Harris C. Faigel

Unwed Pregnant Adolescents: A Synthesis of Current Viewpoints

Helping the unwed pregnant teenager n dudes an understanding why she is pregnant as well as the giving of good medical care. The unwed pregnant adolescent is often one who feels lonely and adrift in a cold and hostile world. 21 She frequently has little sense of personal worth or belonging, and she may have been using sexual relations to help escape from an emotionally sterile life. Her relationships with her family are usually poor. She often mistakes infatuation for affection, stopping at nothing in her attempts

Tonsillectomy—A Bloody Mess

from uneventfully, and hence little active attention is paid to it. During 1964, in the United States, an estimated 1.2 million persons had their tonsils and adenoids removed.4 Deaths directly attributable to the procedure during that same period numbered 101, a known mortality rate of nearly one per 10,000 operations.:3 In Baltimore, in contrast, where this rate had been 1.03 per 10,000, there was only one death in nearly 55,000 operations in the past five years.’ Credit for the improvement is the result of better preand postoperative care in hospital recovery rooms. Two-thirds of the deaths due directly to adenotonsillectomy have been attributed to excessive blood loss 4---a loss which can be kept down by the combination of good nursing care, skillful surgery, and good anesthesia, but even in the best of operating rooms the amount of blood seeping from the operative site remains high. Studies in hospitals on both sides of the Atlantic have shown that 18 per cent of patients who are subjected to adenotonsillectomy, a procedure taking less than 30 minutes, lose 10 per cent of their estimated blood volume.2, In one of these studies

Special Review : Suicide Among Young Persons A Review of Its Incidence and Causes, and Methods for Its Prevention

Suicide now outranks pneumonia, polio, tuberculosis, diabetes, rheumatic fever, kidney disease, appendicitis and leukemia as a cause of death in teenagers. Only accidents and cancer are more common lethal problems. On college campuses today, suicide is second only to accidents as a cause of death. This report at tempts to examine the reasons behind a young persons urge toward self-destruction.

Peritoneal Dialysis: Indications and Applications

valent cations in thalassemia major. Blood 22: 209, 1963. 11. Pittman, A. K.: Desferrioxamine and acute iron poisoning. Brit. Med. J. 2: 1134, 1964. 12. Santos, A. S. and Pisciotta, A. V.: Acute iron intoxication. Amer. J. Dis. Child. 107: 424, 1964. 13. Sephton Smith, R.: Iron excretion in thalassaemia major after administration of chelating agents. Brit. Med. J. 2: 1577, 1962. 14. Sephton Smith, R.: Iron deficiency and iron overload. Arch. Dis. Child. 40: 343, 1965. 15. Stevens, E., Rosoff, B., Weiner, M. and Spencer, H.: Metabolism of the chelating agent diethylenetriamine pentaacetic acid (C 14 DTPA) in man. Proc. Soc. Exp. Biol. (N. Y.) 111: 235, 1962. 16. Walsh, J. R. and Gillick, J. B.: Iron chelation in acute iron poisoning and chronic hypersiderosis. Clin. Pediat. 4: 633, 1965. 17. Westlin, W.: Deferoxamine in the treatment of

Teenage Drug Abuse What Should You Do When One of Your Adolescent Patients Says He Is a Drug Addict

123 York St., New Haven, Conn. 06511. which heals Our young people are growing up in this drug oriented self.medicating society at a time in their lives when their self-control is limited and when they are under great emotional stress and strain. Is it surprising that they too would adopt the socially means of handling emotional problems: self-medication? Now we have the &dquo;hard&dquo; psychotomimctics such a.~ .I~~I~, 5&dquo;~’~ ~r~~I DMT,-,3 drugs which can scramble the chromosomes as, well as the

Childhood Mortality Is No Way to Measure a Nation's Health

or that deaths due to all forms of heart disease in children under five years of age fell 22 per cent between 1960 and 1967.2 Perhaps the most important concept forgotten by the political polemicist is that the United States is just that-a union of states, any one of which is comparable in area, population density, industrialization, and &dquo;health&dquo; with many smaller nation states which are not so unified.

Reported Patterns of Venereal Diseases in Adolescents

among teenagers in the United States. But the fall in the rates for non-whites during this period has been only one-fourth that for v~l~it~s, ~~~tl~ men and women. As for gonorrhea, reported, cases in white women are increasingat a more rapid rate than In men, whereas cases in non-white men are increasing more rapidly than in non-white women. Although teenagers have been considered the highest risk group for ~~r~~re~l disease, this is no longer true. The highest rate is now in the 20to ‘

Who Ever Heard of Babesiasis

.’ .’.-~poyozoa~as/th’c~.’PiaMnodM<iM,’’th~ organism of ~~~ri~. ~~.’ th~ ~i~~ c~~~~ c~~ ~pc~~c~~c~~.¢ the genera’ti~~~ ’ a3~~rr~~.t~ ~~~~~ ~ ~~~ c~~I~ and an : asexual eyd€.:~Tne two cycles can occur in the same host. Some sporozoa and parasites of the order Haemosporidia have adapted themselves to life in blood cells. Whereas the spores of Plasmodia species are transmitted by mosquitoes, those of Babesia species are transmitted by ticks. Inasmuch as both those animals which babesiasis infects and the ticks which transmit it are widespread, it is surprising that more cases tif human babesiasis have not been recognized in the past. .. Babesiasis can be differentiated from malaria by the appearance’of the parasite and the absence of circulating gametocytes and of malarial, pigments. The diagnosis can be confirmed by the inoculation of a patient’s blood into the usual laboratory animals. In the case described above, the appearance of the organisms in hamster red blood cells was similar to that of a rodent-iniesting species

The Changing Role of the School Physician: Reflections and a Report on a Report

SCHOOL is the major activity of most American children. In the United States, one-fourth of the population attends school regularly now, and the median age for education has risen to 12 years. In 1966, 63 per cent of our nve-year-old children. were in kindergarten, nearly all children between six and 15 years, and 83 per cent of those between 16 and 18 ye.ars were attending elementary, middle, or high schools. Each week, American schoolchildren spend more than 30 hours, in classes and an additional five to