PARENTING  It’s the kind of sleepy panic that grips you in the middle of the night: Your child has radiation poisoning. First, you let them fall down the stairs, get injured in flag football or ignore a cavity. Then you chose to allay your fears by getting X-rays or a Computerized Tomography scan.
Even that decision can bring up different worries. Will he get cancer? Will I ever have grandchildren? Read More>>

PARENTING  A study published in an online medical journal of my field, Pediatrics, wound up in the headlines recently. “Study Links ADHD in Children to Pesticide Exposure.” Whoa! That sounded like bad news, for sure. With all the efforts to get our kids to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, were we inadvertently causing another problem? Were parents going to storm my office irritated with conflicting advice — after all, in the last issue of InHealthNW, I wrote about helping kids eat more fresh fruits and veggies? I knew I’d better look into it more. But once again, the study, fetchingly titled “Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate Pesticides,” didn’t exactly show what the headlines proposed. Read More>>

PARENTING  Kim Miller’s business is eyes. In her jobs coordinating surgeries and public relations for Spokane Eye Clinic, she knows the components of an eyeball. She knows how its muscles form, how the light refracts, what happens when eyes form incorrectly and what doctors can do to fix them.
Naturally, she was proactive about her kids’ eye health, having their vision tested as babies and toddlers. Everything checked out OK. But earlier this year, her son Benjamin was struggling in kindergarten.
“His teacher said he was all of a sudden ‘pulling back’ — not participating in story time. But she’d get with him one-on-one, and he had the comprehension,” explains Miller. “Turns out he just couldn’t see the pictures.” Read More>>

PARENTING  When Spokane resident Stacey Conner was 10 years old, she and her two younger sisters would walk down a dirt road in their English village to the ocean, hunting for heart-shaped rocks they pretended were made by fairies.
“We’d throw them into the water and make wishes,” she says. Read More>>

PARENTING  You may have heard of agoraphobia, or claustrophobia, but have you heard of fever phobia? I sure have. I would define it as the grave concern that any temperature greater than 99 degrees Fahrenheit heralds certain peril. Some parents have the belief that if a fever rises too high, bad things will happen: poaching of the brain, melting of teeth or something equally horrific. In actuality, any serious consequence of fever itself would require a sustained fever north of 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Read More>>

PARENTING  Why should I get the flu vaccine? I’m not in a risk group and they get the vaccine wrong sometimes anyway. And by the way, what is the deal with H1N1? I am pretty skeptical about that new vaccine. Is it safe? Read More>>

PARENTING  Tracey, a Spokane mother of three thick-haired children, wrote a short response back to her son’s kindergarten teacher after receiving the most recent official Head Lice Parent Notification Letter from Spokane Public Schools:

“I would rather gnaw off my right hand than have lice in my house again.” Read More>>

PARENTING  My child was recently diagnosed with kidney stones. It was awful. What can we do to prevent this from ever happening again? Read More>>

PARENTING  Face it: Kids are gross. And all those snotty and grubby and sneezy kids can easily turn an elementary school into a giant petri dish. A study by NSF International found that a school cafeteria tray had 10 times more bacteria than a toilet seat. And drinking-fountain water spigots had the most bacteria of all — over 2.7 million per square inch. Read More>>

PARENTING  Erika Meier knew that when her first child, Megan, started fourth grade, she would be learning about the “biological process of sex,” and she was prepared to answer questions. But now Megan’s 12, headed to middle school and an avid reader of teen fiction. Meier reads her book choices ahead of time to make sure they’re appropriate, and she was stunned by one of the current juvenile bestsellers.

“It dealt with a girl who chose to sleep around, drink and smoke,” says Meier. “And by the second chapter, there was a discussion of oral sex. I was so frustrated. I asked my daughter if she even knew what it was, and she didn’t.” Read More>>