by Claire McCarthy on May 22, 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.
When my daughter Elsa was five, she fell and cut her face and needed stitches. The only problem was, we were on vacation. The nearest hospital was a general hospital that had no pediatric staff.
I had never had to make a decision like this before—all of our emergencies had happened at home, near Boston Children’s. Was it okay to go to the community hospital? Was there a hospital nearby that had pediatric expertise?
We don’t usually think about the kind of hospital and its areas of expertise when we go to an emergency room. By definition, it’s, well, an emergency. You think: Hospital. Nearest. Now. Full story »
by Claire McCarthy on May 15, 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.
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 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.
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 April 24, 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 13, 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.
As a pediatrician I am embarrassed to admit this, but my 6-year-old son has a terrible diet.
Well, not terribly terrible. He doesn’t live on chips and soda. But it’s remarkably lacking in the things I always tell my patients to eat, like fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy and whole grains.
It’s not for lack of trying on my part. I serve these foods to him regularly, including in the snack I pack him for school. As I encourage parents in my practice to do, I pack things like grapes and string cheese—which often come back uneaten. I think it was out of sheer exasperation that he wrote the note to us (in his best kindergarten spelling) that I found in his backpack. Full story »
