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The Edge Of The Known World
John D. Lantos
PREFACE: When pediatrics emerged as a specialty in the early twentieth century, child health afflictions were quite different than they are today. At the time, 10 percent of newborns did not survive infancy, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, polio, and scarlet fever were ubiquitous. The advent of antibiotics and vaccines by midcentury—and their proliferation in recent years—has tamed many of the earlier scourges of childhood. Today, dealing with psychosocial problems and child advocacy are central to child health, and as these two essays suggest, pediatricians are, perforce, warriors for distributive justice. John Lantos, a bioethicist and pediatrician at the University of Chicago, describes his unsatisfactory options for treating an autistic patient because what’s known to be really needed is nonexistent. Pediatrician and professor Perri Klass, one of the founders of Reach Out and Read, recounts her exam-room encounter with a teenager who can’t read the instructions for his asthma medications. Illiteracy has replaced measles, and autism is the new typhoid fever. Social systems and adequate public funding rather than wonder drugs, both authors seem to say, are what’s needed to treat these child health afflictions of the twenty-first century.
| The first 100 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
I ARRIVE IN CLINIC on Monday morning. I scan my schedule. Three new patients. Hmm, those are hard to judge. Some are straightforward. Others will take an hour as I try to sort out their medical problems, the reasons why they were referred to me, and what they are hoping I can do. I look down the list for the names of people I like. Or people I dread. The ratio between the two is a good indicator of how I will feel by the end of the morning. A day in pediatric chronic disease clinic can be difficult. Some . . . [Full Text of this Article] |
Doctoring The Chronically Ill
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