Category: Medical Scams
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Understanding Children’s Dental X-Rays: An Are They Necessary Guide
This topic is so important it desrves a second blog. Every year, like clockwork, millions of American children get herded into a small lead-lined room, handed a bite tab that tastes like a pool noodle, and told to “hold very still” while a machine zaps their developing skulls — not because anyone examined them and…
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Please Subscribe, I Don’t Monetize You, I Just Mildly Ruin Your Day With Facts
Let’s clear something up before the tinfoil hats start smoking: I am not selling your email address to anybody. Not to Big Pharma. Not to a shady vitamin company hawking gummies “clinically proven” by a guy named Chad. Not even to that one supplement brand that keeps sliding into my own inbox promising my toddler…
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When Your Doctor Sounds Like an AC Salesman: How to Spot Unnecessary Procedures
There’s a very special kind of magic that happens when the person telling you that you urgently need something is also the person who happens to sell it. You’ve seen this before. The AC repair guy walks in, sighs heavily, and suddenly your perfectly functional unit is on the brink of catastrophic failure. Conveniently, his…
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Why Your Pediatrician Isn’t Calling Out Every Parenting Scam
Every few months, a new “urgent” problem in your child suddenly needs fixing. Flat head? Helmet. Bowed legs? Braces. Tongue tie? Surgery. Mild variation of normal human anatomy? Congratulations, there’s a billable solution for that too. And naturally, parents start to wonder: Why isn’t my pediatrician warning me about this? Oh, they have opinions. Strong…
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The Fast and the Furious-ly Unnecessary: Ear Tube Edition
Ear tubes are, without question, one of the great success stories of pediatric medicine when used correctly. They are also, without much question at all, one of the most reflexively over-prescribed surgeries a child can undergo. Insertion of tympanostomy tubes is the single most common reason a child in the United States goes under general…
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7 Out of 8 Tonsillectomies Are a Waste — Is Your Kid’s One of Them?
Nothing says “modern medicine” quite like removing a perfectly innocent piece of lymphoid tissue from a five-year-old because they had a sore throat twice last winter. Tonsillectomy is one of the most common surgeries performed on American children — more than 500,000 a year at its peak, still hundreds of thousands annually today — and…
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So You Want to Put Your Kid on Lifetime Wegovy Instead of Teaching Him to Eat a Vegetable
Let me set the scene. A parent walks into my office, sits down, and says, “Doc, Timmy had two cookies at the birthday party. Should we start him on a GLP-1?” I want to be clear up front: I am not anti-medicine. I am not anti-science. I went to medical school specifically so I could…