It is discouraging when a parent checks their child into the Emergency Department for a rash. Rashes are rarely an emergency and should be seen by the child's regular doctor. I often go into these patient's rooms feeling grumpy…
When my son got his first ear infection at 8 weeks old, I might have known. Soon after he began having continual congestion. He spent much of his childhood with itchy eyes and nose. Many pictures from that time show him smiling…
When I was in college, I volunteered at a homeless shelter. Back then people were allowed to smoke indoors, and after a night shift I would leave with my hair stiff with cigarette smoke. Then I caught a cold, and a cough that…
In the movie Top Gun, Tom Cruise, playing hot-shot fighter pilot "Maverick," yells "I feel the need for speed!" He is of course talking about jets. In medicine, we are talking about stimulant use. Humans around the world…
I can still see my oldest daughter, 10 years-old then, with her forehead on the dinner table. She could not eat, her stomach hurt too bad. At that time she was having some school trouble, so my wife and I passed it off as…
It is no secret that doctor's offices and Emergency Departments are extremely busy these days. It is the "cold and flu" season, and RSV season, and that makes for a lot of sick kids. In other columns and blog entries, I have…
No one ever accused modern medicine of being good at naming things. There are so many jokes out there that whole web sites are devoted to making fun of medical terminology (Example: Definition of Barium: What doctors do after…
In the late 1940s and early1950s, families had two big worries. One was of a third world war with the horrible new weapon, the atomic bomb. The second was that children would get polio. Polio was on the rise. Every summer a…
I took care of a teenager this past year who suffered from too many antibiotics. Her doctor originally thought she had a skin infection and put her on the first antibiotic course. The skin did not improve, so he put her on a…
