Hero of our “Radio Schools” Pediatrician of the DocDeti clinic Alexander Sivolobov, before the start of the school year, argued with colleagues regarding the first outbreak of “snot” in the new school year. Most put on the second week of autumn, Alexander – on the first, and the head physician even named the date – September 3. We turn over the calendar and decide what to do now with the eternal SARS and more.
SARS prevention
There are three main rules for the prevention of viral diseases in children.
Healthy sleep. The rules are simple: go to bed early, at least before 10 p.m., and limit screen time an hour before bedtime. If a child hardly wakes up in the morning, with circles under his eyes, then he will get sick much more often.
Normal food. If you suddenly didn’t stuff all the salads, all the fruits and all the milk into your child in one day, don’t worry. Better evaluate his weekly diet. Maybe one day you had fries and nuggets, but the next day you had vegetables, meat and milk. That is, in a total of seven days, the child’s diet can be quite healthy. So it is important not to get hung up and not turn food into additional stress (it also does not have the best effect on the body). Eating right and purposefully avoiding fast food, sweets, and other things is good, but it’s important to do it without bigotry.
Stress. Try to minimize it for the child. A tortured and tired person, whatever one may say, gets sick more easily. When children, and even adults, are depressed and anxious, they simply cannot live, study and communicate. But they become more susceptible to infections.
Where did the flu go?
The flu has been suspiciously quiet for the last two years. There were no epidemics. This is both good and bad. The fact is that if people do not encounter any virus for a long time, their immune response (that is, the body’s resistance to this infection) decreases. The immune response to influenza lasts only a year or two, then the patient once more becomes susceptible to the disease.
Thus, we have already significantly reduced the percentage of people who made up a powerful immune layer in society. This means that many more people will get sick in a flu outbreak than usual.
Therefore, it is still worth vaccinating children and vaccinating yourself this year once morest the flu
Flu shots can be given to children of all ages, ideally in their first year of life. If the child has never been vaccinated before, then you need to vaccinate twice, at intervals of a month. Patients who have been vaccinated before and are vaccinated regularly should receive the annual vaccine in September-October.
Does a child need hardening
Hardening in the sense in which many people understand this word – dousing with ice water, running barefoot in the snow – is a rather controversial way to prevent colds.
In order for the child not to get sick often, he simply does not need to be wrapped up. If the baby has cool hands and feet, but at the same time a warm chest and back, then he is dressed perfectly. Such accustoming to the optimal temperature environment, as well as the ability to drink drinks from the refrigerator, play in a draft, and so on, is also hardening, just not extreme.
As for dousing with ice water and similar methods, this is nothing but the most beautiful placebo. But following all, placebo is a working method. A person believes that he has taken the medicine and therefore cannot get sick. Tempering is a similar example.
If you like extreme hardening and you do it not through force, then such a spiritual practice can be done periodically to cheer you up.
SARS in a child and an ambulance
I think that house calls of doctors on the scale that we have in our country now is a disgrace. I worked in an ambulance in a children’s brigade. For 9 years, he did resuscitation only two or three times. Occasionally there were fractures, loss of consciousness or some kind of injury. But on the other hand, I remember a huge sea of ”snot”, coughs and diarrhea – and for these reasons people called an ambulance.
I was doing something completely different from my own, which is why I left. Such work is a path to burnout for doctors who simply work with their feet like couriers.
You can drive to the hospital on your own in 99% of cases
For the remaining percentage, there is an ambulance when the patient cannot move, breathe, and in other cases.
Online consultations are definitely not a substitute for face-to-face appointments. Errors in the diagnosis are not ruled out here. Nevertheless, with the mind, this tool can and should be used. Sometimes it is important to discuss a problem with a doctor, even at the level of complaints and medical history. The doctor already at the stage of the conversation can determine whether the case is urgent or non-urgent. Therefore, online consultations are very promising, although they require improvement.
Faulty reference system
Most of the medical examinations that appear mandatory according to the documents are actually not needed. But healthy children are still sent to them, thereby mixing the flows in polyclinics and causing new outbreaks of seasonal infections. Really necessary annual inspections can be counted on the fingers.
A dentist. It is much cheaper to just go to a scheduled appointment every six months than to treat huge problems for huge sums in the future.
Ophthalmologist. If a child (especially a preschooler) has some kind of visual impairment, then he will not immediately tell you regarding it, because he does not read small text, he has nothing to compare with. And vision worsens, as a rule, not sharply, but gradually. Therefore, it is better to monitor here regularly – we talked regarding intervals and nuances in interview with an ophthalmologist.
Blood analysis. It’s worth giving it up from time to time. The child is changing, transforming, growing. In this period, some problems may slip through him, which are better to identify in a timely manner.
Psychiatrist. Many are afraid of these specialists, but they just should not be avoided. Most often, it is the fears of parents regarding visiting a child psychiatrist that lead to the fact that some problems are discovered too late that might have been worked out much earlier. The psychiatrist knows how the child should develop correctly and what can interfere with this process. It happens that children suffer from speech, behavior, fine motor skills, etc. And here, in cooperation with a neurologist, a psychiatrist can provide timely and high-quality assistance.
As for various ECGs and ultrasounds of anything, such examinations can hardly be called informative without complaints. During the first screening, in the month of the child, we can find out once and for all that the liver, kidneys, and spleen are in place. Without serious diseases that have vivid symptoms, these organs will not change pathologically.
Listen to the full recording of the interview with Alexander Sivolobov here. The conversation was broadcast “Radio Schools” – the project “Mela” and the radio station “Moscow Speaks” regarding the problems of education and upbringing. The guests of the studio are teachers, psychologists and other experts. The program airs on Sundays at 13:00 on the radio “Moscow speaking”.
Photo: Dikushin Dmitry / Shutterstock / Fotodom
