by Claire McCarthy on May 2, 2013
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Boston Children’s Hospital. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. Follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Sometimes, listening to us doctors, you’d think that we have no idea what we are talking about.
That’s certainly what anyone would think after reading Ava Nyer’s hilarious post in which she compiles all the sleep advice she read in books she bought to help her with her twins. Here are excerpts:
“You shouldn’t sleep train at all, before a year, before 6 months, or before 4 months, but if you wait too late, your baby will never be able to sleep without you…Don’t let your baby sleep too long, except when they’ve been napping too much, then you should wake them. Never wake a sleeping baby…Give them a pacifier to reduce SIDS. Be careful about pacifiers because they can cause nursing problems.” Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on July 3, 2012
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Boston Children’s Hospital. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. Follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Claire McCarthy, MD
When we think about planning a family vacation, we think about picking a place and deciding how to get there and packing clothes and toys. What we don’t think about, necessarily, is planning for our children’s health.
The thing is, kids can get sick or hurt any old time, even on vacation. A little extra planning and preparation can go a long way toward preventing this—and making it as painless (so to speak) as possible if it does happen.
So as you start planning, here are a few things to add to the list: Full story »
by Tripp Underwood on December 6, 2010
It seems like an unlikely trigger, but four years ago an automatic toilet turned Sarah Teres’s life upside down. At the time, her daughter, Molly, was maturing quickly: At 3 years old she was already walking, talking and fully potty trained. But the trip to a public restroom with a self-flushing toilet scared Molly right back into diapers.
“Something about the automatic flushing terrified her,” Sarah says. “After that she refused to go to the bathroom. Trying to get her to use the toilet was exhausting.”
Sarah and Molly’s problem was stressful, but not uncommon. Almost 25 percent of all children have some degree of difficulty learning to use a toilet after the suggested age of 36 months. And, as demonstrated by Molly, problems with pottying can occur at any point in the process, even after the child has begun using the toilet.
Struggling parents are often offered copious advice, both welcomed and unwelcomed, about the “best way” to get through the ordeal. From rigid, multi-step programs to free-spirited, diaperless trial and error, there’s no shortage of suggested methods. But what’s a parent to do when nothing seems to work?
“We went through so many pottying techniques, from pleading and bribing to outright begging,” Sarah says. “There was an unbelievable amount of mental anguish. You get so frustrated. It feels like nothing is going to work.” Full story »
by Steve Coldwell on August 12, 2010
People with celiac disease need to eat a gluten-free diet, but why are other consumers joining them?
The Hannaford store in Portland Maine recently expanded its Nature Place department –which used to include but a few shelves of gluten-free products– to a 40-foot area stocked with more than 500 items ranging from cookies to pasta sauce, all of them free of the protein that can pose real problems for people with celiac disease.
Oddly enough, the celiac disease population—the people who genuinely need gluten-free food—seem to have little to do with the current boom in gluten-free products.
Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on July 20, 2010
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Boston Children’s Hospital. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. Follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Your child has a fever and a stomachache. You’re not sure what to do. So you reach for—your laptop?
The AAP just launched the KidsDoc Symptom Checker, which helps look up specific symptoms by body part.
More and more, that’s what many parents are doing. Over the past few years, the amount of health information available on the internet has skyrocketed, and many sites offer to help you make diagnoses, whether it’s through specific health information, quizzes, or a “symptom checker” that allows you to look specifically at what might be causing the fever or stomachache—or rash, or whatever.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recently launched their own “symptom checker,” called the KidsDoc Symptom Checker, available at healthychildren.org (there’s an iPhone app too!). It’s very straightforward: you run the cursor over the part of the body where there’s a problem, and you get a menu of possible symptoms in that area. For example, I ran the cursor over the abdomen (pretending I have a child with fever and stomachache), and it gave me Abdominal Pain and Constipation as possibilities. So I clicked on Abdominal Pain, and it gave me information on possible causes of abdominal pain, advice on when to call the doctor and some home care instructions. Full story »
