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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > How Are Pediatricians Saving Lives Today? (Pedcast)


	Podcast:		Portable Practical Pediatrics
	Episode:		How Are Pediatricians Saving Lives Today? (Pedcast)
	Category:		Kids & family
	Duration:		00:00:00
	Publish Date:		2017-08-13 21:52:57
	Description:		Introduction Child death from an infectious disease like pneumonia was all too common in America just a hundred years ago. If you read descriptions of life in the 19th century, you quickly realize that children suffering from infectious diseases was common and often devastating. Thank goodness those days are gone. Good riddance. To demonstrate that point, just take a look at the most common causes of death in older infants and children during the turn of the century era. Study of childhood deaths year 1900 #1 Pneumonia secondary to influenza #2 Tuberculosis #3 Acute Gastroenteritis Notice, all of the big three causes of child death have one thing in common; they are all infectious diseases. Have you ever known any children who have succumbed to any of these diseases? Probably not because these infections that lead to death in 1900, are very rare in today's children. Just forty years ago, at the onset of my pediatric career, pediatricians regularly saved children by treating them for meningitis, sepsis, pneumonia, and dehydration secondary to acute gastroenteritis; but not today. Those days of infectious disease deaths, relative to the past, are mostly gone. But pediatricians still regularly saves by using tools other than traditional medical therapies. What are those tools you ask? Well stay tuned to find out and explore this interesting topic further in this edition of Portable Practical Pediatrics. Musical Intro Accidents are the leading cause of death in children today You are probably asking yourself, if deaths from infections are becoming rare in America, what are children suffering from today? Take a look at the 2015 statistics of the leading ten causes of death in children by age from the CDC, and you will quickly see the answer to that question. CDC statistics child deaths 2015 Today, death from unintentional accidents is by far, the leading cause of death in children. Unintentional accidental death from motor vehicle accidents, drowning, fires, burns, choking/ suffocations, and pedestrian accidents lead the list of tragedies. Causes of childhood deaths 2015. Note, that deaths from pneumonia, the grim reaper of 1900 barely made the list in today's list child deaths. You can see that while it is great news that children are not dying of pneumonia, parents, pediatricians, and society at large, still have a long way to go if we are to eliminate the tragedy of child deaths from injuries. Injury prevention is the next great frontier in pediatrics. How do Pediatricians Save Lives Today? But how are pediatricians saving lives today? When I started practicing pediatrics, a week didn't go by when I didn't save a life of a child by treating them for meningitis or pneumonia. That fact was one of the main reasons that I decided to spend my life treating sick children. It is incredibly thrilling and rewarding to take a child with a life threatening infection and bring them back to health with the tools pediatricians have today. Fortunately, another incredibly powerful tool at a pediatrician's disposal has almost ended the era infectious disease deaths in children--vaccines. So how are pediatricians saving lives today? Rather than by using antibiotics, my life saving is done in a more subtle fashion, using the tools of persuasion, education, reminders, nagging, storytelling, praising, and what I like to call authoritative convincing. By using these tools , I know I am saving lives even though I am not there to see it happen. I save lives by preventing tragedies from ever happening, by using words and thoughts to convince parents and children to hedge against taking risks. Yes, I save children today by convincing parents that their children need to be properly restrained while riding in a car, by convincing parents that every child needs enough swim lessons to be safe around water, by convincing parents not to let their children play unsupervised on a trampoline,
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