Your innate sense of empathy makes you a born counselor and a source of caring, concern, and essential guidance for your adolescent patients. Does your clinical IQ always keep pace with your emotional intelligence when it comes to menstruation issues?

Riddle me this: Irregular menses in adolescent girls

Pediatricians deal daily with parent and patient refusals of recommended care. Here’s how to protect yourself and your practice from legal repercussions.

How to limit your risk of legal liability

Frequently sending texts to caregivers with messages about infant development, safety, and basic care reduces the number of visits to the emergency department (ED) in the first year of life, according to a new study conducted in a large urban pediatric care practice that serves a low-income population with limited health literacy.

Parent education by text reduces ED visits for nonurgent care

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and Influenza are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality in children. Pediatricians must step up vigilance to ensure early diagnosis and treatment.

Influenza and RSV: How to suspect, diagnose, treat

Scientific evidence supporting the efficacy and safety of adjuvant cannabidiol use for specific pediatric seizures is accumulating, but long-term effects of use are still unknown.

Cannabinoids as future treatment for epilepsy

Women who use marijuana while breastfeeding produce breast milk with a measurable amount of the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (delta 9-THC), for up to 6 days since they last smoked. This was the primary finding in a study in 50 breastfeeding women who reported using marijuana and provided breast milk samples to a research repository for analysis.

Breastfeeding moms who smoke marijuana expose their infants to cannabinoids

A previously healthy 4-year-old male, born late preterm by urgent cesarean delivery with an uncomplicated postnatal course, presents to the outpatient clinic for a chief complaint of worsening cough over the past 5 months. He denies current fever, rhinorrhea, shortness of breath, diarrhea, or vomiting. His cough has been worsening in severity and frequency, and mostly occurs during the daytime.

Chronic cough in a 4-year-old boy

The menstrual cycle can be an important vital sign providing pediatricians with valuable information about health and disease among girls and young women.

Menses: A “vital sign” for teenaged girls

An 8-year-old boy is brought to the office for evaluation of a persistent itchy rash on his extremities, trunk, and face. Although the rash has been present for longer than 3 months, individual skin lesions change from hour to hour and occasionally the rash clears completely only to recur several hours later. He is otherwise healthy with no known allergies, changes in diet, medication use, or recent illness.

Persistent pruritic rash in an 8-year-old boy

Sudden unexplained death in childhood (SUDC)-it happened to my family.

Kisses for Conor

Two pediatricians discuss the 10 commandments of obesity prevention for children and where the focus for treating obesity in childhood should be.

Two views of treating obesity in childhood

Colic linked to gut inflammation and dysbiosis

Many times, testing seems to be the easiest way to answer a clinical question, but judicious use of tests is the best approach. Here are some guidelines I have followed over the years.

To test or not to test

For teenagers’ developing minds and bodies, good food and activity choices are key to appropriate development. A new survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals trends that check how US teenagers are doing.

CDC: Teens missing the nutritional mark

For children living below the federal poverty level, public insurance programs are a lifeline to crucial healthcare services. If eligibility requirements change, however, thousands of children could be left without healthcare-a move that could result in billions of dollars’ worth of uncompensated care for hospitals each year.

Vol 35 No 11