Pediatrics

Most healthcare professionals, including some pediatricians, would rather treat adults than children. That should come as no surprise. If you’ve ever had to draw blood from a young child, you know how heartbreaking it can be for everyone in the room. Maybe in the building. Those screams can be dramatic!

The emotional pain we feel as practitioners, let alone parents, can be as equivalent to the physical pain the child experiences. It adds new meaning to the expression, “This is going to hurt me more than you.”

Unfortunately, the desire to avoid such emotional pain, along with other challenges, often discourages even the most knowledgeable and skilled doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), and other healthcare providers from assessing and treating children. In some ways, they’re just little adults. In other ways, they’re not. And what we don’t know about their similarities and differences compared to adult patients can hurt them. That is particularly true when it causes us to withhold medical care when that care is most needed.

To some degree, we often fear what we don’t fully understand, and in some ways, we have been conditioned to fear those differences. In a lot of medical education, this fear is often instilled by (more…)