Faculty Bibliography

'Nurse,' he said, 'it's an appendix!'' 'One of the things we're struggling with in pediatrics is we've become too dependent on the CT scan,' he said. 'It's become very helpful in terms of identifying appendicitis, but it translates to radiation.' 'I always find it sort of amazing that we've known about appendicitis for so long, and in 2010 there's still so much that's controversial,' said Dr. Catherine Chen, a pediatric surgeon and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School

[...] he was avoiding things in school that made him uncomfortable -- interactions on the bus, jostling on the playground. [...] missing school intensifies both the academic pressures and the social pressures that are waiting when a child returns, setting up a dangerous cycle in which the more you're absent, the more you want to stay out

'We should be careful not to set kids up who are anxious,' she said. 'Make sure they can take their favorite fuzzy bear with them.' The important distinction is in the response. 'If you have a child that's very anxious, you're going to use a lot of anxiety management techniques,' said Christopher A. Kearney, a professor and director of clinical training in the department of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. With the reward-seeking group, he continued, 'increase incentives for going to school and supervision outside of school.' 'It's not a diagnosis, school refusal,' Dr. [Helen Egger] said. 'It's not a disorder. It's a symptom.' It is a symptom with consequences that can be harsh. It should send parents -- and pediatricians, educators and psychologists -- looking for ways to help.

This study examined 3 questions: (1) What are sources from which low socioeconomic status (SES) mothers of newborns receive parenting information? (2) To what extent are sociodemographic characteristics associated with sources? (3) To what extent are sources associated with intentions regarding activities with infants? In this cross-sectional analysis, mothers were interviewed during the postpartum period about potential sources of information about parenting and asked if and when they planned to initiate shared reading and television exposure during infancy. Maternal high school graduation, US birth, non-Latina ethnicity, language English, higher SES, and firstborn child were each associated with one or more categories representing important sources of parenting information. In adjusted analyses, print, physicians and other health care professionals, and family/friends as important sources of information were each significantly associated with increased frequency of intention to begin shared reading in infancy; television as an important source was associated with intention to begin television in infancy

Dr. James B. Bussel, an expert on I.T.P. who is a professor of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medical School, told me that part of his job was to reassure those parents that leukemia can be ruled out if the red and white cell counts look normal and if the child does not have enlarged lymph nodes or an abnormal liver and spleen

The researchers identified several large families in which enuresis was inherited following an autosomal dominant pattern -- that is, if either parent has a history of bed-wetting, a child has a 50 percent chance of inheriting it. Children who develop secondary enuresis -- that is, they are fully dry for six months, then begin wetting again -- may have infections, constipation (an overly full bowel can put pressure on the bladder) or a variety of other problems, including behavioral and psychological issues

Here are three things I now know I should have done: I didn't tell the mother bullying can be prevented, and it's up to the school. I didn't call the principal or suggest that the mother do so. And I didn't give even a moment's thought to the bullies, and what their lifetime prognosis might be. '[Dan Olweus]'s genius,' [Robert Sege] said, 'is that he manages to turn the school situation around so the other kids realize that the bully is someone who has a problem managing his or her behaviour, and the victim is someone they can protect.' Dr. Joseph Wright of Children's National Medical Center in Washington notes that protecting children from intentional injury is a central task of pediatricians, and 'bullying prevention is a subset of that activity.'

Some of the most exciting new research, according to D. Kimbrough Oller, a professor of audiology and speech-language pathology at the University of Memphis, analyzes the sounds that babies make in the first half-year of life, when they are 'squealing and growling and producing gooing sounds.' Michael H. Goldstein, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, has done experiments showing that babies learn better from parental stimulation -- acquiring new sounds and new sound patterns, for example -- if parents provide that stimulation specifically in response to the baby's babble

[...] many of these issues of prenatal influences and prenatal origins lead to complexities; pursuing the question of stress on the mother and its effect on the fetus, for example, leads to studies of the aftermath of pregnancy in a time of catastrophe.