SanTanValley.com

Here in Arizona- the valley of the sun, the summer comes with a good amount of warmth and sunshine as it does elsewhere. The relatively low humidity improves the tolerance of  the triple digit temperatures we often get here. Proper hydration orally along with sensitivity for modifications in out door sport training programs are popular recommendations. Young children however need special precautions taken in addition.

Ah! Sunshine is here- the very bounty of nature. Without it life as we know it wouldn’t exist on our beloved good green planet. We do need to be careful in how we enjoy this bounty, as lifetime risks for different forms of skin cancer can be influenced by inappropriate exposure to sunshine and repeated sunburn injury. So here comes the age old advice on sunburns and sunscreen.

If you are like many and a walk down the store aisle, leaves you wondering which sunscreen to grab for you or your children? and why is this brand so much more expensive than that brand? what do the SPF numbers really mean? We’ll share a few tips with you in this post that would help you make an informed choice.

The maxim, “breastfeeding is the way to go!” was drummed in early in my pediatric training and it remains a scientific fact to date. Recently the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted surveys and monitored growth for years on exclusively breast fed newborns in stable home environments from six racial backgrounds in six different geographic regions of the world to get an idea of how a normal human ought to develop in the first 2-years of life. The finding which shows that we all grow in a consistent manner regardless of racial background when exclusively breastfed corroborates the importance of breastfeeding. Baby friendly hospital initiatives gaining traction in some valley newborn nurseries draw their antecedents from these initiatives by the WHO.

A portal just as is suggested by the Latin derivative, is basically a gateway or access into some space or situation.

Enter, the 21st Century! with yet another new technology: A Patient Portal. Alas! Patients can now enter and see aspects of their own health records online! Technology and the sometimes friction laden-ride with the practice of medicine may have found a perfect fit.  Medicine today as an art form has many antecedents from the past, from Hippocrates through the Renaissance and the post WWII era that still shape many aspects of patient care and health care delivery and research.

Allergies are on the rise! No one has quite figured out all the answers at this point. There’s the “hygiene hypothesis”, which we spoke about previously and other areas of intense on-going research beyond the scope of this post today.

A parent wondered recently and asked if her 13-month old son could be having nasal allergies? My answer was, Yes. This surprised her and this is why. This parent realized and correctly so that you can only respond with allergy-type symptoms to something you’ve been exposed to and subsequently sensitized to. The baby at 13-months old has barely gone through his first allergy season and presumably his very first exposure to the annual tide of environmental allergens (trees, weeds, grasses) and really unlikely to be reacting now, let alone mount an allergic response barely after the first year of exposure. 

Parental anxiety rises and deservedly so whenever someone shares the discovery of an  illness, let alone a communicable one in their child with another parent. The words: hand-foot-and-mouth disease linked together in that sequence certainly evokes a suite of reactions from respect to bounding fear in the other parent listening. “Will my child catch it?”, “Oh! he had a fever last night too- he probably has caught it already!”. We want to address concerns like this in this post and share recent trends and disease patterns with this condition as we approach the fall season.

Parenting is a joyful and rewarding experience and the appearance of a concern in the newborn can be very distressing. We frequently encounter parental concerns themed on crying and suspicions of colic in newborns. This post on Infantile colic is the first of two addressing this concern commonly seen in about 1:5 newborns.

The most widely used definition of colic is set in the rule of threes.  Here seriously fussy babies cried for more than 3 hours a day, more than 3 days a week, and for longer than 3 weeks. This cascade of events is Illustrated below. 

Anyone with children has dealt with the stress of keeping them healthy.

New and experienced parents alike are forced to deal with questions such as: when is a cough and runny nose just a cold or a cause for concern?

Having a pediatrician you can trust goes a long way to alleviating that stress. The San Tan Valley Chamber of Commerce now has one as a member, welcoming Springfield Pediatrics to San Tan Valley.