
American lesion
What’s the latest thing growing faster than my savings account? If you answered “pediatric melanoma” you’d be right, although the judges also would have accepted “the pile of dirty clothes crammed between my son’s bed and the wall.” According to a new analysis of the SEER cancer database (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) rates of the rare childhood cancer rose an average of 2% annually between 1973 and 2009.
The study, which appears online in Pediatrics 4/15/2013, was not designed to determine the exact cause of the increase, but specialists are unanimous in cautioning against the use of tanning beds, especially by children and adolescents. In a related story, Maine Gov. Paul LePage last week vetoed a bill to prohibit tanning facilities from serving minors, explaining, "This is government run amok. Maine parents can make the right decisions for their families.” Because if you restrict children's right to give themselves lethal skin cancer, the next thing you know the state will be telling parents when children should be allowed to drive cars or drink alcohol or even skip school! The slippery slope of tyranny is greased with suntan oil.
Screen test
Today’s Zen koan: If the television is on, and a teenager is in the room, but he’s texting about the noob he just obliterated in World of Warcraft on his laptop, is he watching TV? (While you were thinking about that, a tree fell in the forest, and you were not there to hear it. Give yourself a round of one-handed applause.) The question, however, has practical applications for researchers trying to determine what sorts of media use contribute to childhood obesity, people like the folks at Harvard’s Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH). They actually answered it, which ruined their meditation.
Since today’s teens interact with multiple screens at once, the CMCH team naturally gave them yet another screen, a handheld computer that would ping at four to seven random times during the day and ask them which screen they were paying the most attention to at that moment. As it turns out, having the television on does not contribute to teens’ obesity. Actually watching the television does, dramatically. Teens focusing instead on computers, mobile phones, and video games presumably just forget to eat. Personally, I can’t imagine multitasking like that, but it may just be my age. Or the lead.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Some politicians are upset that pop super-couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé just celebrated their 5th wedding anniversary in Cuba. As required by law, the U.S. Department of Treasury preapproved their trip to the rogue state, but anti-Cuba activists are demanding to know which category of approved travel applied to the couple’s jaunt: academic, religious, journalistic, or cultural exchange. Neither star is considered a reporter, but both are tenured at the University of Awesome. The trip did not appear to serve a religious purpose, although Beyoncé is widely worshiped. I’m guessing the junket was a “cultural exchange,” on the basis that 5 days of Jay-Z and Beyoncé is a fair trade for a lifetime of Gloria Estefan.
Lead zeppelin
Have you noticed that a lot of kids these days think they’re smarter than their parents? Like how my 13-year-old daughter applauds and praises me with clear, one-syllable words every time I successfully use Bluetooth? A disturbing study from the Centers for Disease Control suggests these kids may actually be right: Most adults in their 30s and 40s are brain damaged. At least something finally explains Congress!
Those of us who have clear memories of the 1970s may think the whites were whiter, the colors brighter, and the gasoline cheaper. That’s not the rosy sheen of nostalgia. It’s lead. It turns out that between 1976 and 1980 a full 88% of American children aged 1-5 years had blood lead levels ≥10 mcg/dL, a concentration associated with irreversible loss of IQ, shortening of attention span, and lifelong disruptions in behavior (I wasn’t kidding about Congress). Toxicologists have now lowered the “lead level of concern” to 5 mcg/dL, and only 2.6% of U.S. preschoolers have levels above that. This does nothing to explain the popularity of Yo Gabba Gabba.
But before we become complacent about how far we’ve come in the battle against environmental lead, we have to recognize that 535,000 U.S. kids with elevated lead levels during the study period (2007-2010) are still likely to suffer lifetime cognitive impairments, and only one-thousandth of them can serve in the Legislature. Naturally, poorer kids and minorities remain more likely to suffer lead toxicity, because what do they need more than another challenge? And who is taking over the reins of power and can therefore solve this problem? That’s right: we of Generation X or, as I like to call us, Generation Pb.
American lesion
What’s the latest thing growing faster than my savings account? If you answered “pediatric melanoma” you’d be right, although the judges also would have accepted “the pile of dirty clothes crammed between my son’s bed and the wall.” According to a new analysis of the SEER cancer database (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) rates of the rare childhood cancer rose an average of 2% annually between 1973 and 2009.
The study, which appears online in Pediatrics 4/15/2013, was not designed to determine the exact cause of the increase, but specialists are unanimous in cautioning against the use of tanning beds, especially by children and adolescents. In a related story, Maine Gov. Paul LePage last week vetoed a bill to prohibit tanning facilities from serving minors, explaining, "This is government run amok. Maine parents can make the right decisions for their families.” Because if you restrict children's right to give themselves lethal skin cancer, the next thing you know the state will be telling parents when children should be allowed to drive cars or drink alcohol or even skip school! The slippery slope of tyranny is greased with suntan oil.
Screen test
Today’s Zen koan: If the television is on, and a teenager is in the room, but he’s texting about the noob he just obliterated in World of Warcraft on his laptop, is he watching TV? (While you were thinking about that, a tree fell in the forest, and you were not there to hear it. Give yourself a round of one-handed applause.) The question, however, has practical applications for researchers trying to determine what sorts of media use contribute to childhood obesity, people like the folks at Harvard’s Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH). They actually answered it, which ruined their meditation.
Since today’s teens interact with multiple screens at once, the CMCH team naturally gave them yet another screen, a handheld computer that would ping at four to seven random times during the day and ask them which screen they were paying the most attention to at that moment. As it turns out, having the television on does not contribute to teens’ obesity. Actually watching the television does, dramatically. Teens focusing instead on computers, mobile phones, and video games presumably just forget to eat. Personally, I can’t imagine multitasking like that, but it may just be my age. Or the lead.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Some politicians are upset that pop super-couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé just celebrated their 5th wedding anniversary in Cuba. As required by law, the U.S. Department of Treasury preapproved their trip to the rogue state, but anti-Cuba activists are demanding to know which category of approved travel applied to the couple’s jaunt: academic, religious, journalistic, or cultural exchange. Neither star is considered a reporter, but both are tenured at the University of Awesome. The trip did not appear to serve a religious purpose, although Beyoncé is widely worshiped. I’m guessing the junket was a “cultural exchange,” on the basis that 5 days of Jay-Z and Beyoncé is a fair trade for a lifetime of Gloria Estefan.
Lead zeppelin
Have you noticed that a lot of kids these days think they’re smarter than their parents? Like how my 13-year-old daughter applauds and praises me with clear, one-syllable words every time I successfully use Bluetooth? A disturbing study from the Centers for Disease Control suggests these kids may actually be right: Most adults in their 30s and 40s are brain damaged. At least something finally explains Congress!
Those of us who have clear memories of the 1970s may think the whites were whiter, the colors brighter, and the gasoline cheaper. That’s not the rosy sheen of nostalgia. It’s lead. It turns out that between 1976 and 1980 a full 88% of American children aged 1-5 years had blood lead levels ≥10 mcg/dL, a concentration associated with irreversible loss of IQ, shortening of attention span, and lifelong disruptions in behavior (I wasn’t kidding about Congress). Toxicologists have now lowered the “lead level of concern” to 5 mcg/dL, and only 2.6% of U.S. preschoolers have levels above that. This does nothing to explain the popularity of Yo Gabba Gabba.
But before we become complacent about how far we’ve come in the battle against environmental lead, we have to recognize that 535,000 U.S. kids with elevated lead levels during the study period (2007-2010) are still likely to suffer lifetime cognitive impairments, and only one-thousandth of them can serve in the Legislature. Naturally, poorer kids and minorities remain more likely to suffer lead toxicity, because what do they need more than another challenge? And who is taking over the reins of power and can therefore solve this problem? That’s right: we of Generation X or, as I like to call us, Generation Pb.
American lesion
What’s the latest thing growing faster than my savings account? If you answered “pediatric melanoma” you’d be right, although the judges also would have accepted “the pile of dirty clothes crammed between my son’s bed and the wall.” According to a new analysis of the SEER cancer database (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) rates of the rare childhood cancer rose an average of 2% annually between 1973 and 2009.
The study, which appears online in Pediatrics 4/15/2013, was not designed to determine the exact cause of the increase, but specialists are unanimous in cautioning against the use of tanning beds, especially by children and adolescents. In a related story, Maine Gov. Paul LePage last week vetoed a bill to prohibit tanning facilities from serving minors, explaining, "This is government run amok. Maine parents can make the right decisions for their families.” Because if you restrict children's right to give themselves lethal skin cancer, the next thing you know the state will be telling parents when children should be allowed to drive cars or drink alcohol or even skip school! The slippery slope of tyranny is greased with suntan oil.
Screen test
Today’s Zen koan: If the television is on, and a teenager is in the room, but he’s texting about the noob he just obliterated in World of Warcraft on his laptop, is he watching TV? (While you were thinking about that, a tree fell in the forest, and you were not there to hear it. Give yourself a round of one-handed applause.) The question, however, has practical applications for researchers trying to determine what sorts of media use contribute to childhood obesity, people like the folks at Harvard’s Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH). They actually answered it, which ruined their meditation.
Since today’s teens interact with multiple screens at once, the CMCH team naturally gave them yet another screen, a handheld computer that would ping at four to seven random times during the day and ask them which screen they were paying the most attention to at that moment. As it turns out, having the television on does not contribute to teens’ obesity. Actually watching the television does, dramatically. Teens focusing instead on computers, mobile phones, and video games presumably just forget to eat. Personally, I can’t imagine multitasking like that, but it may just be my age. Or the lead.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Ludacris
Okay, let’s just state for the record that there’s nothing funny about rapper Flavor Flav’s fiancée, Liz Trujillo, being hospitalized earlier this week for what a publicist states was “exhaustion.” There is something funny about the fact that Flavor Flav’s latest business venture is the “Flavor Flav House of Flavor Take Out Restaurant.” What’s next? The Snoop Dogg grooming salon? 50 Cent commemorative coins? Beats by Dr. Dre automatic implanted cardiac defibrillators?
It must be incredibly tiring to live as a celebrity. Have you ever heard of any normal person being hospitalized for exhaustion? Is there even an ICD-9 code for that? I suspect it was just another of Ms. Trujillo’s ploys to delay the wedding in order to put off the moment when she will go through the rest of her life as “Mrs. Flav.”
All in on it
Did you ever notice that nothing energizes paranoid people like disproof of the thing they’re paranoid about? Like, why isn’t there any evidence that the Trilateral Commission has a fleet of black helicopters just waiting to introduce Americans to their new overlords as soon as we pass universal health care? Because they’re that powerful! Were the Apollo missions filmed on a Hollywood sound stage? Have Communists infiltrated academia in order to brainwash a new generation of Trotskyites whose families are paying $50,000 a year to send them to private colleges? Are Beyoncé and Jay-Z members of the Illuminati? If you ask these questions, then you already know the answers.
In that vein, I propose we never again waste another dime studying the relationship between vaccines and autism. This week saw the publication of yet another overwhelmingly definitive study demonstrating that vaccines don’t cause autism. Does this mean Jenny McCarthy will finally devote all her energies to kissing random servicemen on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve? I’m thinking if the first 24 investigations didn’t do the trick, this one won’t dissuade a single person who has drunk the (un-fluoridated) Kool Aid.
Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer at Autism Speaks (who wasn't involved in the new paper) told USA Today, "This is a very important and reassuring study. This study shows definitively that there is no connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism." Vaccine opponents responded with a call for more research into the connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism. Funds for these studies will be raised in part through the sale of special-edition tin-foil hats.
Needle in a haystack
Say the American Heart Association came up with seven criteria for a healthy lifestyle, sensible things like not smoking, maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, being physically active, and maintaining low blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol level. How many US teens do you think you’d have to evaluate before you found one who met all seven criteria? One hundred? A thousand? Four thousand six hundred seventy-three? You’re going to have to keep guessing, because that last number is how many students aged 12-19 participated in a new study published in Circulation, and not a single one of them met all seven criteria. Apparently it’s harder to find a healthy teenager in America than it is to meet a sane person in Congress.
Of all the available criteria, the one that knocked 99% of subjects out of the running was “ideal healthy diet,” with fewer than 1% of males or females qualifying. Researchers blame the fact that bacon just tastes so darn good. The best numbers were for ideal blood pressure, where 78% of males and 90% of females met criteria, presumably because bacon works slowly. These data may be strategically important to enemies of the United States. Rather than building expensive missiles or risky plutonium centrifuges, they should simply flood the country with cheap pork bellies, then wait a generation.
Hardly working
Back when I was in residency, well before the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented humane work hour restrictions in 2003, we showed up on the wards on June 24 and walked out of the hospital 3 years later, dragging our beards on the ground and leafing desperately through old newspapers to figure out who the President was. I was out of residency 6 months before my eyes were fully adjusted to sunlight. But residents who graduated between 2003 and 2011 were protected from working more than 24 hours in a row; some of them even got suntans. With these changes came modest improvements in resident well-being and patient safety.
According to a trio of new studies in this week’s JAMA Internal Medicine, just because less is good doesn’t mean that lesser is better. When the ACGME further restricted resident hours in 2011, it seems residents didn’t get any more sleep, and the number of self-reported serious medical errors actually increased. The authors suggest this may be because while hospitals decreased resident work hours, they didn’t hire any more staff to do those residents’ jobs, leaving increasingly inexperienced docs to do the same work in less time with more patient hand-offs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these house staff were to be admitted to the hospital themselves for exhaustion, if only they could find someone to write the orders.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Okay, let’s just state for the record that there’s nothing funny about rapper Flavor Flav’s fiancée, Liz Trujillo, being hospitalized earlier this week for what a publicist states was “exhaustion.” There is something funny about the fact that Flavor Flav’s latest business venture is the “Flavor Flav House of Flavor Take Out Restaurant.” What’s next? The Snoop Dogg grooming salon? 50 Cent commemorative coins? Beats by Dr. Dre automatic implanted cardiac defibrillators?
It must be incredibly tiring to live as a celebrity. Have you ever heard of any normal person being hospitalized for exhaustion? Is there even an ICD-9 code for that? I suspect it was just another of Ms. Trujillo’s ploys to delay the wedding in order to put off the moment when she will go through the rest of her life as “Mrs. Flav.”
All in on it
Did you ever notice that nothing energizes paranoid people like disproof of the thing they’re paranoid about? Like, why isn’t there any evidence that the Trilateral Commission has a fleet of black helicopters just waiting to introduce Americans to their new overlords as soon as we pass universal health care? Because they’re that powerful! Were the Apollo missions filmed on a Hollywood sound stage? Have Communists infiltrated academia in order to brainwash a new generation of Trotskyites whose families are paying $50,000 a year to send them to private colleges? Are Beyoncé and Jay-Z members of the Illuminati? If you ask these questions, then you already know the answers.
In that vein, I propose we never again waste another dime studying the relationship between vaccines and autism. This week saw the publication of yet another overwhelmingly definitive study demonstrating that vaccines don’t cause autism. Does this mean Jenny McCarthy will finally devote all her energies to kissing random servicemen on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve? I’m thinking if the first 24 investigations didn’t do the trick, this one won’t dissuade a single person who has drunk the (un-fluoridated) Kool Aid.
Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer at Autism Speaks (who wasn't involved in the new paper) told USA Today, "This is a very important and reassuring study. This study shows definitively that there is no connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism." Vaccine opponents responded with a call for more research into the connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism. Funds for these studies will be raised in part through the sale of special-edition tin-foil hats.
Needle in a haystack
Say the American Heart Association came up with seven criteria for a healthy lifestyle, sensible things like not smoking, maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, being physically active, and maintaining low blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol level. How many US teens do you think you’d have to evaluate before you found one who met all seven criteria? One hundred? A thousand? Four thousand six hundred seventy-three? You’re going to have to keep guessing, because that last number is how many students aged 12-19 participated in a new study published in Circulation, and not a single one of them met all seven criteria. Apparently it’s harder to find a healthy teenager in America than it is to meet a sane person in Congress.
Of all the available criteria, the one that knocked 99% of subjects out of the running was “ideal healthy diet,” with fewer than 1% of males or females qualifying. Researchers blame the fact that bacon just tastes so darn good. The best numbers were for ideal blood pressure, where 78% of males and 90% of females met criteria, presumably because bacon works slowly. These data may be strategically important to enemies of the United States. Rather than building expensive missiles or risky plutonium centrifuges, they should simply flood the country with cheap pork bellies, then wait a generation.
Hardly working
Back when I was in residency, well before the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented humane work hour restrictions in 2003, we showed up on the wards on June 24 and walked out of the hospital 3 years later, dragging our beards on the ground and leafing desperately through old newspapers to figure out who the President was. I was out of residency 6 months before my eyes were fully adjusted to sunlight. But residents who graduated between 2003 and 2011 were protected from working more than 24 hours in a row; some of them even got suntans. With these changes came modest improvements in resident well-being and patient safety.
According to a trio of new studies in this week’s JAMA Internal Medicine, just because less is good doesn’t mean that lesser is better. When the ACGME further restricted resident hours in 2011, it seems residents didn’t get any more sleep, and the number of self-reported serious medical errors actually increased. The authors suggest this may be because while hospitals decreased resident work hours, they didn’t hire any more staff to do those residents’ jobs, leaving increasingly inexperienced docs to do the same work in less time with more patient hand-offs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these house staff were to be admitted to the hospital themselves for exhaustion, if only they could find someone to write the orders.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Okay, let’s just state for the record that there’s nothing funny about rapper Flavor Flav’s fiancée, Liz Trujillo, being hospitalized earlier this week for what a publicist states was “exhaustion.” There is something funny about the fact that Flavor Flav’s latest business venture is the “Flavor Flav House of Flavor Take Out Restaurant.” What’s next? The Snoop Dogg grooming salon? 50 Cent commemorative coins? Beats by Dr. Dre automatic implanted cardiac defibrillators?
It must be incredibly tiring to live as a celebrity. Have you ever heard of any normal person being hospitalized for exhaustion? Is there even an ICD-9 code for that? I suspect it was just another of Ms. Trujillo’s ploys to delay the wedding in order to put off the moment when she will go through the rest of her life as “Mrs. Flav.”
All in on it
Did you ever notice that nothing energizes paranoid people like disproof of the thing they’re paranoid about? Like, why isn’t there any evidence that the Trilateral Commission has a fleet of black helicopters just waiting to introduce Americans to their new overlords as soon as we pass universal health care? Because they’re that powerful! Were the Apollo missions filmed on a Hollywood sound stage? Have Communists infiltrated academia in order to brainwash a new generation of Trotskyites whose families are paying $50,000 a year to send them to private colleges? Are Beyoncé and Jay-Z members of the Illuminati? If you ask these questions, then you already know the answers.
In that vein, I propose we never again waste another dime studying the relationship between vaccines and autism. This week saw the publication of yet another overwhelmingly definitive study demonstrating that vaccines don’t cause autism. Does this mean Jenny McCarthy will finally devote all her energies to kissing random servicemen on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve? I’m thinking if the first 24 investigations didn’t do the trick, this one won’t dissuade a single person who has drunk the (un-fluoridated) Kool Aid.
Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer at Autism Speaks (who wasn't involved in the new paper) told USA Today, "This is a very important and reassuring study. This study shows definitively that there is no connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism." Vaccine opponents responded with a call for more research into the connection between the number of vaccines that children receive in childhood, or the number of vaccines that children receive in one day, and autism. Funds for these studies will be raised in part through the sale of special-edition tin-foil hats.
Needle in a haystack
Say the American Heart Association came up with seven criteria for a healthy lifestyle, sensible things like not smoking, maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, being physically active, and maintaining low blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol level. How many US teens do you think you’d have to evaluate before you found one who met all seven criteria? One hundred? A thousand? Four thousand six hundred seventy-three? You’re going to have to keep guessing, because that last number is how many students aged 12-19 participated in a new study published in Circulation, and not a single one of them met all seven criteria. Apparently it’s harder to find a healthy teenager in America than it is to meet a sane person in Congress.
Of all the available criteria, the one that knocked 99% of subjects out of the running was “ideal healthy diet,” with fewer than 1% of males or females qualifying. Researchers blame the fact that bacon just tastes so darn good. The best numbers were for ideal blood pressure, where 78% of males and 90% of females met criteria, presumably because bacon works slowly. These data may be strategically important to enemies of the United States. Rather than building expensive missiles or risky plutonium centrifuges, they should simply flood the country with cheap pork bellies, then wait a generation.
Hardly working
Back when I was in residency, well before the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented humane work hour restrictions in 2003, we showed up on the wards on June 24 and walked out of the hospital 3 years later, dragging our beards on the ground and leafing desperately through old newspapers to figure out who the President was. I was out of residency 6 months before my eyes were fully adjusted to sunlight. But residents who graduated between 2003 and 2011 were protected from working more than 24 hours in a row; some of them even got suntans. With these changes came modest improvements in resident well-being and patient safety.
According to a trio of new studies in this week’s JAMA Internal Medicine, just because less is good doesn’t mean that lesser is better. When the ACGME further restricted resident hours in 2011, it seems residents didn’t get any more sleep, and the number of self-reported serious medical errors actually increased. The authors suggest this may be because while hospitals decreased resident work hours, they didn’t hire any more staff to do those residents’ jobs, leaving increasingly inexperienced docs to do the same work in less time with more patient hand-offs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these house staff were to be admitted to the hospital themselves for exhaustion, if only they could find someone to write the orders.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
The vision thing
Justin Timberlake has just released a new album, “The 20/20 Experience,” his first since 2006’s “FutureSex/LoveSounds.” Naturally, I expected at least one song about Lasik surgery. Instead, it’s the future, and Timberlake has wed actress/model/singer Jennifer Biel, so the new album is actually full of love sounds about married life. As Timberlake continues to mature I look forward to his future releases, including “PastSex/JointSounds” and “The Honey-Have-You-Seen-My-Reading-Glasses? Experience.”
Ouch
What if you did something really useful for the world, like, say, contributed to the breakup of boy band One Direction? Or invented a kind of chocolate ice cream that caused weight loss? Or -- let’s just blue sky here -- came up with a vaccine that could cut the estimated 3,700 deaths from cervical cancer American women suffer every year by 2/3? And then people were all like, “Thanks, but we’ll pass.” Would you not want to scream? That muffled sound you hear is the anguished cries of pediatricians now reading a new study that shows progressively fewer parents are planning to vaccinate their teens against human papillomavirus (HPV), even as evidence supporting safety of the HPV vaccine accrues daily.
Between 2008 and 2010 the percentage of parents reporting that they did not intend to have their children vaccinated against HPV rose from 38.9% to 43.9% Ironically, the number of eligible girls who actually were fully vaccinated against HPV rose during that period from 17.9% to 32.0%. If that makes sense to you then perhaps you can also explain the Higgs boson, the budget sequester, and Splash. Increasing numbers of parents reported that doctors had indeed recommended their children be vaccinated, and increasing numbers of parents reported that they felt the vaccines were not needed. That’s why I’m always careful to have a long discussion with parents which I start with the words, “Blah, blah, blah,” and end with, “yada, yada, whatever.” It has the same effect as my usual vaccine counseling, but I’m able to simultaneously give my spiel and check Facebook.
Study coauthor Dr. Paul Darden of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center was just as flummoxed as anyone at the results, saying, "You'd expect as people get more familiar with a vaccine that they would actually become more comfortable with it. That doesn't seem to be the case with HPV." I suspect the real problem is that word has hit the streets: This vaccine is really, really painful. Like wait-15-minutes-so-you-don’t-faint painful. Compared with cervical cancer (or head and neck cancer, against which it may also be effective) it’s no biggie, but what people are becoming familiar with may be the pain. Darden suggested physicians counter the negative trend with better patient education and, “...social media sorts of things.” You heard the man: Fight cancer! Tweet/Facebook this blog!
Hello, Baby
Is your hospital Baby-Friendly? Ours is working toward that designation, requiring that all staff wave and smile at infants and giving workshops in coochie-coochie-coo. That, and we’re implementing the World Health Organization’s Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, necessary to display the Baby-Friendly Seal of Approval. Now, however, increasing evidence suggests that one of those steps -- eliminating pacifiers -- may actually hinder successful nursing.
As if parents don’t already get enough conflicting advice about pacifiers (Don’t use them if you want to nurse! Do use them if you want your baby to keep breathing!), it now appears the conventional wisdom about pacifiers and nursing is ... what’s the word? Wrong. The data behind discouraging new mothers from giving their babies pacifiers were always sketchy, but a new study adds a big chunk to the growing evidence that moms who use pacifiers are actually more likely to successfully initiate and maintain breastfeeding.
Added to level A evidence supporting pacifiers’ role in preventing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, I sort of wish I owned Soothie stock right now. Of course 10 recommendations is such a nice, round number. In place of, “Never allow new moms to use a pacifier,” I propose, “Always greet newborns with Eskimo kisses.” Will it encourage successful nursing? I have no idea. But it certainly is friendly.
Simple syrup
What if it turned out that the solution to what everyone thought was a big, complicated problem turned out to be really straightforward? Like if the fix for war in the Middle East was a gun buy-back program. Researchers publishing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine may have a comparable answer for the childhood obesity. At least for children aged 2-11 years, it could all be about the sugar sweetened beverages (SSB’s).
It turned out that in evaluating the caloric intake of nearly 11,000 US children from 2003 to 2010, kids drank pretty much every extra calorie they consumed. For subjects aged 12-18 years, junk food also played a role in weight gain, with those who ate more fast food predictably also drinking more sodas. I’m sure this news will be greeted enthusiastically by television programmers, manufacturers of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and purveyors of frosted breakfast cereals. Now we just need a major marketing push for ... what’s that liquid without the flavoring and artificial colors? Oh, right, water! It could happen, hopefully right around the time Justin Timberlake releases his next album: “My FutureKids/LoveNoise.”
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Justin Timberlake has just released a new album, “The 20/20 Experience,” his first since 2006’s “FutureSex/LoveSounds.” Naturally, I expected at least one song about Lasik surgery. Instead, it’s the future, and Timberlake has wed actress/model/singer Jennifer Biel, so the new album is actually full of love sounds about married life. As Timberlake continues to mature I look forward to his future releases, including “PastSex/JointSounds” and “The Honey-Have-You-Seen-My-Reading-Glasses? Experience.”
Ouch
What if you did something really useful for the world, like, say, contributed to the breakup of boy band One Direction? Or invented a kind of chocolate ice cream that caused weight loss? Or -- let’s just blue sky here -- came up with a vaccine that could cut the estimated 3,700 deaths from cervical cancer American women suffer every year by 2/3? And then people were all like, “Thanks, but we’ll pass.” Would you not want to scream? That muffled sound you hear is the anguished cries of pediatricians now reading a new study that shows progressively fewer parents are planning to vaccinate their teens against human papillomavirus (HPV), even as evidence supporting safety of the HPV vaccine accrues daily.
Between 2008 and 2010 the percentage of parents reporting that they did not intend to have their children vaccinated against HPV rose from 38.9% to 43.9% Ironically, the number of eligible girls who actually were fully vaccinated against HPV rose during that period from 17.9% to 32.0%. If that makes sense to you then perhaps you can also explain the Higgs boson, the budget sequester, and Splash. Increasing numbers of parents reported that doctors had indeed recommended their children be vaccinated, and increasing numbers of parents reported that they felt the vaccines were not needed. That’s why I’m always careful to have a long discussion with parents which I start with the words, “Blah, blah, blah,” and end with, “yada, yada, whatever.” It has the same effect as my usual vaccine counseling, but I’m able to simultaneously give my spiel and check Facebook.
Study coauthor Dr. Paul Darden of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center was just as flummoxed as anyone at the results, saying, "You'd expect as people get more familiar with a vaccine that they would actually become more comfortable with it. That doesn't seem to be the case with HPV." I suspect the real problem is that word has hit the streets: This vaccine is really, really painful. Like wait-15-minutes-so-you-don’t-faint painful. Compared with cervical cancer (or head and neck cancer, against which it may also be effective) it’s no biggie, but what people are becoming familiar with may be the pain. Darden suggested physicians counter the negative trend with better patient education and, “...social media sorts of things.” You heard the man: Fight cancer! Tweet/Facebook this blog!
Hello, Baby
Is your hospital Baby-Friendly? Ours is working toward that designation, requiring that all staff wave and smile at infants and giving workshops in coochie-coochie-coo. That, and we’re implementing the World Health Organization’s Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, necessary to display the Baby-Friendly Seal of Approval. Now, however, increasing evidence suggests that one of those steps -- eliminating pacifiers -- may actually hinder successful nursing.
As if parents don’t already get enough conflicting advice about pacifiers (Don’t use them if you want to nurse! Do use them if you want your baby to keep breathing!), it now appears the conventional wisdom about pacifiers and nursing is ... what’s the word? Wrong. The data behind discouraging new mothers from giving their babies pacifiers were always sketchy, but a new study adds a big chunk to the growing evidence that moms who use pacifiers are actually more likely to successfully initiate and maintain breastfeeding.
Added to level A evidence supporting pacifiers’ role in preventing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, I sort of wish I owned Soothie stock right now. Of course 10 recommendations is such a nice, round number. In place of, “Never allow new moms to use a pacifier,” I propose, “Always greet newborns with Eskimo kisses.” Will it encourage successful nursing? I have no idea. But it certainly is friendly.
Simple syrup
What if it turned out that the solution to what everyone thought was a big, complicated problem turned out to be really straightforward? Like if the fix for war in the Middle East was a gun buy-back program. Researchers publishing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine may have a comparable answer for the childhood obesity. At least for children aged 2-11 years, it could all be about the sugar sweetened beverages (SSB’s).
It turned out that in evaluating the caloric intake of nearly 11,000 US children from 2003 to 2010, kids drank pretty much every extra calorie they consumed. For subjects aged 12-18 years, junk food also played a role in weight gain, with those who ate more fast food predictably also drinking more sodas. I’m sure this news will be greeted enthusiastically by television programmers, manufacturers of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and purveyors of frosted breakfast cereals. Now we just need a major marketing push for ... what’s that liquid without the flavoring and artificial colors? Oh, right, water! It could happen, hopefully right around the time Justin Timberlake releases his next album: “My FutureKids/LoveNoise.”
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Justin Timberlake has just released a new album, “The 20/20 Experience,” his first since 2006’s “FutureSex/LoveSounds.” Naturally, I expected at least one song about Lasik surgery. Instead, it’s the future, and Timberlake has wed actress/model/singer Jennifer Biel, so the new album is actually full of love sounds about married life. As Timberlake continues to mature I look forward to his future releases, including “PastSex/JointSounds” and “The Honey-Have-You-Seen-My-Reading-Glasses? Experience.”
Ouch
What if you did something really useful for the world, like, say, contributed to the breakup of boy band One Direction? Or invented a kind of chocolate ice cream that caused weight loss? Or -- let’s just blue sky here -- came up with a vaccine that could cut the estimated 3,700 deaths from cervical cancer American women suffer every year by 2/3? And then people were all like, “Thanks, but we’ll pass.” Would you not want to scream? That muffled sound you hear is the anguished cries of pediatricians now reading a new study that shows progressively fewer parents are planning to vaccinate their teens against human papillomavirus (HPV), even as evidence supporting safety of the HPV vaccine accrues daily.
Between 2008 and 2010 the percentage of parents reporting that they did not intend to have their children vaccinated against HPV rose from 38.9% to 43.9% Ironically, the number of eligible girls who actually were fully vaccinated against HPV rose during that period from 17.9% to 32.0%. If that makes sense to you then perhaps you can also explain the Higgs boson, the budget sequester, and Splash. Increasing numbers of parents reported that doctors had indeed recommended their children be vaccinated, and increasing numbers of parents reported that they felt the vaccines were not needed. That’s why I’m always careful to have a long discussion with parents which I start with the words, “Blah, blah, blah,” and end with, “yada, yada, whatever.” It has the same effect as my usual vaccine counseling, but I’m able to simultaneously give my spiel and check Facebook.
Study coauthor Dr. Paul Darden of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center was just as flummoxed as anyone at the results, saying, "You'd expect as people get more familiar with a vaccine that they would actually become more comfortable with it. That doesn't seem to be the case with HPV." I suspect the real problem is that word has hit the streets: This vaccine is really, really painful. Like wait-15-minutes-so-you-don’t-faint painful. Compared with cervical cancer (or head and neck cancer, against which it may also be effective) it’s no biggie, but what people are becoming familiar with may be the pain. Darden suggested physicians counter the negative trend with better patient education and, “...social media sorts of things.” You heard the man: Fight cancer! Tweet/Facebook this blog!
Hello, Baby
Is your hospital Baby-Friendly? Ours is working toward that designation, requiring that all staff wave and smile at infants and giving workshops in coochie-coochie-coo. That, and we’re implementing the World Health Organization’s Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, necessary to display the Baby-Friendly Seal of Approval. Now, however, increasing evidence suggests that one of those steps -- eliminating pacifiers -- may actually hinder successful nursing.
As if parents don’t already get enough conflicting advice about pacifiers (Don’t use them if you want to nurse! Do use them if you want your baby to keep breathing!), it now appears the conventional wisdom about pacifiers and nursing is ... what’s the word? Wrong. The data behind discouraging new mothers from giving their babies pacifiers were always sketchy, but a new study adds a big chunk to the growing evidence that moms who use pacifiers are actually more likely to successfully initiate and maintain breastfeeding.
Added to level A evidence supporting pacifiers’ role in preventing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, I sort of wish I owned Soothie stock right now. Of course 10 recommendations is such a nice, round number. In place of, “Never allow new moms to use a pacifier,” I propose, “Always greet newborns with Eskimo kisses.” Will it encourage successful nursing? I have no idea. But it certainly is friendly.
Simple syrup
What if it turned out that the solution to what everyone thought was a big, complicated problem turned out to be really straightforward? Like if the fix for war in the Middle East was a gun buy-back program. Researchers publishing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine may have a comparable answer for the childhood obesity. At least for children aged 2-11 years, it could all be about the sugar sweetened beverages (SSB’s).
It turned out that in evaluating the caloric intake of nearly 11,000 US children from 2003 to 2010, kids drank pretty much every extra calorie they consumed. For subjects aged 12-18 years, junk food also played a role in weight gain, with those who ate more fast food predictably also drinking more sodas. I’m sure this news will be greeted enthusiastically by television programmers, manufacturers of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and purveyors of frosted breakfast cereals. Now we just need a major marketing push for ... what’s that liquid without the flavoring and artificial colors? Oh, right, water! It could happen, hopefully right around the time Justin Timberlake releases his next album: “My FutureKids/LoveNoise.”
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
Where all the children are above average
It’s been a quiet week in the world of pop culture. How quiet? Let’s just say that major news on Yahoo’s “OMG!” celebrity page included the fact that Anne Hathaway...wait for it...kissed her husband Adam Shulman when they went out for coffee in Brooklyn. Oh. My. Gosh (or whatever)! In other news, we learn that Maddox Jolie-Pitt (or whatever) is growing and developing normally and that, while no one has any clue when and how Jennifer Aniston and fiancé Justin Theroux are getting married, one celebrity wedding expert thinks Aniston will probably make this wedding different than her first. So help me, if some pop star doesn’t crash a Ferrari full of shoplifted lingerie while speeding to rehab with an unrestrained love child in the front seat in the next 7 days, the next “Needles” is going to open with politics.
Metal head
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love, love, love evidence-based medicine! How much do I love it? Let’s just say that I may be legally required to always remain at least 100 yards from the Cochrane Collaboration. But some days, even I have to admit that I get frustrated at how little we actually know about what works, even when it should be obvious. Like, say you discover a 3-year-old patient has iron deficiency anemia. So you give him a daily iron supplement, right? Right?!
Who knows? The most recent trip down the evidence-based rabbit hole suggests that we don’t even know if giving children iron fixes iron deficiency, corrects iron deficiency anemia (because naturally they’re two different things) or improves cognitive deficits resulting from low iron. That’s after a group of Australian researchers (why is it always the Australians?) combed through 9,169 papers on the topic and identified a whole 15 studies that met their inclusion criteria, all of which were still considered at moderate risk of statistical bias. Where are our scientific priorities? How is it we can perfect the Blooming Onion, but we can’t run a basic study of whether we should give iron-deficient kids iron?
The results of the meta-analysis just get more confusing. Daily iron supplementation in 2- to 5-year-olds does seem to increase blood levels of hemoglobin and ferritin, but those results alone are not adequate to say that such end points as anemia, iron deficiency, and iron deficiency anemia are actually better, although some evidence might suggest improved cognition. At least iron supplementation did not appear to increase kids’ risk of getting respiratory infections and diarrhea (because why would it?). For now I’m going to continue to put my right shoe on my right foot, at least until the Australian meta-analyze that, too.
Thought for food
Speaking of stuff we thought we knew, you remember how just a few years ago, we were warning parents that if their kids even looked at a shrimp or an egg before age 2 they would develop life-threatening food allergies? Ha, parents! You didn’t think we were serious, did you? Nah, pediatricians and allergists are just a bunch of jokesters! What we meant to say was that the earlier you expose your children to potentially allergenic foods, the better! Wean them straight to pureed prawns with Thai peanut sauce at 4-6 months of age unless you want to have to buy big economy packs of epinephrine auto-injectors. Oh, and that “Kick Me” sign on your back? That was us, too.
That’s right, the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology (AAAAI) has released a new policy statement that nearly completes our about-face on avoiding food allergies in children. Except for a little hedging about maybe starting with a few bites of less-allergenic first foods, they now say that if you have a blender that can handle crab cake eggs Benedict with soy-glazed shishito peppers, you can spoon-feed them to your 6-month old. There are still some exceptions in the guidelines. If patients have had an allergic reaction to a food, difficult-to-control moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis, or an underlying food allergy, you should either refer them to an allergist or give them one of your feeding handouts from 2010.
A small pond
There is pretty much nothing cuter than those little African dwarf frogs they sell by the cash register at high-end toys stores, except maybe Maddox Jolie-Pitt (or whatever) before he grew all big and hairy. I’ve always just barely resisted the temptation to bring one home (a frog, not one of Brangelina’s children). That was before I knew they could live as long as 18 years (again, the frogs). Now I’m relieved, not only because the last frog we had got eaten by the cat, but also because my children will have to get their salmonella from something normal, like cantaloupe.
Investigators at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracked 376 cases of salmonella enteritis back to a single distributor of the amphibians, located in Madera County, California. The facility shut down for disinfection in 2011, and now they’re clean, but remember how long those little web-footed suckers live? That’s right, some of these kids who got frogs for Christmas probably won’t develop salmonella until they’re in graduate school. Hopefully, by then there will be some interesting celebrity gossip, or at least Jennifer Aniston will have finally gotten remarried.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
It’s been a quiet week in the world of pop culture. How quiet? Let’s just say that major news on Yahoo’s “OMG!” celebrity page included the fact that Anne Hathaway...wait for it...kissed her husband Adam Shulman when they went out for coffee in Brooklyn. Oh. My. Gosh (or whatever)! In other news, we learn that Maddox Jolie-Pitt (or whatever) is growing and developing normally and that, while no one has any clue when and how Jennifer Aniston and fiancé Justin Theroux are getting married, one celebrity wedding expert thinks Aniston will probably make this wedding different than her first. So help me, if some pop star doesn’t crash a Ferrari full of shoplifted lingerie while speeding to rehab with an unrestrained love child in the front seat in the next 7 days, the next “Needles” is going to open with politics.
Metal head
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love, love, love evidence-based medicine! How much do I love it? Let’s just say that I may be legally required to always remain at least 100 yards from the Cochrane Collaboration. But some days, even I have to admit that I get frustrated at how little we actually know about what works, even when it should be obvious. Like, say you discover a 3-year-old patient has iron deficiency anemia. So you give him a daily iron supplement, right? Right?!
Who knows? The most recent trip down the evidence-based rabbit hole suggests that we don’t even know if giving children iron fixes iron deficiency, corrects iron deficiency anemia (because naturally they’re two different things) or improves cognitive deficits resulting from low iron. That’s after a group of Australian researchers (why is it always the Australians?) combed through 9,169 papers on the topic and identified a whole 15 studies that met their inclusion criteria, all of which were still considered at moderate risk of statistical bias. Where are our scientific priorities? How is it we can perfect the Blooming Onion, but we can’t run a basic study of whether we should give iron-deficient kids iron?
The results of the meta-analysis just get more confusing. Daily iron supplementation in 2- to 5-year-olds does seem to increase blood levels of hemoglobin and ferritin, but those results alone are not adequate to say that such end points as anemia, iron deficiency, and iron deficiency anemia are actually better, although some evidence might suggest improved cognition. At least iron supplementation did not appear to increase kids’ risk of getting respiratory infections and diarrhea (because why would it?). For now I’m going to continue to put my right shoe on my right foot, at least until the Australian meta-analyze that, too.
Thought for food
Speaking of stuff we thought we knew, you remember how just a few years ago, we were warning parents that if their kids even looked at a shrimp or an egg before age 2 they would develop life-threatening food allergies? Ha, parents! You didn’t think we were serious, did you? Nah, pediatricians and allergists are just a bunch of jokesters! What we meant to say was that the earlier you expose your children to potentially allergenic foods, the better! Wean them straight to pureed prawns with Thai peanut sauce at 4-6 months of age unless you want to have to buy big economy packs of epinephrine auto-injectors. Oh, and that “Kick Me” sign on your back? That was us, too.
That’s right, the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology (AAAAI) has released a new policy statement that nearly completes our about-face on avoiding food allergies in children. Except for a little hedging about maybe starting with a few bites of less-allergenic first foods, they now say that if you have a blender that can handle crab cake eggs Benedict with soy-glazed shishito peppers, you can spoon-feed them to your 6-month old. There are still some exceptions in the guidelines. If patients have had an allergic reaction to a food, difficult-to-control moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis, or an underlying food allergy, you should either refer them to an allergist or give them one of your feeding handouts from 2010.
A small pond
There is pretty much nothing cuter than those little African dwarf frogs they sell by the cash register at high-end toys stores, except maybe Maddox Jolie-Pitt (or whatever) before he grew all big and hairy. I’ve always just barely resisted the temptation to bring one home (a frog, not one of Brangelina’s children). That was before I knew they could live as long as 18 years (again, the frogs). Now I’m relieved, not only because the last frog we had got eaten by the cat, but also because my children will have to get their salmonella from something normal, like cantaloupe.
Investigators at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracked 376 cases of salmonella enteritis back to a single distributor of the amphibians, located in Madera County, California. The facility shut down for disinfection in 2011, and now they’re clean, but remember how long those little web-footed suckers live? That’s right, some of these kids who got frogs for Christmas probably won’t develop salmonella until they’re in graduate school. Hopefully, by then there will be some interesting celebrity gossip, or at least Jennifer Aniston will have finally gotten remarried.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
It’s been a quiet week in the world of pop culture. How quiet? Let’s just say that major news on Yahoo’s “OMG!” celebrity page included the fact that Anne Hathaway...wait for it...kissed her husband Adam Shulman when they went out for coffee in Brooklyn. Oh. My. Gosh (or whatever)! In other news, we learn that Maddox Jolie-Pitt (or whatever) is growing and developing normally and that, while no one has any clue when and how Jennifer Aniston and fiancé Justin Theroux are getting married, one celebrity wedding expert thinks Aniston will probably make this wedding different than her first. So help me, if some pop star doesn’t crash a Ferrari full of shoplifted lingerie while speeding to rehab with an unrestrained love child in the front seat in the next 7 days, the next “Needles” is going to open with politics.
Metal head
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love, love, love evidence-based medicine! How much do I love it? Let’s just say that I may be legally required to always remain at least 100 yards from the Cochrane Collaboration. But some days, even I have to admit that I get frustrated at how little we actually know about what works, even when it should be obvious. Like, say you discover a 3-year-old patient has iron deficiency anemia. So you give him a daily iron supplement, right? Right?!
Who knows? The most recent trip down the evidence-based rabbit hole suggests that we don’t even know if giving children iron fixes iron deficiency, corrects iron deficiency anemia (because naturally they’re two different things) or improves cognitive deficits resulting from low iron. That’s after a group of Australian researchers (why is it always the Australians?) combed through 9,169 papers on the topic and identified a whole 15 studies that met their inclusion criteria, all of which were still considered at moderate risk of statistical bias. Where are our scientific priorities? How is it we can perfect the Blooming Onion, but we can’t run a basic study of whether we should give iron-deficient kids iron?
The results of the meta-analysis just get more confusing. Daily iron supplementation in 2- to 5-year-olds does seem to increase blood levels of hemoglobin and ferritin, but those results alone are not adequate to say that such end points as anemia, iron deficiency, and iron deficiency anemia are actually better, although some evidence might suggest improved cognition. At least iron supplementation did not appear to increase kids’ risk of getting respiratory infections and diarrhea (because why would it?). For now I’m going to continue to put my right shoe on my right foot, at least until the Australian meta-analyze that, too.
Thought for food
Speaking of stuff we thought we knew, you remember how just a few years ago, we were warning parents that if their kids even looked at a shrimp or an egg before age 2 they would develop life-threatening food allergies? Ha, parents! You didn’t think we were serious, did you? Nah, pediatricians and allergists are just a bunch of jokesters! What we meant to say was that the earlier you expose your children to potentially allergenic foods, the better! Wean them straight to pureed prawns with Thai peanut sauce at 4-6 months of age unless you want to have to buy big economy packs of epinephrine auto-injectors. Oh, and that “Kick Me” sign on your back? That was us, too.
That’s right, the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology (AAAAI) has released a new policy statement that nearly completes our about-face on avoiding food allergies in children. Except for a little hedging about maybe starting with a few bites of less-allergenic first foods, they now say that if you have a blender that can handle crab cake eggs Benedict with soy-glazed shishito peppers, you can spoon-feed them to your 6-month old. There are still some exceptions in the guidelines. If patients have had an allergic reaction to a food, difficult-to-control moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis, or an underlying food allergy, you should either refer them to an allergist or give them one of your feeding handouts from 2010.
A small pond
There is pretty much nothing cuter than those little African dwarf frogs they sell by the cash register at high-end toys stores, except maybe Maddox Jolie-Pitt (or whatever) before he grew all big and hairy. I’ve always just barely resisted the temptation to bring one home (a frog, not one of Brangelina’s children). That was before I knew they could live as long as 18 years (again, the frogs). Now I’m relieved, not only because the last frog we had got eaten by the cat, but also because my children will have to get their salmonella from something normal, like cantaloupe.
Investigators at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracked 376 cases of salmonella enteritis back to a single distributor of the amphibians, located in Madera County, California. The facility shut down for disinfection in 2011, and now they’re clean, but remember how long those little web-footed suckers live? That’s right, some of these kids who got frogs for Christmas probably won’t develop salmonella until they’re in graduate school. Hopefully, by then there will be some interesting celebrity gossip, or at least Jennifer Aniston will have finally gotten remarried.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC, and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).