Hot MedFax

I can't remember when I started trying to lose weight -- I think it was somewhere around 5th grade.  (Actress Ginnifer Goodwin, now 32, beat me -- she joined Weight Watchers at 9).  But now we're finding that there can be emotional consequences from being put on a diet too early in life. According to Jen Weigel at the Chicago Tribune, the last thing people with children who are a little too pudgy should do is bug them about it.  She quotes a woman, who should know, whose mom was obsessed with her food intake, Karen Kataline, author of "Fatlash: Food Police & the Fear of Thin. "She had unresolved issues about weight and appearance and she wasn't happy with her own body." Kataline says that her mother was obsessed with her weight from infancy. Now mine didn't start quite that early, but almost since I can remember I, and a cousin, were teased about being overweight by our stringy, fast-metabolism siblings. Children as young as six and eight hat...

This probably won't come as a surprise to very many, but did you know that 25% of young people injured in assaults own guns ? According to Michelle Healy at usatoday.com, "Among young people ages 14 to 24 who received care in a hospital emergency department for assault-related injuries, 23% said they owned a firearm in the past six months." Even worse, only 17% of those who said they owned guns got them legally, says the report, in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics , published online today, Healy reports. Almost 700 young people who sought care at a major trauma center in Flint, Mich., were surveyed by the  University of Michigan Injury Center for the study.  About 14% were younger than age 18, and "32% had children of their own," Healy notes the shocking facts. Not surprisingly, "those with firearms were more likely to use illegal drugs, have been involved in a serious fight, and to endorse the position that 'revenge was a good thing...

Think about this.  A three-week-old needs flexible tube through a tiny artery in her leg that winds its way to her heart to try to treat narrowed veins and arteries, the result of a congenital condition. So what do they use for this? An adult-sized catheter.  Sound insane?  That's right.  Medical devices for children are not being developed because -- are you ready? There's no money in this. The development of surgical tools and medical devices designed for children falls far behind device development for adults, The New York Times' Laurie Tarkan reports. "The lag, say experts, can be blamed largely on economics. The pediatric market is far smaller than the market for adults, making it difficult for companies to recoup research and development expenses for smaller devices," she writes. This child was subjected to a procedure that took longer, and was more likely to "injure her already abnormal blood vessels," her cardiologist cardiologist, Dr. Alex...