Author: Christopher

As a parent, you may be perfectly comfortable talking with your child about the differences between right and wrong. But talking with them about their private parts and sexual development is not always so easy. Seeing what may appear to be “sexual” behaviors in your young child may be especially distressing. You may worry that these behaviors are…

This is huge. I wrote about it in a previous newsletter but things have moved along significantly. A new vaccine that would be given to pregnant women to protect their infants from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) just received the endorsement of FDA vaccine experts. “If the vaccine actually lives up to data we’ve seen today, I can…

This recent study in the journal Critical Care Medicine gives some useful information about an increasing trend in all of medicine, and certainly in my field of pediatric critical care. It has been well shown a key part in any acute care setting is distinguishing the really sick from the not so sick. We have some screening tools that…

Artificial Intelligence is all the rage lately, and its ability to interact with people is getting better and better. There are good and bad things that go with this. Highschool and college students are more and more cribbing their writing homework using AI and that is getting ever harder to detect. Yet a lot of medical…

Long Covid syndrome risk in children The syndrome called “long Covid” is where people experience persistent symptoms once the infection has passed. These symptoms are many and varied. They include fatigue, shortness of breath, headache, difficulty concentrating, and many others (you can read about the list at the CDC site linked above). Estimates vary, but…

There is no question that our understanding of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has advanced significantly over the past couple of decades. But it still accounts for about 10 % of deaths in children under 1 year of age. The syndrome has also been renamed and its description broadened. It’s now generally called sudden unexplained…

I’ve written before how firearms injuries have emerged as a leading cause of traumatic death in children. A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as a good letter to the editor, examines this issue further. Note this is a difficult subject to study because Republican-controlled Congresses have legislated against even…

This has actually been known for some time, but recent evidence is compelling. A recent study from Harvard University suggests public policies aiming to reduce the harms of poverty may lead to larger brains in children. Scientists say that underscores the need for a strong social safety net. Researchers looked at brain images from 11,000…

A recent editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine highlighted something that really has been a running sore in medicine from many decades: the fact women physicians are paid on average about 75% of what men are paid for doing the same work. Our gender pay gap is actually one of the worst in…

Eating disorders can be complex and hard to identify and treat in children and teens, but the earlier an eating disorder is detected, the better chance at a healthy outcome for a child. The American Academy of Pediatrics has published an excellent review of them here. It’s written for physicians but easily understandable for parents. For…