If you’re a young celebrity, how do you know you’re in trouble? Take Amanda Bynes, for example. My children watched the comedic actress grow up on TV, and they’ve internalized her strong antidrug message: “Don’t worry, Dad,” they say, “we don’t want to end up like Amanda Bynes!”
Maybe you know when you allegedly toss a bong out the window of your Manhattan apartment as the police are knocking at the door? Or is it when you’re accused of saying mean things about the singer Rihanna, and people seem to care? No, I’d have to say it’s when Courtney Love is trying to perform an intervention on you via Twitter. I’m not sure how much good advice Love has to offer on keeping the celebrity life simple and substance free, but I’m guessing 140 characters is more than enough room to contain it.
Stockbyte
I think these shoes have termites!
Tough to stomach
Can we share a secret, just you, me, and the Internet? Sometimes we dread evaluating abdominal pain, don’t we? Best-case scenario, it’s something fixable like constipation, and we flush with pride. Rarely we pick up an appendicitis, and then we want to call our old medical school professor and crow, “See, I can too make a diagnosis with just a basic history and physical exam, so long as my hunch is backed up by a stat contrast CT of the abdomen and pelvis!” But more often we ask all sorts of questions, poke around in places mentionable and unmentionable, order a bunch of labs and x-rays, and end up feeling about as useful as a washed-up celebrity providing life coaching on Twitter.
Now a group of Dutch researchers has quantified exactly how often we fail to treat pediatric abdominal pain, which I find surprising, because somehow my image of the Netherlands doesn’t include children kvetching about tummy aches (presumably because those wooden shoes distract from pain anywhere else). The researchers looked at 305 children aged 4-17 years who presented to their doctors’ offices with abdominal pain. Nearly 79% had or developed Chronic Abdominal Pain (CAP), which is the medical term for “beats the heck outta me!”
The diagnosis of CAP is defined and codified by the Rome III Criteria, which are not nearly as sexy as they sound. The criteria classify abdominal pain without a detectable organic cause as either functional dyspepsia, irritable bowel syndrome, abdominal migraine, or functional abdominal pain. (I don’t recall the specific distinctions between these diagnoses, but if it will jog my memory, I’m perfectly willing to go to Italy.) One year after diagnosis, around half the kids in the study still had abdominal pain bad enough to impair their daily functioning. In conclusion the researchers felt this prognosis was not gouda, er, good.
Pillow top
Humans fail notoriously when it comes to judging risks. If we were better at it, no one would be content to wait an hour in an airport security line in order to fly safely to a place where they forget to use enough sunscreen. According to a new meta-analysis from the British Medical Journal, if we were really good at judging risk, none of us would ever co-sleep with our young infants.
The study came from Robert Carpenter at the Department of Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a place whose name makes me think of washing coconuts in antibacterial soap. Carpenter’s team looked at 1,472 infants who had died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and 4,679 matched controls. His rather clever idea was to control for two risk factors for SIDS, parental smoking and formula use, by counting only breastfed babies with nonsmoking parents. Unfortunately the authors were unable to completely control for drinking, drug use, and whether parents slept on Swedish memory foam.
SIDS deaths increased from 8 per 100,000 infants among non-co-sleeping babies to 23 per 100,000 when babies slept with their parents. As a doctor I find a nearly threefold increase in risk of death concerning, but my guess is that proponents of “attachment parenting” will point out that for every 100,000 co-sleeping infants 99,977 survive. As for the 15 excess fatalities? You can't prove it wasn't that memory foam.
Gym Shorts
I’m sure some kid in some school somewhere enjoys physical education. For me it was mainly a chance to educate my classmates on how to identify a full-blown asthma attack. And yet, I’m kind of loving PE now, as it may be one of the keys to stopping the epidemic of pediatric obesity. That, and I’ve been practicing dodge ball for the last 35 years, just waiting for it come up again.
An analysis in the Journal of Health Economics found that just one extra hour a week of PE class has the power to reduce childhood obesity by nearly 5%. You know what this means: we can eliminate childhood obesity altogether if kids would just spend 20 hours a week in gym class! And since other studies have demonstrated that time spent in PE may improve kids’ academic performance and behavior in school, we could easily have the smartest, best-disciplined, skinniest, smelliest students the world has ever seen. And why just limit it to school kids? Why not wayward celebrities? Amanda Bynes is already apparently a ringer at the Bong Toss, and I’ve heard she’s training for the Perp Walk, hoping to beat the prior record, held by Courtney Love.