Martha Sears - The Portable Pediatrician: Everything You Need to Know About Your Childs Health

www.AskDrSears.com

This comprehensive online resource provides parents with the latest updates in all areas of pediatric health, including timely news items, personal blogs from the Sears doctors, links to media appearances and speaking engagements, and much more. Visit our Medicine Cabinet to see detailed dosing on a variety of pediatric over-the-counter medications. Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter. Visit our Portable Pediatrician Updates section to keep abreast of new approaches to pediatric health care. Visit www.AskDrSears.com today.

The Portable Pediatrician is truly portable!

The Portable Pediatrician is also available as an app for your mobile device.

E very parent desires to give a child the best possible start in lifeto provide love, shelter, clothes, food, education, fun, and everything else a child wants and needs. But theres one thing that many parents forget to add to this listthe gift of health. The Portable Pediatrician will give you the tools you need to provide this precious gift to your children and grandchildren. Many of our children arent getting the level of health care that they deserve. Children are getting sicker, sadder, and fatter. Dissatisfaction with the medical insurance system is at an all-time high. How often have you left the doctors office wanting more: more time with the doctor, more understanding of your childs illness, and more information about what you can do in addition to what your child can take? This book gives you the more you need.

The Portable Pediatrician was literally written on the job. When parents brought their children in for sick or well visits, we kept a log of the most common worries parents had and the most common illnesses children get. When you, our trusting readers, want to know how to keep your children from getting sick, we want you to feel that you are sitting in our office and talking with one of us.

This book represents our combined experience: more than sixty years in total. We have put ourselves behind the eyes of parents and asked: What do I need to know to keep my child healthy and if my child gets sick, what do I need to know to help her get better? We intend this book to be a helpful addition to your present parent-pediatrician partnership. We want to help parents become wise consumers of medical care.

Throughout this book we present each pediatric problem and illness in a parent-helpful way that teaches you how to be watchful. This is how we practice medicine, helping parents do what they do best. We educate you about a particular illness, believing that the more thoroughly parents understand the nature of their childs illness, the less they will worry and the more effective they will be. Well teach you what you, as your childs home doctor, can do with time-tested home remedies. This book will enable you to solve many common pediatric problems. We will also tell you when to enlist help from your own doctor.

This is not a textbook cluttered with worrisome statistics about what may happen in 0.1 percent of cases. Your child is a person, not a case. We give you the most important points of each illness, especially those that you can do something about, either through prevention or treatment. Consider each topic a handout that we would give you as you were leaving our office, summarizing the office visit as well as providing more detail.

How to find a topic. We have arranged the topics alphabetically according to the most common medical name. But parents often use other terms to refer to the same topic. Go to the index first. Medical names and parent terms for the same concern are listed in the index. For example, halitosis will be discussed in the H section, yet the index at the back of the book will contain terms such as breath, stinky and bad breathall referring you to the same page.

How each topic is organized. You will notice that each medical topic has a heading to make it easy to get information at a glance. Subheadings generally include what causes the behavior or illness, what the symptoms are, when to worry, and what to do.

For each topic we have included the most important information for parents. In case you need to learn more, we have included extra reading and website resources for many of the topics. We have purposely omitted prescription drug dosages, because such information changes from time to time and should be determined by your medical provider.