Category: Pediatrics (Shows all posts chronologically)
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The Math Behind Why Some Pediatricians Can’t Take Medicaid
Why My Pediatric Practice Cannot Survive on Good Vibes and Medicaid Reimbursement Several times a year, I have some version of this conversation:“We had a change in insurance. Do you take Medicaid?” And I hate answering it, because the question usually arrives after someone has lost a job, changed jobs, gotten divorced, had an employer…
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The Case for Early Cholesterol Testing in Children
A pediatrician’s case for checking numbers before they become problems. Somewhere along the way, cholesterol became a “grownup problem,” like mortgages and lower back pain. Parents hear “cholesterol test” and picture their kid getting handed the same lecture their own cardiologist gives them at 55. But here’s the thing nobody wants to sit with: your…
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Mission Accomplished: Humanity Beat Famine and Then Kept Eating
Humanity is great at overcorrecting. We found out the sun can hurt us and started wearing SPF 100 to check the mail. We learned germs exist and put hand sanitizer on the same shelf as the communion wine. And after thousands of years of starving, we fixed hunger in much of the world so hard…
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Sure Kid, You Can Carry Your Own EpiPen, The Data Says You’ll Leave It in Your Gym Bag
Almost weekly, my inbox fills with the same PDF: the school self carry form. One box for “student is capable of carrying and self-administering emergency epinephrine,” one line for my signature, and one implicit assumption that a twelve year old who cannot reliably carry a library book is a competent field medic. And every day,…
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My Teenager Wants to Take Peptides: Because Apparently Puberty Needed a Black Market Upgrade
At some point, many parents ask a version of the same question:“ My kid wants to take peptides. Is that safe?” Usually this question follows a highly scientific chain of events: a teenager sees a muscular influencer online, the influencer says “recovery,” “optimization,” or “growth,” and suddenly your child believes a syringe marketed beside a…
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Breakthrough Chickenpox: When Your Vaccinated Kid Gets 12 Sad Little Spots and the Internet Declares the Vaccine a Failure
Filed under: things that are technically chickenpox but mostly just an inconvenience Let me set the scene. It’s a Tuesday. Your fully vaccinated 7 year old comes to breakfast with eleven you counted, eleven pink bumps. Two of them might be mosquito bites. One is definitely a scab from the driveway incident. You send me…
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Blue Hair and Mental Illness: Correlation, Causation, and Everyone’s Cousin Who Took One Psych 101 Class
If you’ve ever seen someone with cotton candy blue hair and immediately assumed they cry in a Target parking lot, congratulations, you’ve been radicalized by a 2022 study, TikTok comment sections, and your own unresolved biases. Let’s break down what the research actually says, why the internet turned it into a personality test, and why…