What Do You Call Your Kids?
I ran across this post on Dr. Flea’s blog this morning that was too good not to share with you. For those of you unfamiliar with Flea he is a pediatrician and one of the more prevalent medical bloggers.
This quote is from his response to the question, Why Do You Blog?
Our culture is suffused with messages telling parents that their children are sick, or potentially sick: one sniffle away from certain doom. Flea’s message is that American children are the healthiest children that ever lived on planet Earth. We should celebrate our good fortune.
The culture tells us the children are defined by series of capital letters: ADD, ADHD, ASD, PDD-NOS, OCD. Flea wants children to be called by the names their parents gave them.
Pediatrics today consists of daily exercises in over-testing, over-diagnosing, over-treating, and over-admiting to hospital. Flea wants the folks to know that often the best thing to do for a child is to keep him or her the hell out of the pediatrician’s office!
Pediatricians who write for newspapers and magazines produce icky, squishy pap that bears only the faintest resemblance to expository writing, and that is astonishingly void of original points of view.
Flea is trying to keep it real.
September 4th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
` Wow. This somewhat resonates with my most recent post (including the comments), which you may or may not think is interesting.
` When I was a kid, the doctors diagnosed me with so many illnesses, none of them addressing the fact that I should have been taken out of my home because my father was horribly abusive.
` They just looked at ME and put ME in a mental hospital and treated ME like a leper and gave ME all this medication that screwed ME up, and not once was this helpful!
` There was nothing wrong with ME, I was just reacting to being treated atrociously! Any kid would have similar symptoms! The whole ‘you’re crazy’ thing just gave my dad - who needed to live in a mental hospital himself - more fuel to threaten me with!
` I think that doctors - especially the mental health kind - need to have their heads examined. What are they thinking?
` PS where did Dr. Flea’s blog go?
September 14th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Hey S E E,
Unfortunately, Flea shut down his blog not long after he posted the above remarks. He is sorely missed by all who came to know and love him.
I don’t have a link handy, but there was a great deal of discussion about him and the demise of his blog posted throughout the medical blogosphere at the time. If you go to any of the medical blogs such Doctor Anonymous, or Kevin, MD and search for flea, you’ll pick up the thread.
I’m going to head over and read your post now.
Dean