Tagged With "Child Abuse Doc"

By Jack P. Shonkoff, Immigration Initiative at Harvard, October 2019 Background The separation of children from their parents and their prolonged detention for an indefinite period of time raise profound concerns that transcend partisan politics and demand immediate resolution. Forcibly separating children from their parents is like setting a house on fire. Preventing rapid reunification is like blocking the first responders from doing their job. And subjecting children to prolonged...

By Rachel Pearson, The New Yorker, October 8, 2019 On a cool spring afternoon, in a clinic that serves refugee and immigrant families, I sit across from a teen-age girl. She is otherwise known as an unaccompanied alien child, or U.A.C. She left her home in Central America, crossed the southern border, and was detained for a week—in Texas, she thinks—in a facility where breakfast was a cold bean burrito, lunch was a cup of microwavable noodle soup, and dinner was a cold bean burrito. She says...

By Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, November 13, 2019 When the stress in your life just doesn’t let up, and it feels like you have no support to get through the day—let alone do everything you need to do to be the best parent you can be—it can seem like there’s nothing that can make it better. But there are resources that can help, and this kind of stress—known as “toxic stress”—doesn’t have to define your life. In this video, learn more about what toxic stress is, how it...

By Nadia Akseer, Arjumand Rizvi, Zaid Bhatti, et al., JAMA Network Open, November 8, 2019 Key Points Question: Is conflict severity associated with the performance of health systems and population health outcomes in Afghanistan during the 2003 to 2018 reconstruction period? Findings: In this survey study of 64 815 women in Afghanistan, notable health and health system improvements were made despite increasing conflict after 2010. However, regions with greater conflict had lower gains in...

By Antoinette Laskey, MedPage Today, December 1, 2019 I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. I also always knew working with children is what brought me the most joy. Finding the subspecialty of child abuse pediatrics was not something I had anticipated. In medical school, I had the opportunity to work with a child abuse pediatrician when a child was brought in for medical care after being sexually assaulted. We examined the child, calmed the obviously distressed parent, and talked with the...

By Jesse J. Helton, Jason T. Carbone, et al., JAMA Pediatrics, November 4, 2019 For children who have been sexually abused, emergency department (ED) professionals provide immediate medical care, including testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, prophylaxis for potential HIV exposure, and emergency contraception. In some cases, ED clinicians conduct forensic examinations to assist with child protection and criminal investigations. Physicians and nurses in EDs are among the...

By Carole H. Stipelman, Greg Stoddard, Kyle Bata, et al., JAMA Pediatrics, October 28, 2019 Firearms are a leading cause of death in US children, and the rate of suicide by firearms in people aged 10 to 19 years has increased since 2008.1 In the United States, 4.6 million children (approximately 7%) live in households with at least 1 gun that is stored loaded and unlocked.2 Safe storage of guns and ammunition may decrease the occurrence of self-inflicted or unintentional firearm injury to...

As a family doc with 40 years of practice under my belt I heard the phrase "Trauma Informed Care." for the first time in 2019. This not so benign neglect is complimented by adult medicine's obliviousness to the pervasive morbidities caused by the fact that about 20% of our adult patients were abused as children. This affects both mental and physical health. Training in adult medicine is void of attention to both child abuse and TIC, much to the detriment of our patients.

For all it's worth I am a family doc with 35 years experience in practice and many years mentoring medical students. I also served 8 years on my state's medical licensing and discipline board and 10 years on my community hospital's bioethics committee. Needless to say physicians are human beings too and have the same array of frailties as the rest of humanity. These days in addition to 'ordinary' mental illness and the awesome assumption of responsibility for life and death the docs carry...

Criticizing ACEs in Peer Reviewed Professional Journals Impairs Child Abuse Treatment Jeoffry B. Gordon, MD, MPH May 23, 2021 As a family doc practicing in San Diego I was privileged to hear Dr. Vincent Felitti talk about his inspired development of the ACEs questionnaire and its association with many adult mental and physical diseases directly from him only a few years after his original insight. Yet, although I had a lively clinic and learned how to manage a vast array of medical...

Please register now at this link to reserve your spot. You’re invited to participate in Building the Movement with Coalitions, the first of eight remarkable workshops featured in the series, “ Building a National Movement to Prevent Trauma and Foster Resilience ”. The first half-day workshop will occur virtually on January 7th from 1-5pm ET/10am-2pm PT. It focuses on the history and future of the movement and building community-owned, trauma-informed, prevention-focused, and healing-centered...

Scott Grant, MD., MPH joined us on the Less Stress in Life Podcast for a conversation on childhood trauma, how he approaches incorporating trauma-informed care into his practice, the transformational power of parenthood and his new Docs2Dads podcast. Dr. Grant is a Board-Certified pediatrician who works in primary care and hospital pediatrics in Southeast Michigan. Professionally, Dr. Grant is interested in learning how childhood adversity and toxic stress affect children into adulthood, and...

Note: PACEs Connection is in dire financial straits. We are asking for support, from you, our 57,586 members, to help cover the loss of foundation funding that was promised and did not come through. Pay and hours have been cut for our staff—most of us will be laid off for the month of December. Another grant will pick up in January, but we will still be underfunded. Since sounding the alarm this summer, we’ve raised about $26,000 . Thankfully, about 25% of new donors are making monthly...

Life is hard. None of us makes it through unscathed. Unfortunately, though, some of us have a much tougher journey on this planet than others. Most distressingly of all, children and babies are by no means immune from the wounds that this world all too often inflicts. Indeed, for many children, trauma is not a future threat but a present reality. And these adverse childhood experiences (ACE) can have a devastating long-term impact across all domains of a child’s life. This includes...

Because of a collaboration with Columbia University and UW-Madison, we have answers to these questions. By Peter Peter Pecora, Casey Family Programs, March 17, 2023 - Overview The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently released a “ roadmap ” to reduce child poverty by as much as half through the implementation of a series of social policy packages. The aim of this study was to simulate the reductions in Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement and foster care placements that are...

Of course Charlie Fletcher is very right here; we all want to support and help our kids, especially those that have been traumatized. BUT speaking as a family doc the situation in the medical care system is very, very much worse than what is described in this essay: (1) Especially for the traumatized kids, the US has a 19th century mental health system. I say this because many behavioral health providers and the American Psychiatric Association do not even recognize the pathologic dynamic...

The brain doesn’t fully develop until about the age of 25. This fact is sometimes quite surprising and eye opening to most adults. It can also be somewhat overwhelming for new parents and professionals who are interacting with babies and young children every day, to contemplate. It is essential to realize however, that the greatest time of development occurs in the years prior to kindergarten. And even more critical to understand is that by age three 85 percent of the core structures of the...

Christina Bethell, Ph.D, MBA, MPH, founder of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), principal author of the groundbreaking study on positive childhood experiences, and creator of the free Well Visit Planner, among other innovations. Two internationally-respected leaders and innovators in complementary aspects of early relational health and childhood and maternal health equity recently launched a partnership they believe will benefit everyone from newborn babies and...