My Child is Sick: New Book Tells Parents When to Call the Doctor

Have you ever debated about whether your child’s symptoms warranted a call to the doctor or not? Wondered if your kid was sick enough to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night or if it was okay to wait until the morning to go to the doctor’s office instead? Worried whether you were doing the right things to treat your child’s symptoms at home? Then a new book from Dr. Barton D. Schmitt may be just what the doctor ordered.

My Child is Sick!: Expert Advice for Managing Common Illnesses and Injuries is a new reference guide designed to help parents find answers fast to questions about treating the illnesses and injuries they are most likely to encounter while raising kids. This easy to use guide offers the same expert advice and guidance given by doctors and nurses in 10,000 practices and 400 nurse call centers in the United States and Canada and using the Pediatric Telephone Protocols which have been tested for 15 years on over 150 million phone calls. Now all of that advice is yours in one practical reference guide.

The author, Dr. Barton D. Schmitt is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine medical director of the After-Hours Call Center at The Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. Dr. Schmitt is also the author of Pediatric Telephone Protocols: Office-Hours version (12th edition, 2009), published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and Your Child’s Health (Bantam Books). Dr. Schmitt’s purpose in writing the book was to assist parents in determining when it is necessary to call a doctor about their child’s symptoms and how to treat the child at home if a doctor’s care is not required.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “inside this practical guide, parents will find:

• Straightforward information on the most common illnesses and injuries of childhood
• Decision charts to help care givers determine when to call the doctor and when it’s safe to treat symptoms at home, as well as descriptions of which symptoms are normal during the course of an illness or recovery from an injury and which are cause for concern.
• Specific time-frame guidelines as to when to call the doctor or 911.
• In-depth advice for treating symptoms at home, taking the guesswork out of how to make little ones feel better.
• Drug dosage charts for the most commonly used non-prescription medicines.

With My Child is Sick at their fingertips, parents will never again have to worry about whether they’ve made the right decision about their child’s illness or injury.”

The 50 most common illnesses and injuries children are likely to face are outlined in order of areas of the body, and offer specific instructions on when to call the child’s doctor, when to call 911 or emergency services, and how to treat the illness or injury at home and offers information for children of all ages, from newborns to teenagers.

Parents may be tempted to think a book is unnecessary in this digital age where answers are abundant on the internet but if you’ve ever searched an illness or injury online before, you may already know that there is an overwhelming amount of information and advice to wade through and in some cases, not all of the information or advice is accurate or from an expert source. This book has accurate, expert guidance in a quick, easy to use format that can save parents time, money (if it saves you from making a trip to the doctor that wasn’t necessary), and a lot of worry.

After reviewing Part 1: Head or Brain Symptoms, which covers crying, head injuries, and headaches, I was glad to find that it is not written in “medical jargon” or “doctor speak” but easy to understand with clear instructions on what to do. I highly recommend parents have this book on hand in an handy location where it is easy to find in an emergency. It would even make a great baby shower gift for new parents. The book can be purchased online at the major online book retailer’s websites and may be available in your local bookstore.

Sugar makes kids hyper: fact or fiction

“Wait an hour after eating before going swimming.” “Don’t go out in the rain or you’ll catch a cold…” We’ve all heard these before…mostly because our parents told them to us…but who told it to them? Sometimes their parents…sometimes even doctors…but is there actual science behind the myths that most of us believe – and will more than likely pass on to our own kids?

Pediatricians Andrew Adesman (author of “Babyfacts: The Truth About Your Child’s Health From Newborn Through Preschool”), Aaron Carroll and Rachel Vreeman, (co-authors of “Don’t Swallow Your Gum! Myths, Half-Truths and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health”) all agree – many of the leading myths just don’t have the scientific evidence to back them up. When in doubt, doctors often fall back on what their own mentors taught them without questioning the facts on which their advice is based. (Story by Liz Szabo, USA Today http://tinyurl.com/p6nmox)

• Adding cereal to a baby’s diet will help him sleep longer (…we really do so want to believe)
• Teething causes a fever (apparently no more so than anything else)
• Vitamin C, echinacea or zinc will prevent a cold (a number of studies to the contrary)
• You can catch poison ivy from someone else with poison ivy (only if they haven’t washed off the oil )
• Birth control pills don’t work as well on antibiotics (apparently no proof of this)
• Must stay awake with a concussion (not unless the doctor says so).
• Timing when you have sex will determine your baby’s sex (even if it’s not true – this one might be worth double checking…just for the fun)

…And Then There’s the Joy