Category: Medical Scams
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Craniosynostosis, The More Serious Cause of Flat Heads, And a DOC Helmet Won’t Fix It Either
Every few days a parent shows up in my office holding their phone up like it’s a search warrant, already zoomed in on a photo of the back of their baby’s head. “It’s flat,” they announce, as if flatness were a diagnosis instead of a description. And look — sometimes it is flat. Babies are…
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The Breast Pump Industrial Complex: Milk, Money, and Mayhem
Somewhere along the way, breastfeeding—an elegantly simple biologic process—got upgraded into a full-blown production.Now it involves cords, flanges, storage bags, apps, schedules, freezer inventories, and just enough anxiety to qualify as a part-time job. Progress?And at the center of it all? The modern breast pump. A device that is occasionally very useful… and increasingly treated…
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Concierge Pediatrics: A Membership Fee For a Benefit You Already Have
Somewhere in America right now, a pediatric practice is running a Facebook ad promising “guaranteed same-day sick visits” and “unhurried, VIP access to your child’s doctor” for the low, low price of $250 a month, per child. Do the math on that and you land somewhere between $1,800 and $13,800 a year depending on your…
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Pediatric X rays, Your Dentist’s Real Priority? Their Wallet
As a pediatrician, I am increasingly concerned by how often dental X-rays are presented to families as routine rather than selective. Let me be clear: that is not what current guidelines recommend. The American Dental Association (ADA), along with the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, does not support taking dental X-rays on a fixed, automatic…
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We Didn’t Need Obamacare To Fix Healthcare. We Needed Elon Musk and a Very Large Broom
The Unfiltered Pediatrician’s case for auditing the healthcare system before we redesign it again. Every few years, Washington has the same argument about how to pay for American healthcare, and every few years, nobody asks the far more insulting question: what if we just stopped setting nearly a trillion dollars on fire every year? Because…
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The Blue Line Is Lying to You: A Pediatrician Explains Diaper Company Psychological Warfare
Let’s talk about the single most successful piece of marketing in the history of infant care that nobody has ever questioned out loud at a baby shower: the little yellow-to-blue stripe running down the front of your disposable diaper. You know the one. It’s marketed like a smoke detector for your baby’s bottom. Some invisible…
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Snip Happens: How Tongue-Tie Became a Multimillion-Dollar Business
I’ve been practicing pediatrics for close to thirty years, and I can tell you exactly what didn’t happen in that time: human anatomy did not change. Babies are not being born with dramatically more tongue-tie than they were in 1997. What changed is who’s looking under the tongue, what they’re calling “tied,” and how much…