Really?
This week began with a tremendous loss, not only to television journalism, but to common sense. I spent countless Sunday nights of my youth learning the art of incredulity from Mike Wallace. Wallace was willing to look the most powerful people in the world straight in the eye and exclaim, “Oh, come on!” Inspired, I tried it out on my principal. There must have been something about Wallace’s inflection....
This week’s news is full of people who could benefit from an, “Oh, come on!” For example, I’ve tried that line a few times with vaccine deniers. Public health officials in Washington State this week tried every line they could think of, as whooping cough has torn through the state, with 640 confirmed cases of pertussis between January 1st to March 31st of this year, leading to four deaths. Similar outbreaks have struck Oregon, California, and Vermont.
Hmm. What do all those states have in common? They grow great seasonal fruits? A lot of people there drive Subarus? Oh yeah! They all boast large communities where few children are vaccinated! You might think a major outbreak of pertussis would be enough to tip the balance in those places in favor of immunizations, but if you’ve ever had “the talk” with a committed vaccine denier you know better. I’m sure they’ll blame the epidemics on the Subarus.
Speaking of states of denial, a new report from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights a disturbing trend in sex education. Between 2008 and 2010 eleven states stopped teaching middle-schoolers about HIV, STD’s, and pregnancy prevention. Presumably these states have finally figured out how to convince young people not to have sex. While nearly half of all high school students have had intercourse, they must be doing it somewhere else. I hope to visit one of these states and learn techniques we can use nationwide. One thing is for sure: nothing helps kids make smart decisions like ignorance. Hopefully in the future we’ll see similar results from not telling kids about substance abuse, smoking, and wearing seat belts!
Fortunately, we doctors don’t engage in denial. Sure, we think about it sometimes, and we might know someone who’s experimented with it, but we ourselves do not do it, no sir! That’s why I just can’t wrap my head around a new study in Archives Of Pediatrics And Adolescent Medicine reporting that only 22% of parents of overweight children recall their pediatrician ever mentioning the issue. The study did not address what pediatricians actually told parents, just whether the parents remembered having the conversation.
I’m sure our actual numbers are better than that, but face it, we pediatricians like to tiptoe around unpleasant conversations: “So, Ms. Smith, this graph here represents a Gaussian distribution of body mass indices across a national sampling performed by the CDC in the year 2000, and you see that little dot there is where Timmy’s BMI would fall, and so if he’s drinking a lot of sugared beverages you might want to cut back some, and now let’s talk about his vision.”
Imagine if Dirty Harry had been a pediatrician: “Go ahead, I’m having kind of a bad day, and if you make an unwise choice right now it might cheer me up, insomuch as it would grant me moral authority to perform an act of potentially lethal violence.” Oh, come on!