Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Take a look at her blog archive and follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
This may not be a great confession to make as a pediatrician, but when it comes to sleep and kids, I am a total softie.
Our kids slept in our bed. We slept in theirs (which was very cramped in the toddler bed, and didn’t do great things to the frame)—or lay next to them as they drifted off to sleep. We sat on the floor, telling stories and singing lullabies and slowly edging out of the bedroom as their breathing got deep and regular. We went in again and again to retrieve the stuffed animal from under the bed or to investigate the scary noise or possible spider. When they woke in the middle of the night, we held them until they went back to sleep—sometimes night after night. Full story »
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Take a look at her blog archive and follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Claire McCarthy MD
The other evening, as I was trying to get him into the shower, my 6-year-old son Liam explained to me the meaning of the phrase “hits the spot.”
“There is a spot,” he said, pointing to his chest. “It’s small when you are little,” he explained, putting his thumb and index finger close together, “but it gets bigger when you grow up. When you eat something, it passes by that spot and you feel good.” He wriggled out of his pants. “Sometimes it makes you feel dizzy—but in a good way, like how I feel when I drink hot cocoa.” He demonstrated by spinning around, narrowly avoiding the bathroom scale and towel rack. “It makes you just want to lie down.”
“So that’s what ‘hits the spot’ means,” he said, as he got his socks off and climbed into the shower. Full story »
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Take a look at her blog archive and follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Andrew Wakefield, if you haven’t heard of him, is the guy who pretty much singlehandedly scared thousands of parents away from the MMR vaccine with a study he published in the Lancet linking the vaccine with autism. The study has since been retracted, something journals almost never do, after it was discovered that data in it was falsified. Not only that, Wakefield lost his medical license.
But is he backing down? No way. On the contrary: he is suing the British Medical Journal (from Texas) for defamation. And he is still defending his findings. Full story »
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Take a look at her blog archive and follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Have you seen the anti-childhood obesity ads from Georgia?
With 40% of the kids in Georgia overweight or obese (only Mississippi is worse), health advocates decided that it was time for “a wake-up call.” So the Strong4Life campaign and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta have released print and TV ads with obese kids and slogans like “It’s hard to be a little girl when you’re not.”
Ouch. I mean, really. Imagine being on a playground and having some kid point at you and say, “You look like the fat girl on TV!” What were they thinking?
Actually, I get what they were thinking. It’s a desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures thing. Full story »
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Take a look at her blog archive and follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
A study came out recently in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, saying that by age 23, 1 in 3 youth in the United States has been arrested for a non-traffic offense.
Yes, you read that right. 1 in 3.
Because getting arrested is not good for a person’s health (the study pointed out that it increases the risk of “an unhealthy lifestyle”) and because pediatricians have regular and continuous contact with kids as they grow up, the authors called out to pediatricians to be aware of the risk factors for being arrested, and do something to help.
“Timely intervention by pediatricians in the lives of these youth,” says the last sentence, “may be an opportunity to move young people onto a path toward safer, healthy, productive, and successful lives.”
That sounds totally reasonable. But it’s not really true. Full story »
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Take a look at her blog archive and follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Claire McCarthy MD
Christmas Eve is hard for me.
It was in the early hours of Christmas Eve sixteen years ago that my newborn son was diagnosed with a horrible brain malformation. My husband and I were wrapping presents late on the 23rd (so now I associate wrapping presents with this diagnosis and throw everything I can into gift bags) when he began to have seizures so bad that we called an ambulance. Over the night the news went from bad to worse, and by dawn we knew that he would be severely disabled and die young. He died less than a year later. Full story »
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Take a look at her blog archive and follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Claire McCarthy MD
You may have heard the term “medical home”—it’s been bandied about recently as something we all should have. No, it’s not a nursing home. Nor is it a house well-stocked with Band Aids and Tylenol, or one where doctors live.
The American Academy of Pediatrics defines medical home as “a model of care that is accessible, family-centered, continuous, comprehensive, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective.”
Well, that sounds exceedingly lovely. Of course we’d all want that. But still, what does it really mean? Full story »
Dr. Claire McCarthy is a primary care physician and the Medical Communications Editor at Children’s Hospital Boston. Take a look at her blog archive and follow her on Twitter @drClaire.
Liam was vomiting a couple of days ago.
Dealing with vomit is one of those parts of parenthood that non-parents can’t quite imagine. After all, it’s just so, well, gross. But somehow, I’ve found that dealing with my kids’ vomit isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Liam’s recent illness (which is starting its spread through the family) got me thinking about why this is. Full story »
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This may not be a great confession to make as a pediatrician, but when it comes to sleep and kids, I am a total softie.
