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Dr. Val’s Health Tips: Causes And Cures For Childhood Insomnia

Thanks to support from OTCSafety.org, I’ve created a series of health tips for common medical concerns. This week’s article is about how to diagnose and treat sleep difficulties in children and adolescents. There are many possible causes of insomnia, which include everything from emotional distress to bad dreams, breathing problems, stomach pains, medical conditions or behavioral problems.

In my article I discuss how you can work with a healthcare professional to determine the cause of your child’s sleep difficulties (this includes details on how to keep a sleep diary). I offer instructive do’s and don’ts to promote healthy sleep, and offer examples of symptoms that may require medical intervention.

For the full article, please click here. I promise it won’t put you to sleep! đŸ˜‰

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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