User login
I am almost too excited to write this week’s blog, anticipating heading to New Orleans on Friday for the annual AAP National Conference and Exhibition! I and over 10,000 other pediatricians will descend on the Big Easy and proceed to show them how we throw down, AAP style! Starting at the opening reception in the “AAP Jazz Club” and rocking until, oh, I don’t know, maybe 10:00 PM, we intend to show the natives what happens when you give a bunch of gentle souls in sensible shoes one domestic beer, a watered-down cocktail, or, for many, a club soda with a lime twist! One thing’s for sure: the Crescent City has never seen anything like it.
Protection Projection
Finally, a study has proven that girls vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) at age 12 are no more likely than their unvaccinated peers to become sexually active by age 15. Hopefully this news will reassure the many parents who fear their kids may view the HPV vaccine as a license to have sex. They imagine their daughters thinking, “I really love him, and I know he loves me, so despite the risks of pregnancy, HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes, syphilis, hepatitis, chancroid, lympogranuloma venereum, gardnerella, and trichomonas, so long as I won’t get cervical cancer in ten to twenty years I think I’ll say yes.”
As it turns out, girls who received HPV vaccine were also no less likely to have sex, become pregnant, use contraception, or contract non-HPV sexually transmitted infections. I have to say as the father of a daughter who has received the full HPV vaccine series, I’m disappointed. I thought kids who got the vaccine might have the sorts of parents who would be better at protecting them from the risks of early and unprotected sexual encounters. I guess there’s only one thing to do: read her the above paragraph.
Danger, Will Robinson!
The Wellcome Trust-sponsored ADHD VOICES study (for Voices On Identity, Childhood, Ethics, Stimulants, and Torturous Acronyms) announced this week that children taking stimulant medications for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do not feel like robots. The interview-based exploration of how children with ADHD feel about taking medications was designed to answer a basic question: how do children with ADHD feel about taking medications? Out of 151 families in the US and Great Britain, not one child said, “The medicine makes me feel like a robot.” On more detailed questioning, kids denied any resemblance to Astro-Boy, Robby, R2D2, C3PO, Twiki, the T-800, Inspector Gadget, Data, Optimus Prime, or Zane, although fifty-six kids did plan to dress as Iron Man for Halloween/All Hallow’s Eve.
In fact, rather than feeling that ADHD medications robbed them of free will, many interviewees said they felt the drugs liberated them to make the choices they wanted. As the parent of a daughter with ADHD, I was again disappointed, having hoped that her medication would, at the very least, give her laser vision. I wonder if that HPV vaccine might turn her into a robot?
Dr. Sandman
I don’t know what they pay research subjects in Quebec, but it’s gotta be good. How else could the team publishing in Pediatrics this week have convinced 33 families to let them mess with their children’s sleep schedules? The goal was to see how kids fared in school with either one hour more or one hour less sleep than they usually get. I assume the Institutional Review Board that approved this protocol was not packed with parents.
Amazingly, families managed to comply with these alterations of their children’s sleep schedules, a feat that in my house would require a power outage and a barrel of melatonin. What they discovered was ... wait for it ... tired kids get really cranky and do poorly in school. More usefully, they found that kids given some extra sleep saw their mood and school performance improve remarkably. I’m putting these findings into practice at home tonight, assuming I can find the right size tranquilizer darts for five kids. This weekend, of course, I’ll be on Bourbon Street, which means to my kids, “Laissez les bon temps rouler!”
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
I am almost too excited to write this week’s blog, anticipating heading to New Orleans on Friday for the annual AAP National Conference and Exhibition! I and over 10,000 other pediatricians will descend on the Big Easy and proceed to show them how we throw down, AAP style! Starting at the opening reception in the “AAP Jazz Club” and rocking until, oh, I don’t know, maybe 10:00 PM, we intend to show the natives what happens when you give a bunch of gentle souls in sensible shoes one domestic beer, a watered-down cocktail, or, for many, a club soda with a lime twist! One thing’s for sure: the Crescent City has never seen anything like it.
Protection Projection
Finally, a study has proven that girls vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) at age 12 are no more likely than their unvaccinated peers to become sexually active by age 15. Hopefully this news will reassure the many parents who fear their kids may view the HPV vaccine as a license to have sex. They imagine their daughters thinking, “I really love him, and I know he loves me, so despite the risks of pregnancy, HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes, syphilis, hepatitis, chancroid, lympogranuloma venereum, gardnerella, and trichomonas, so long as I won’t get cervical cancer in ten to twenty years I think I’ll say yes.”
As it turns out, girls who received HPV vaccine were also no less likely to have sex, become pregnant, use contraception, or contract non-HPV sexually transmitted infections. I have to say as the father of a daughter who has received the full HPV vaccine series, I’m disappointed. I thought kids who got the vaccine might have the sorts of parents who would be better at protecting them from the risks of early and unprotected sexual encounters. I guess there’s only one thing to do: read her the above paragraph.
Danger, Will Robinson!
The Wellcome Trust-sponsored ADHD VOICES study (for Voices On Identity, Childhood, Ethics, Stimulants, and Torturous Acronyms) announced this week that children taking stimulant medications for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do not feel like robots. The interview-based exploration of how children with ADHD feel about taking medications was designed to answer a basic question: how do children with ADHD feel about taking medications? Out of 151 families in the US and Great Britain, not one child said, “The medicine makes me feel like a robot.” On more detailed questioning, kids denied any resemblance to Astro-Boy, Robby, R2D2, C3PO, Twiki, the T-800, Inspector Gadget, Data, Optimus Prime, or Zane, although fifty-six kids did plan to dress as Iron Man for Halloween/All Hallow’s Eve.
In fact, rather than feeling that ADHD medications robbed them of free will, many interviewees said they felt the drugs liberated them to make the choices they wanted. As the parent of a daughter with ADHD, I was again disappointed, having hoped that her medication would, at the very least, give her laser vision. I wonder if that HPV vaccine might turn her into a robot?
Dr. Sandman
I don’t know what they pay research subjects in Quebec, but it’s gotta be good. How else could the team publishing in Pediatrics this week have convinced 33 families to let them mess with their children’s sleep schedules? The goal was to see how kids fared in school with either one hour more or one hour less sleep than they usually get. I assume the Institutional Review Board that approved this protocol was not packed with parents.
Amazingly, families managed to comply with these alterations of their children’s sleep schedules, a feat that in my house would require a power outage and a barrel of melatonin. What they discovered was ... wait for it ... tired kids get really cranky and do poorly in school. More usefully, they found that kids given some extra sleep saw their mood and school performance improve remarkably. I’m putting these findings into practice at home tonight, assuming I can find the right size tranquilizer darts for five kids. This weekend, of course, I’ll be on Bourbon Street, which means to my kids, “Laissez les bon temps rouler!”
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).
I am almost too excited to write this week’s blog, anticipating heading to New Orleans on Friday for the annual AAP National Conference and Exhibition! I and over 10,000 other pediatricians will descend on the Big Easy and proceed to show them how we throw down, AAP style! Starting at the opening reception in the “AAP Jazz Club” and rocking until, oh, I don’t know, maybe 10:00 PM, we intend to show the natives what happens when you give a bunch of gentle souls in sensible shoes one domestic beer, a watered-down cocktail, or, for many, a club soda with a lime twist! One thing’s for sure: the Crescent City has never seen anything like it.
Protection Projection
Finally, a study has proven that girls vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) at age 12 are no more likely than their unvaccinated peers to become sexually active by age 15. Hopefully this news will reassure the many parents who fear their kids may view the HPV vaccine as a license to have sex. They imagine their daughters thinking, “I really love him, and I know he loves me, so despite the risks of pregnancy, HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes, syphilis, hepatitis, chancroid, lympogranuloma venereum, gardnerella, and trichomonas, so long as I won’t get cervical cancer in ten to twenty years I think I’ll say yes.”
As it turns out, girls who received HPV vaccine were also no less likely to have sex, become pregnant, use contraception, or contract non-HPV sexually transmitted infections. I have to say as the father of a daughter who has received the full HPV vaccine series, I’m disappointed. I thought kids who got the vaccine might have the sorts of parents who would be better at protecting them from the risks of early and unprotected sexual encounters. I guess there’s only one thing to do: read her the above paragraph.
Danger, Will Robinson!
The Wellcome Trust-sponsored ADHD VOICES study (for Voices On Identity, Childhood, Ethics, Stimulants, and Torturous Acronyms) announced this week that children taking stimulant medications for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do not feel like robots. The interview-based exploration of how children with ADHD feel about taking medications was designed to answer a basic question: how do children with ADHD feel about taking medications? Out of 151 families in the US and Great Britain, not one child said, “The medicine makes me feel like a robot.” On more detailed questioning, kids denied any resemblance to Astro-Boy, Robby, R2D2, C3PO, Twiki, the T-800, Inspector Gadget, Data, Optimus Prime, or Zane, although fifty-six kids did plan to dress as Iron Man for Halloween/All Hallow’s Eve.
In fact, rather than feeling that ADHD medications robbed them of free will, many interviewees said they felt the drugs liberated them to make the choices they wanted. As the parent of a daughter with ADHD, I was again disappointed, having hoped that her medication would, at the very least, give her laser vision. I wonder if that HPV vaccine might turn her into a robot?
Dr. Sandman
I don’t know what they pay research subjects in Quebec, but it’s gotta be good. How else could the team publishing in Pediatrics this week have convinced 33 families to let them mess with their children’s sleep schedules? The goal was to see how kids fared in school with either one hour more or one hour less sleep than they usually get. I assume the Institutional Review Board that approved this protocol was not packed with parents.
Amazingly, families managed to comply with these alterations of their children’s sleep schedules, a feat that in my house would require a power outage and a barrel of melatonin. What they discovered was ... wait for it ... tired kids get really cranky and do poorly in school. More usefully, they found that kids given some extra sleep saw their mood and school performance improve remarkably. I’m putting these findings into practice at home tonight, assuming I can find the right size tranquilizer darts for five kids. This weekend, of course, I’ll be on Bourbon Street, which means to my kids, “Laissez les bon temps rouler!”
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).