My health club’s outdoor pool’s hot tub has a new sign:
“No children under 12 allowed in the hot tub…this includes dangling feet and dipping toes!”
It’s very large and placed in front of the entrance to the hot tub at the stairs. Not only can you not miss it, you can’t miss reading it – the letters are huge and neatly written.
You only have to be at the club for a few minutes to see why the need for the sign:
1. This week, the high heat: in this weather, kids will dehydrate quickly and put themselves at risk for heat-related illnesses. Just not worth the few minutes in the very hot water. Kids may already be relatively dehydrated if not drinking enough in heat waves so time in hot water will hasten the onset of heat illnesses in that situation.
2. Parents were already ignoring the smaller posted signs.
3. Hot tubs are really grown-up venues and actually have a therapeutic function. They are not toys or meant as recreation so shouldn’t be used or fostered as such.
Adults, too, shouldn’t be in a hot tub for very long when the outside temperature is in the mid 80’s and above with high humidity. We, too, can become dehydrated and put ourselves at risk for heat exhaustion and heat stroke. However, sometimes us adults need the hot tub for therapeutic reasons, such as after exercise, to aid in the healing of injury, arthritis, etc. That’s how I use the hot tub and why I found myself sitting in it for a few minutes on an 85 degree, very humid day. My healing back needed a few minutes of intense heat and those jets after my usual swim. I kept my eye on the time and after 10 minutes got out and downed some cold water.
The sign did keep away most people and most older kids and adults did respect it. But, a few blatantly did not. One mom actually read the sign for a good few minutes and then when her toddler tossed a fit because she wanted to go in she finally relented but said “only your toes…that’s allowed.” Well, actually not. The sign specified no toes specifically so I’m not sure how she made the leap that her daughter’s toes were the exception.
Her daughter didn’t dip for long before a lifeguard came over and shooed her away. The mom looked miffed but hopefully will be wiser next time and not attempt to pull one over on the staff or the rest of the people there to have fun and were willing to follow the rules.
Safety aside, the ultimate issue here, the other important issue is teaching our kids that rules are meant to be followed. If we break the rules and don’t follow them ourselves, our kids will grow up thinking they, too, can break rules, that they are “above the rules”. Those are the kids who tend to get themselves into all sorts of trouble as teens. The seeds of risk taking and bad behavior do start young and are often planted by watching us.
So, have a blast this summer but follow the posted rules. You’ll not only keep your kids safe today…but tomorrow, too.
For more information on heat illness in kids, click here.
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Gwenn Is In*
For this week’s episode of CBS Doc Dot Com, I went back to camp. OK, it wasn’t my camp – Camp Algonquin in Argyle, New York – now defunct, where I spent many an idyllic summer growing up. It was Camp Shane in Ferndale, New York, listed on their website as “The original, longest running weight loss camp in the world” at 41 years and counting.
This is a tough time to be overweight or obese. Last week the Centers for Disease Control announced that obesity-related diseases account for 147 billion dollars in medical costs every year in the United States.
About a quarter of Americans are obese and two thirds are either obese or overweight. Over the past twenty years, obesity in teenagers has increased from 5 percent to almost 18 percent. Obese children and adolescents are more likely to become obese adults. Which brings us back to Camp Shane.
I spent an hour talking to about a dozen kids ranging from ages 11 to 17 who had been gathered into a group by Camp owner David Ettenberg and his wife, Zipora. They came in all shapes and sizes but shared a common sentiment – they felt safe at camp, surrounded by people who accepted them for who they were. It brought tears to my eyes to hear how supportive they were of each other, how open they were about their emotions and fears.
In school other kids often mocked them. There’s no way that would be tolerated at camp – not just by the staff but, more importantly, by the campers. “We’re all in this together,” one boy offered. A girl added, “It’s a safe zone for us.” A teenage girl said “You can wear a bikini without being made fun of.” I asked, “What would happen if you wore a bikini at home?” She answered, “You’d most likely get made fun of and like pushed in a pool. Ah ha, you’re fat.”
A boy told me that kids at his school would ask him, “‘Why are you so massive?’ And like usually I’d just laugh it off but sometimes it does get a little annoying. I’m like, how long until I get back to camp?”
The kids all said they had lost varying amounts of weight at camp through portion control and exercise, a program supervised by pediatrician Dr. Joanna Dolgoff. The challenge has been trying to stay on track once they leave camp and return home.
If they can do it at camp, they can do it at home. But not without the support of parents and schools who have been educated about how to help their children make healthy choices. My good friend, Dr. Mehmet Oz, has launched a wonderful organization called HealthCorps “to help stem the crisis of child obesity through school-based health education and mentoring, as well as community events and outreach to underserved populations.” Click here to see the HealthCorps website.
Click here to see this week’s CBS Doc Dot Com about my trip to Camp Shane.
I have not posted a blog in a week because we were on vacation and truly wanted to be on vacation and not be tied to doing any “work.”
We went to north Georgia for a few days then up to the mountains in western North Carolina. How gorgeous! It was so nice to escape the humidity of Florida for a week!
I had an observation on my vacation that I thought I would share. I have talked in previous blogs about mindless eating and how we multi-task while we are eating. When we are not conscious of what we are eating, we don’t fully enjoy it. In addition, we eat more than we realize.
I observed this phenomenon in my little boy who just turned 2 years old. We were in the car a lot for hours on end, so snacking and fast food were part of the trip. Also, because he is 2 and difficult to entertain in a car, we had the DVD player set up for him to watch his favorite Elmo, Clifford, and Thomas the Tank Engine videos.
It was quite amazing that whenever he was glued to the TV, he ate whatever snacks or meals in his carseat without even looking down. He just picked up a piece and put it in his mouth. And he would ask for more. Whenever he was not glued to the TV, he wasn’t asking for food or eating as much. Hmmm…..very interesting.
From now on I am going to be very careful about two things. First, how much TV he is watching. He normally doesn’t watch much but on this trip he got very spoiled with watching his DVD’s and I am afraid it will lead to more asking to watch now that we are home. Second, I am going to only let him snack when he is fully conscious of what he is doing. No food in front of the TV so that he can be very conscious about what and how much he is putting into his mouth.
As a fairly new (2 years) parent, I am still learning these lessons first hand on how to feed children. I just had to share my story because our children learn habits, both good and bad, at a very young age!
I generally know what’s coming next when a parent asks about altering their child’s vaccine schedule: “I was reading Dr. Sears….”
Dr. Sears is a genius. No, not in an Albert Einstein or Pablo Picasso kind of way. He’s more of an Oprah or a Madonna kind of genius. He’s a genius because he has written a book that capitalizes on the vaccine-fearing, anti-establishment mood of the zeitgeist. The book tells parents what they desperately want to hear, and that has made it an overnight success.
Dr. Robert Sears is perhaps one of the best-known pediatricians in the country. The youngest son of Dr. Bill Sears, the prolific parent book writer and creator of AskDrSears.com, Dr. Robert Sears has become the bane of many a pediatrician’s existence. He has contributed to his family dynasty by co-authoring several books, adding content to the family website, and making myriad TV appearances to offer his sage advice. But Dr. Bob is best known for his best-selling The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for your Child. This book, or at least notes from it, now accompanies many confused and concerned parents to the pediatrician’s office. Parents who have been misled by the onslaught of vaccine misinformation and fear-mongering feel comforted and supported by the advice of Dr. Sears, who assures parents that there is a safer, more sensible way to vaccinate. He wants parents to make their own “informed” decisions about whether or how to proceed with vaccinating their children, making sure to let them know that if they do choose to vaccinate, he knows the safest way to do it. And for $13.99 (paperback), he’ll share it with them.
In the final chapter of his book (entitled “What should you do now?”), after reinforcing the common vaccine myths of the day, Dr. Sears presents his readers with “Dr. Bob’s Alternative Vaccine Schedule.” He places this side-by-side with the schedule recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He then explains why his schedule is a safer choice for parents who chose to vaccinate their children. Without a doubt, the alternative vaccine schedule is among the more damaging aspects of this book. It’s the part that gets brought along to the pediatrician’s office and presented as the the plan going forward for many parents today. But the book is also dangerous in the way in which it validates the pervasive myths that are currently scaring parents into making ill-informed decisions for their children.
Dr. Sears discusses these now common parental concerns, but instead of countering them with sound science, he lets them stand on their own as valid. He points out that most doctors are ill-equipped to discuss vaccines with parents, being poorly trained in the science of vaccine risks and benefits. He then claims to be a newly self-taught vaccine expert, a laughable conceit given the degree to which he misunderstands the science he purports to have read, and in the way he downplays the true dangers of the vaccine-preventable diseases he discusses in his book. He then provides parents with what he views as rational alternatives to the recommended vaccination schedule, a schedule designed by the country’s trueauthorities on vaccinology, childhood infectious disease, and epidemiology.
So what does Dr. Sears have to say, exactly, about the risks of vaccines, and just how out of touch is he with medical science and epidemiology? Read more »
The scans presented here are of a ten year-old German girl who was discovered to be missing the right hemisphere of her brain. Incredibly, she is perfectly normal, except for a history of seizures and a slight weakness on her left side. Attending school with others of her age, it is reported that she is able to study and play sports, just like other kids around her. Of course, the mystery is how is this all possible? To answer the question, University of Glasgow scientists used an fMRI to see where the left eye’s vision is processed. Turns out that the brain’s visual area responsible for the right eye offered up some space for the left.
Normally, the left and right fields of vision are processed and mapped by opposite sides of the brain, but scans on the German girl showed that retinal nerve fibres that should go to the right hemisphere of the brain diverted to the left.
Further, the researchers found that within the visual cortex of the left hemisphere, which creates an internal map of the right field of vision, ‘islands’ had been formed within it to specifically deal with, and map out, the left visual field in the absence of the right hemisphere.
Dr Lars Muckli of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in the Department of Psychology, who led the study, said: “This study has revealed the surprising flexibility of the brain when it comes to self-organising mechanisms for forming visual maps.
“The brain has amazing plasticity but we were quite astonished to see just how well the single hemisphere of the brain in this girl has adapted to compensate for the missing half.
“Despite lacking one hemisphere, the girl has normal psychological function and is perfectly capable of living a normal and fulfilling life. She is witty, charming and intelligent.”
The girl’s underdeveloped brain was discovered when, aged three, she underwent an MRI scan after suffering seizures of brief involuntary twitching on her left side.
The scientists believe the right hemisphere of the girl’s brain stopped developing early in the womb and that when the developing optic nerves reached the optic chiasma, the chemical cues that would normally guide the left eye nasal retinal nerve to the right hemisphere were no longer present and so the nerve was drawn to the left.
This implies that there are no molecular repressors to prevent nasal retinal nerve fibres from entering the same hemisphere.
Dr Muckli added: “If we could understand the powerful algorithms the brain uses to rewire itself and extract those algorithms together with the general algorithms that the brain uses to process information, they could be applied to computers and could result in a huge advance in artificial intelligence.”
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The scans presented here are of a ten year-old German girl who was discovered to be missing the right hemisphere of her brain. Incredibly, she is perfectly normal, except for a history of seizures and a slight weakness on her left side. Attending school with others of her age, it is reported that she is able to study and play sports, just like other kids around her. Of course, the mystery is how is this all possible? To answer the question, University of Glasgow scientists used an fMRI to see where the left eye’s vision is processed. Turns out that the brain’s visual area responsible for the right eye offered up some space for the left.
