Faculty Bibliography

There's nothing simple about speech, and there's nothing simple about speech delay -- starting with diagnosing it. 'The physician who understands delayed speech understands child development,' said Dr. James Coplan, a Rosemont, Pa., pediatrician who created the Early Language Milestone Scale to measure children's language from birth to the age of three. 'You'll see delayed receptive language, delayed use of visual skills like pointing, adaptive skills like using a spoon or using a crayon,' Coplan said.

Primary care pediatricians 'really do take care of families, but by golly, they can also go to war -- and do,' I was proudly told by Dr. Val G. Hemming, a retired military pediatrician who was formerly dean of the F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. The history of military pediatrics goes back at least to World War II; as the G.I.'s came home, they brought war brides and young children. Fifty Years of Training and Deploying Uniformed Pediatricians, published in the journal Pediatrics in 1999, traces pediatric training in the military to a 90-day course begun at Walter Reed in 1946 to teach general medical officers to take care of those babies

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 physician who understands delayed speech understands child development,' said Dr. James Coplan, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician in Rosemont, Pa., who created the Early Language Milestone Scale to measure children's language from birth to age 3. Pediatricians have been faulted in the past for dragging our feet in making speech-delay diagnoses, but times have changed; Dr. Coplan credited parent advocacy and the federally mandated early intervention program, which makes it possible for children younger than 3 to get a free evaluation

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.'