A couple of years ago, I read an article by Dr. Profeta at LinkedIn called “These four words that may offend you … may also just save you.” He was invited to talk about burnout in medicine and did not get a warm reception. “It&#…
Category: Pediatrics
Everything you ever wanted to know about croup
Imagine this scenario. Your two-year-old son has had a runny nose for a day or two and an occasional cough, but seemed no worse to you that everyone else in his preschool class. Two hours after you put him to bed you hear him coughing, only this cough …
A physician who is afraid of shots
This is not a story about anti-vaxxers. This is a story about primary care. Running a smaller practice, as I do, has inherent rewards and challenges. There is literature on both sides of the Atlantic that patients prefer small practices. Lately, consol…
A call for accountability in health care
In Dr. Suneel Dhand’s article, “We can do a better job with hospital discharge paperwork,” he advocates for physicians to do a better job at creating discharge instructions that are more appealing and easier for patients to understand. After all, coher…
It shouldn’t be this difficult to find shoes for kids with disabilities
My son, Luke, was born 18 months ago with myelomeningocele, the most severe form of spina bifida. Luke and our family have faced many challenges: premature birth at 26 weeks due to complications after in utero surgery for spina bifida; a 171-day stay i…
This attending learned so much from her residents
While riding shotgun in the family minivan on the way home from a fall break water park trip, I received the following text message: I thought of you today! One of the residents here had done a great job with a complex (and really sad) labor and delive…
This is what the face of resilience looks like
At the age of 17, my younger sister Elisabeth noticed a change in her body — enlargement of the front of her neck. “I just thought I was building muscle from working out,” she innocently rationalized. A series of laboratory tests and imaging followed a…
Why demanding a randomized controlled trial for vaccines is disingenuous
I swiped this editorial cartoon by Steve Sack from the redoubtable Dr. David Gorski’s blog, who goes by the nom-de-web of Orac. Recent epidemiology shows reducing the fraction of vaccinated children in the population rather promptly leads to a resurgen…
Does that patient really need antibiotics?
For those of you who have been following my story since this summer of 2018, you will remember that I quit my nine-to-five job to pursue a career in public speaking on a more semi-permanent basis. I started working essentially full-time with a national…
Gender-diverse youth need pediatrician advocates
For many pediatricians, the thought of providing care to children who live outside of gender norms is daunting. But it is time for the pediatric community to awaken to the realities of our world. We need to stand behind our gender-expansive and transge…
