How to raise a Healthy Child #2

HOW TO RAISE A HEALTHY CHILD

by the late Robert S. Mendelsohn M.D.

Continued from previous page:

What little doctors learn about breastfeeding, the most effective
long-term health protection a child can obtain, is usually taught
by male doctors who, for obvious reasons, have little interest or
experience in this vital function. Despite its enormous influence
on the development and ultimate health of your baby, which I will
discuss later, I heard only one lecture on breastfeeding during
four years in medical school. But the formula makers were wide
awake while my instructors slept, and I was brainwashed by a
deluge of literature that they supplied.

What students do learn in medical school seems to relate as much
to succeeding in business as to keeping their patients well. They
are taught to behave like doctors, to project the appearance and
demeanor of omnipotence, so their patients will hold them in awe.
You may assume that the inadequacies of medical school are
overcome during the pediatric residency, but they're not. There
the resident deals with hospitalized patients and learns to use
cannon to fend off mosquitoes because of the emphasis on
hazardous diagnostic technology, surgery, and other drastic
procedures that are typical of the hospital routine. He still
gets little or no experience in dealing with the vast majority of
childhood illnesses that are brought to a pediatrician for care.

That translates, in private practice, to a compulsion to
overreact to simple illnesses with dramatic forms of
intervention; it is a hazard that demands your constant
vigilance. I'll be more specific about that throughout this book.
When he completes his residency and opens his first office, the
typical pediatrician is poorly educated and largely unskilled. He
knows very little about the risks of the drastic treatments he
administers, the side effects of the drugs he prescribes, the
risks of the surgery he orders or performs, the possible
inaccuracy of the tests on which he relies, or the shortcomings
of the medical technology he employs. He knows virtually nothing
about the most critical items in pediatric health care--the
impact of nutritional, allergic, psychological, and emotional
factors on the well-being of his patients.

Pediatricians actually spend most of their time treating patients
who don't need treatment and refer to specialists most of those
who are injured or seriously ill. In fact, the referral of
patients to other specialists is such an intergral part of their
function that they are sometimes referred to as "access managers"
within the medical profession.

Perhaps because I've been a pediatrician for so long, I have
little remaining conviction that a specialist is needed to
perform this function. Most childhood illnesses can be treated
competently within the home, by informed and caring parents. When
medical treatment is indicated it can be provided as well by
general practitioners or family practitioners or by specialists
to whom their patients are referred. In fact, given the
opportunity, nurse-practitioners could perform most of these
functions equally well. That is actually the practice in many
other countries that have only a relative handful of
pediatricians yet produce medical outcomes that are better than
ours.

It may seem anomalous, but those outcomes are better because
there are fewer pediatricians. Children in those countries are
healthier because there is less medical intervention and thus
less exposure to potentially damaging drugs and medical
technology. Although American medical schools teach their
students very little about pharmacology, they do teach them to
exploit all of the new drugs and medical technologies that are
available. New drugs and equipment appear almost daily, spawned
by the laboratories of the pharmaceutical industry and the
medical equipment manufacturers. More often than not, they are
unproven and potentially unsafe. Most parents assume, as they
should have the right to, that they can rely on the federal Food
and Drug Administration to keep drugs off the market until they
have been proven safe for human use. Most doctors, who don't have
the right to because they know better, operate on that premise,
too. This confidence in the FDA is misplaced, because virtually
all drugs are released without appropriate or significant human
trials. They may have immediate or short-term effects of some
patients that have not been discovered. Even more likely is the
possibility of cumulative and long-term effects, which I will
discuss more fully in a later chapter. These long-term effects
are never known at the time new drugs are introduced and perhaps
not for decades after that, when untold harm has already been
done to unsuspecting victims.

The history of medicine, here and abroad, is replete with
examples of drugs approved for human use that were removed from
the market only after countless victims bore evidence of the
damage they caused. You may recall some of the more sensational
examples - DES, MER 29, thalidomide. To compound the problem,
although the FDA has the power to keep unproven drugs off the
market, it has virtually no authority to force their removal once
they have been approved. It also lacks an effective postmarketing
surveillance mechanism that would alert it and the public to the
appearance of destructive effects from the drugs that have been
released. That's why the hazards of drugs are most often publicly
revealed in European nations, which do exercise postmarketing
surveillance that brings their risks to light.

DOCTORS RARELY INVESTIGATE THE DRUGS THEY USE

It is a rare doctor, indeed, who investigates the tests to which
a drug or a treatment has been subjected before he begins to use
it on his patients. Even when doubts are
..........

YOU NEED TO BUY AND READ THIS BOOK BY DR. MENDELSOHN, IT WILL
ILLUMINATE YOU IN MANY WAYS.

To be contuned