Many children are afraid of needles to varying degrees, and may become anxious in the days leading up to a medical visit or take longer to get shots or blood draws because of their fear. For some, that fear can reach the point of interfering with their medical care.
On our sister blog Thriving, child psychologist Carolyn Snell, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Medical Coping Clinic shares five tips for families that can help them prepare their child for blood draws and other procedures requiring needle sticks. She also shares suggestions for approaching situations where a child’s needle phobia is so great that it delays necessary care.
Notes spoke to Ganeshwaran Mochida, MD, of the Boston Children’s Hospital Department of Neurology, who specializes in in microcephaly care, about the virus and microcephaly. He raised five points about microcephaly for both providers and their patients to consider. …Read More
Precision cancer medicine — an approach in which doctors treat a tumor based on its genetic profile, rather than where it is — has benefited a growing number of adults with cancer. It’s not yet a standard approach in pediatric oncology, but the times may be a-changing.
The study joins a growing body of evidence in favor of incorporating sequencing into pediatric oncology care, at least among children with relapsed tumors.
“There’s a lot more going on than any one study would suggest,” Janeway says. “Every study, every paper is all part of one big story about bringing precision medicine to children with cancers.”
In reality, patients are no closer now to having direct access to and control over their health data than they were in 1994. But maybe now the time is right. What the health care system has finally achieved, Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, and Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School (HMS), say in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), is the critical mass of supply and demand that should help get PCHRs off the ground:
With widespread adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems, at least some of any given patient’s data are likely available electronically, albeit locked up within individual institutions.
Patients want to be able to manage their health information.
Providers, developers and researchers are calling for access to those data.
So what more, Mandl and Kohane ask, needs to be done? …Read More