In whom do we trust?
I have been MIA - Young Juju has been sick. Bacterial infection, they say. He was running insane temperatures like 104+ etc - what with giving him tepid baths & rushing to Government Hopital ER's with the burning body in my arms, now that he seems better, I have been thinking... about the problem of diagnosis & medication.
Both my kids, Juju, who is 3 & Oju who is barely 9 months have been misdiagnosed & over-medicated at some point. First it was Juju - when he was just a wee 2 month old, he used to cry, you know, for no apparent reason, everyday. The first baby has the capacity to make the best of us neurotic. Therefore, off we rushed to one of the most "popular" peds. The fellow pronounced him colic & prescribed ''medication'. When the crying did not stop (Juju was 100% breastfed BTW), we went to him again & he said, no kidding, these are his actual words:
Doctor: "You see, all this milk he's having, bound to make him gassy."
Me: ???? - But he feeds on demand...
Doctor: If you weigh, say, 70 kg & drink milk in the same body weight proportion that he does, you would be drinking about 5 litre, nobody can digest that much milk. I suggest you put him on 1 or 2 bottles of soy milk.
Something did not feel right over here, so I went in for a second opinion & sure enough, I was told that I was just not burping him properly - he was just taking in too much air due to a blocked nose. Moreover the colic medicines that he had been prescribed 3x daily were "morphine like". I was told to forget the soy milk nonsense & carry on BF'ing. Needless to give out graphic details of what I would have liked to do to the doctor I saw initially.
Then there was the case with Oju. At about 6 months, he started having repeated cough & was prescribed salbutamol sulphate based syrups repeatedly. Then we shifted our house & he was exposed to lots of old dust. Thereafter, he started having repeated attacks of chest congestion. The ped said he had allergy and that as a parent of an allergy prone kid, I had to learn to live with some symptoms. Meanwhile, the nebulizers, steam in the room & Salbutamol doses continued. He finally pronounced little Oju "having asthamatic tendencies" & put him on salbutamol & steroid based inhalers. That day, I cried & cried. I went to Homeopaths, ENT specialists & chest specialists. I was in denial and seriously scared. I could see my baby getting thinner & developing dark circles under his eyes. I scoured the internet & looked up an allergy specialist. Luckily, this lady is pediatrician who later did a lot of research on allergies. She did a few blood tests & pin pointed the exact allergins - just fungal spores & sunflower. It seemed that all the steam we were introducing in the room was actually aggravating the problem. Also, the salbutamol was causing his growth to slow down esp. in the time that he was developing mentally. So, we got new cotton matresses & threw out the inhalers. Oju has been abs. perfect & has started gaining weight again.
Thanks for having the patience to read till here. The point I am trying to make here is that, let's say, I stop being a mother for a minute & take a higher level view & allow for the fact that doctor are just humans & may make mistakes. But again, as a mother of these two individual children, can I forgive people who exposed these kids to chemicals that interfered with their mental & physical growth? I think the best solution is mother's instinct. If it does not feel right, I'd say one should get a second opinion, even a third or a fourth, till one is sure that one's precious child is in safe hands.
I have been MIA - Young Juju has been sick. Bacterial infection, they say. He was running insane temperatures like 104+ etc - what with giving him tepid baths & rushing to Government Hopital ER's with the burning body in my arms, now that he seems better, I have been thinking... about the problem of diagnosis & medication.
Both my kids, Juju, who is 3 & Oju who is barely 9 months have been misdiagnosed & over-medicated at some point. First it was Juju - when he was just a wee 2 month old, he used to cry, you know, for no apparent reason, everyday. The first baby has the capacity to make the best of us neurotic. Therefore, off we rushed to one of the most "popular" peds. The fellow pronounced him colic & prescribed ''medication'. When the crying did not stop (Juju was 100% breastfed BTW), we went to him again & he said, no kidding, these are his actual words:
Doctor: "You see, all this milk he's having, bound to make him gassy."
Me: ???? - But he feeds on demand...
Doctor: If you weigh, say, 70 kg & drink milk in the same body weight proportion that he does, you would be drinking about 5 litre, nobody can digest that much milk. I suggest you put him on 1 or 2 bottles of soy milk.
Something did not feel right over here, so I went in for a second opinion & sure enough, I was told that I was just not burping him properly - he was just taking in too much air due to a blocked nose. Moreover the colic medicines that he had been prescribed 3x daily were "morphine like". I was told to forget the soy milk nonsense & carry on BF'ing. Needless to give out graphic details of what I would have liked to do to the doctor I saw initially.
Then there was the case with Oju. At about 6 months, he started having repeated cough & was prescribed salbutamol sulphate based syrups repeatedly. Then we shifted our house & he was exposed to lots of old dust. Thereafter, he started having repeated attacks of chest congestion. The ped said he had allergy and that as a parent of an allergy prone kid, I had to learn to live with some symptoms. Meanwhile, the nebulizers, steam in the room & Salbutamol doses continued. He finally pronounced little Oju "having asthamatic tendencies" & put him on salbutamol & steroid based inhalers. That day, I cried & cried. I went to Homeopaths, ENT specialists & chest specialists. I was in denial and seriously scared. I could see my baby getting thinner & developing dark circles under his eyes. I scoured the internet & looked up an allergy specialist. Luckily, this lady is pediatrician who later did a lot of research on allergies. She did a few blood tests & pin pointed the exact allergins - just fungal spores & sunflower. It seemed that all the steam we were introducing in the room was actually aggravating the problem. Also, the salbutamol was causing his growth to slow down esp. in the time that he was developing mentally. So, we got new cotton matresses & threw out the inhalers. Oju has been abs. perfect & has started gaining weight again.
Thanks for having the patience to read till here. The point I am trying to make here is that, let's say, I stop being a mother for a minute & take a higher level view & allow for the fact that doctor are just humans & may make mistakes. But again, as a mother of these two individual children, can I forgive people who exposed these kids to chemicals that interfered with their mental & physical growth? I think the best solution is mother's instinct. If it does not feel right, I'd say one should get a second opinion, even a third or a fourth, till one is sure that one's precious child is in safe hands.
posted by Random Impressions at 8:24 AM
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