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.
It seemed like such a great idea.
We need kids to be more active. With a third of US kids overweight or obese, and studies showing that childhood obesity leads to adult obesity, getting the recommended hour a day of activity is more important than ever. Problem is, kids aren’t doing it. For all sorts of reasons, some good and most bad, our kids are turning into couch potatoes.
I was getting really frustrated with my inability to get my patients moving. Then I heard about active video games, like Wii Fit and Just Dance and Dance Dance Revolution, and I thought: this is perfect. Kids love video games. Full story »
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.
Claire McCarthy, MD
The Boston Globe recently reported on a Children’s Hospital Boston study that shows a preventative approach to treating asthma can keep kids out of the Emergency Department (ED) and save money on health care spending. Here, Dr. Claire talks about the medical professionals whose commitment to keeping children healthy supports these innovative approaches to medicine.
I have known Susan Sommer, a nurse in the Community Asthma Initiative (CAI) at Boston Children’s, for nearly twenty years—we met at Martha Eliot Health Center when we were both working there. I was so happy when she started working with CAI, because she is the perfect person to do that kind of work. There are three things that are undeniably true about Susan. First, she really cares about people. I mean really cares, as if each and every one of us were family. Second, she’s really smart. Third, she gets real life.
That last one isn’t to be taken for granted, especially when we’re talking about medical professionals. Sadly, it can be said about us that we often have our heads up in the clouds. We prescribe things based on science and studies—which is good, don’t get me wrong, medical treatments should be based in science and studies. But when patients leave the hospital and go home, real life has a way of, well, getting in the way. Full story »
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.
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. 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
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. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. 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. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. 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. Along with her blogs here on Thriving, you can find her at the Huffington Post and Boston.com. 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. 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
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 »
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It seemed like such a great idea.
