Pediatricians And Their Questions

By Tiffany in Health, Neatorama Only on Aug 11, 2010 at 9:40 pm

A few weeks ago I did a post on a pediatrician who allegedly turned away children because there were guns in the home. This was fascinating to me, because in the 4+ years that I have known my kids’ pediatrician he has never once asked me if we own a firearm. He has, however, asked me several times if we have a swimming pool or if my children have access to a swimming pool.

Today was my daughter’s 4-year check-up and my pediatrician once again asked the swimming pool question. Now I don’t have a swimming pool, but my parents do. My pediatrician on hearing this instructed me to make sure my children received adequate swim instruction. In short they should be schooled until they were proficient swimmers. They must be taught all swim safety rules. This included floating and finding their way to the wall so they could crawl out. My daughter was also made to repeat after him that she would, “not go near or into a swimming pool without Mommy or Daddy.”

I love my pediatrician. I don’t find the swimming pool interrogation to be the least bit insulting. I appreciate his concern. Call me strange, but I like that he questions me and provides detailed parenting instruction.

Recently,however, I have been starting to wonder if my pediatrician’s questions and advice are not regional. There are a lot of drowning deaths in my area and less firearm deaths. This might go a long way to explaining why my pediatrician fixates on pools. So that begs the question, what great pediatrician questions and subsequent advice am I missing by living where I do? I was hoping that some readers out there would be willing to share what their pediatrician obsesses about. You never know what advice you were told that just might come in handy to someone else.

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Gauldar
Aug 12th, 2010 at 11:16 am
I don’t know about an increase in pool related deaths, but I do know that there is significantly more awareness of the issue, including the other water related accidents. I know a good deal of this information is geared towards people needing to get licences for boating and other pleasure crafts, but they feel that water safety all around should be recognised.
Kristi
Aug 13th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
Around here they ask (have to ask) not to give your babies sweet tea in the bottle. Having grown up in the north, this was news to me, but apparently common enough to merit an automatic question from the peds office.
Miss Cellania
Aug 16th, 2010 at 9:18 am
I’ve been asked by several pediatricians (we go to a clinic where you rarely get the same doctor twice) if we have a trampoline. So many kids do, and they see way too many injuries from them. We don’t have one.

I’m sure if I brought in an infant, they would warn us against giving Mountain Dew in a baby bottle. That’s pretty common here.
kiddoctor
Aug 21st, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Here’s my two cents as a pediatrician:
In this age of vaccination and antibiotics, most of the significant decrease in mortality is going to come from accident prevention and preventing chronic diseases of adulthood. (For pediatricians, the latter mostly involves preventing smoking and obesity.) Pediatricians save a lot more lives through “anticipatory guidance” and prevention than with any sort of wizardry with diagnosis and treatment. Since it seems so commonplace, patients often don’t especially see this part of a visit as important.
I rarely ever fire patients, since I think kids with jerks for parents probably need a good doctor as much or more than than kids with good parents. However, many doctors take the approach that a parent who has a basic disagreement with the doctor’s approach would be better served with another doctor (or is just a pain in the ass, and not worth having as a customer.)
Over the years, the leading cause of parents dropping me as their child’s doctor has been my telling them to quit smoking. It’s always a balancing act to be forceful enough to motivate parents without alienating them, and I don’t always get it right.
I do ask about firearms in the home. If they’re present, I talk about safe storage (for little kids) and about keeping firearms out of the home completely (“store your deer rifle at grandpa’s house”) during the years when kids are prone to suicide. (“When your 16 year old son comes back from the party where he sees his ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend, I’d rather he came home to a house without a gun.”)
There are certainly doctors who don’t bother to address uncomfortable subjects like parental smoking, guns in the house, excess television watching or refusing vaccinations. The doctors probably spare themselves a lot of hassle and get home for dinner more often than I do, but I don’t think they’re doing a service to the children they care for.
kiddoctor
Aug 21st, 2010 at 3:08 pm
(Oops – sorry, the above comment was for the preceding “doctor asked about guns” story.)

The American Academy of Pediatics chapter in California had quite a struggle in the state legislature a few years ago. The opposing lobbyists were not employed by alcohol or tobacco manufacturers, but by contractors. The AAP chapter was lobbying to require four-sided fencing around backyard pools, and the contractors were afraid it would cut into their pool construction.
As the Freakonomics authors have pointed out, having a pool at your house is much more likely to kill your kid than having a firearm at your house. So I’m glad your doctor asked….

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