How to Talk to Your Child's Doctor: A Handbook For Parents
Like ships passing in the night - that is how to describe what too often happens when parents bring their child to the doctor. Parents do their best to describe their child's problem; meanwhile the doctor listens and tries to fit what he or she is hearing into a diagnostic box. Most times the exchange results in the child getting what is needed, but this is too often in spite of, rather than because of, the dynamics of what happens in the examining room.
This book concerns a common and pernicious communication difficulty between doctors and parents. The problem is not language, although medical jargon sometimes impedes communication; the root of the problem is world view. Few parents understand what doctors are listening for when they talk to parents, and how they use what parents tell them to solve medical problems.
This book will admit parents to a doctor's mental medical universe and explain how physicians solve problems. It will not make doctors of them, but it will make parents better partners in the diagnostic and therapeutic enterprise when their child is sick. The book uses problem-focused chapters with detailed, real-life examples to show them how to do that. At the end of the book, parents get a chance to try their hand at medical problem solving by using some real-life examples.
Table of Contents coming soon...
Read Chapter One Free:
Chapter One: Like Ships Passing in the Night
Your Critically Ill Child: Life and Death Choices Parents Must Face
Crucial Decisions For Your Critically Ill Child is about children. It is a collection of stories describing children whom I have cared for in the course of over two decades practicing pediatric critical care medicine. The stories tell of the many challenges and decisions that these children and their families faced when severe illness or injury unexpectedly entered their lives. None of us are ready for events like these when they suddenly happen. As you will learn from these stories, however, most of us are wiser and stronger than we often think that we are; we usually do find a way to meet these challenges and make these decisions, sometimes against very tall odds. It has been my privilege to watch that happen time and again.
Why do we need a book about pediatric intensivists and PICUs? For one thing, the PICU is an exciting and fascinating place. As you will read, no television program or movie does justice to the reality of what happens there. That reality is far more complex and multi-faceted, more intriguing and fascinating, than Hollywood script writers can imagine. The complexity of the PICU world makes it fascinating, but that complexity also presents challenges to children, their parents, and those of us who work in the PICU. Some of these challenges are great, some small, but few families are ready to meet them when their child needs the PICU. This book tells you the stories of a few children, among the thousands whom I have cared for in the PICU, and how they and their families met and surmounted these challenges. It is a book of parables. It will show you how life-and-death decisions are made and who makes them.
Spending time in a PICU is to see ordinary people performing in extraordinary ways when they confront, often suddenly and unexpectedly, sick or injured children who vividly personify issues that previously seemed distant and abstract. The PICU is not a place for those with a special moral or philosophical agenda. Highly dogmatic persons do not last long in the PICU environment because what you see there every day challenges your preconceived notions of right, wrong, life, and death. On the other hand, if you pay attention to what goes on there, you can emerge from the encounter a wiser person, with stronger personal convictions. This is because in the PICU, not only is the care intensive, but so too is the lived experience. This book will take you there to share in that experience.
Read Chapter One Free:
Chapter One: Parents’ Challenge: Running the PICU Marathon
