Children can not be cared for as “small adults”. The best specialist to take care of your child’s sickness is a Pediatrician: a doctor who, upon completion of a Medical School, spent three more years at a rigorous Pediatric Residency training program, learning about caring for infants, children and adolescents. Unfortunately, very few urgent care clinics in our area have an American Board of Pediatrics-certified Pediatrician on staff. What can you do?
Have a plan. Research the local urgent care clinics well in advance and identify the one that you are comfortable with, the one that specializes in pediatric care and has certified Pediatricians on board. Before heading to an ER or urgent care, call your primary pediatrician to [Continue reading…]
Young parents brought their son to my clinic on Saturday. The boy’s test for influenza came out positive. How the dad reacts is priceless. [Continue reading…]
The patient was a seven-year-old boy, who came to see me with his mom. She said that he complained of sore throat two days prior and was “spitting up” the “phlegm”. She denied any fever, cough or vomiting up food. She was concerned that her son was not able to eat or drink anything for past two days. The boy was seen on the previous day by a different doctor who examined him and took a throat swab, which showed no strep. During our conversation the boy was sitting on the exam table with a paper cup constantly spitting his saliva in it. He was not coughing and did not appear to be in pain. It looked like he was not [Continue reading…]
A joke goes: “Mothers of teenagers know why some animals eat their young.” But all the jokes apart, raising a teenager can be a stressful and psychologically draining experience. I know it first hand. I am in no way an expert on this matter, just want to share some thoughts.
In some way having a child between the age of 12 and 16 is alike to having a newborn. They keep you up at night, you are worried for their well-being at every moment and you feel exhausted. The difference between taking care of a baby and raising a teen is that with newborns, though they are fragile creatures, a lot is in your power to [Continue reading…]
A 20 month old boy presented in my office with a chief complaint of refusing to fall asleep in his crib. The parents said that whenever they put him in his bed and try to leave the room, he starts screaming until he works himself up to the point of vomiting. They heard many different suggestions from family, friends and their former pediatrician on how to handle the situation, and tried them all: from taking their child out of the crib after every sound he made to not coming into his room and letting him cry. Neither approach worked. By the time they they came to my office, their son was spending every night in their bed and the parents [Continue reading…]
It’s the second year in a row that Anna Strumba MD, a West Bloomfield/ Novi pediatrician and lactation consultant, has been recognized as one of America’s Most Compassionate Doctors. The award is based on patients’ reviews. “While physicians generally receive positive feedback from their patients, only a select few receive praise about the compassion that accompanied their care… Of the nation’s 720,000 active physicians, less than 3% were accorded this honor by their patients in 2011,” Vitals.com, who tabulates this award, says.
We started displaying ads on this site. Running a website costs money, all coming from my family’s budget. I am not reimbursed for these expenses by my employer or anybody else. One way to offset the costs is to display paid ads on the site, so the ads are here to stay.
Hopefully, those ads promote legitimate, quality products of interest to you. The ads are “context sensitive” and should be generally relevant to the topics I cover in my posts (kids health, breastfeeding, parenting, family, etc.) and to the audience of this site (to you, new and [Continue reading…]
One may wonder, “why would a doctor want to become a lactation consultant?” In my work as a pediatrician I frequently have to take care of the babies that are breastfed. In fact, in most situations that means to take care of both: baby and mother. For the baby to be growing and thriving, the mother has to know how to latch and nurse in a proper [Continue reading…]
She is kind, understanding, honest and trustworthy. Although she is busy, she never makes me feel rushed and returns my calls in a timely fashion. My son had an ongoing health issue, and she gave us contacts for the specialists and made phone calls to those doctors to give information and receive updates. – Michelle, Troy
Women have been helping other women breastfeed for millennia. As a pediatrician and as a woman I daily work together with mothers to prevent and solve breastfeeding problems. I feel it will be only appropriate for me to seek the International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) credential. Next week (the week of November 1, 2010) I will be out of town attending an intensive 5-day Lactation Specialist Course offered by Lactation Education Consultants. This course qualifies participants for the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners (IBLCE) certification exam.
