by Claire McCarthy on May 15, 2012
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. Follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
I am the mother of a child who died. And that makes Mother’s Day very hard.
Recently I was talking to a mother whose child had just died. “What about Mother’s Day?” she asked, through tears. It was hard to know what to say, because it’s a terrible day for those of us who have lost a child. Other days of the year you can maybe make it a few hours without thinking about your loss; other days of the year you can pretend that you are an ordinary person and that life is normal. But not on Mother’s Day. Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on May 8, 2012
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. Follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
My latest (by no means the first, and certainly not the last) embarrassing parenthood moment happened two weeks ago.
It was the evening of the district-wide art show. This is a semi-big deal in our town; the art teachers pick their favorite projects from the school year, from all the grades, and put them on display for everyone to see. There is an opening reception when all the families and friends come to look at all the wonderful art, eat hors d’oeuvres, and do all the appropriate oohing and aahing. Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on May 1, 2012
The care of children is fundamental to the survival of humanity.
That was the belief of an 18th century London physician named George Armstrong, although he said it this way: “But certain it is that the human species can only be preserved by taking proper care of the infant race.”
Dr. Armstrong, who devoted his life to the care of children, to learning about them and documenting their illnesses and their behavior and development, is considered one of the parents of pediatrics. For that reason, every year at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) meeting a lecture is given in his honor. This year, the PAS meeting was in Boston and the lecture was given by Boston Children’s Hospital’s own Judy Palfrey, MD. Palfrey, who has been the president of both the Academic Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, is the T.Berry Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the director of the International Pediatric Center at Boston Children’s.
In Armstrong’s time, one in two children died—and medicine, as Palfrey pointed out, had not much more than leeches to offer. But Armstrong did some remarkable things. He started a clinic that cared for 35,000 children. He kept careful records, some of the earliest examples of population data and quality improvement. He built collaborations with influential people, even did outreach to the Queen, in his attempts to get children what they needed. He understood, long before most, that advocacy is crucial for health—especially the health of children, who can’t advocate for themselves. Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on April 24, 2012
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. Follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Every day, there is another medical study in the news. There’s another newspaper or TV story telling us that X can cure depression or make you thinner or cause autism or whatever. And since it’s a medical study, we usually think that it’s true. Why wouldn’t it be?
But what most people don’t realize, let alone really think about, is that there might be other studies that show that X does none of those things—and that some of those studies might never have been published. Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on April 17, 2012
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. Follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
A couple of months ago, we sat down as a family to watch the five o’clock news. We never do this, but my 11-year-old had been interviewed and we wanted to watch it together. We were told it would be on in the five o’clock hour, but of course it didn’t come on until 5:55. In those 55 minutes, my 6-year-old watched news about:
- A shooting at a school
- A suicide bomb in Afghanistan that killed civilians
- A policeman shooting another policeman and then shooting himself
- A video of teen girls fighting in a high school
- A man who escaped from a mental hospital, prompting the community to tell all children to stay inside
- A child molester on the loose, including a picture of him
- A trial of two men accused of killing four people, including a toddler. Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on April 10, 2012
by Claire McCarthy on April 3, 2012
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. Follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
A child with autism is more likely to do well if his mother is white and educated.
This is the message of a study just released in the journal Pediatrics, and it’s something we need to pay attention to—now. Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on March 27, 2012
I really wanted my 11-year-old daughter to read The Hunger Games, but my 14-year-old intervened. It doesn’t matter that kids her age are reading them, Elsa said; it’s a bad idea for Natasha.
It was out of curiosity that I picked up the first book of The Hunger Games—and I couldn’t put it down. I devoured the whole series; I totally get why it has been so successful. It’s an exciting story. The characters are interesting. The fact that the killing is televised and glamorized and that there are “sponsors” rings uncomfortably true in our “Survivor” society. The idea of kids fighting bravely and resourcefully against the Bad Big Brother government is appealing. I was sucked in—and that’s what I was hoping would happen to Natasha. Full story »
