Monday Madness: From Pediatric Drug Dosing To Teenage Parties…things are not always what they seem
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
Appearances can be deceiving. How often have you met someone and they end up not being at all the person you thought they were? How often have you planned a trip or an outing only to have it be totally unlike the experience you anticipated?
I’d argue this is actually our modus operandi in medicine for so many facets of the care we provide, particularly drug dosing. In pediatrics, in fact, it often becomes our guiding principle, as Dr. McEvoy described today in the Boston Globe.
Dr. McEvoy’s article well illustrates the issues pediatricians grapple with when deciding on drug doses for kids. There is science and then there is conjecture based “on science - and that seems to be where we end up more and more. To add insult to injury, as we have learned with cold and cough products, many medications for kids are not only ineffective but unsafe. And, as we have learned for many conditions such as ear infections, many conditions get better without drugs, as Dr. McEvoy pointed out. In the end, I find I drag my feet more and more to advise a drug for a child and agree with Dr. McEvoy’s comment that
“(o)ften, doing nothing is the best dose of all.”
Moving from the gray zone to the obvious comes this headline. The headline really stopped me in my tracks this morning: “Beijing aims to cut down smoking for Olympics.” Think about this a minute. Health issues of smoking aside in their own community, these are the Olympics - the pinnacle of athletic games. The Olympic committee should include in their rules for potential cities that those cities must be smoke free. Beijing officials are working quite hard, according to Reuters, but not hard enough:
“New legislation to take effect on May 1 will forbid smoking at government offices and on public transport, the Beijing Morning Post said, but falls short of setting outright bans at restaurants, bars and clubs”, according to the Reuters report. That, to me, is not smoke free!
Finally, here’s a headline that will open your eyes in so many ways: “Cops bust high school root beer keeger”. Yes, that does say root beer! Some teens in DC became fed up with police assume that all gatherings of teens meant trouble and pulled a little prank. What started it was a YouTube video that showed teens drinking from red cups and getting suspended from sports for the behavior.
This was a great lesson from teens to adults that things are not always as they appear and it is important for adults to get the facts before leaping to conclusions and pointing fingers. After all, aren’t we all innocent before being presumed guilty? Wouldn’t we want that for our own kids? Let’s all pull the reins back and be thoughtful about teen behavior so the lessons are not lost by well meaning adults seeing trouble everywhere. Not all teens are drinking and not all teens are causing trouble. That is the moral of this story…some are just having fun and those are the ones we have to cut the slack to.
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