TOP 10 MISCONCEPTIONS
- Crying newborn means inadequate milk. Give the baby more milk. Newborns cry due to various reasons. It includes being too cold or too hot, disturbance in sleep, before and after passing urine and motion, wanting to be held etc. Hunger is just one of the many causes for a newborn to cry. In fact, cry is the only form of communication of a newborn. Hence not all cry should be interpreted as a cry for hunger. As long as the child is passing adequate amounts of stool and urine and is gaining weight normally one need not worry about feeds.
- Newborns need water to hydrate them and gripe water or traditional medicines to digest milk. Mother’s milk has the right balance of water and nutrients for the baby. Hence in there is no need for giving extra water for babies on exclusive breast feeding until 6 months of age. Following this on starting other solids you would be advised to give water for the child. Mother’s milk is the most easily digestible food a baby can have. There is no need for any medications or digestive tonics to aid in digestion for newborns. Colic pain is not a digestive problem. Giving over the counter colic medicines can be detrimental to your child. Avoiding these medicines may be the best thing you would do to your child.
- Vibrations felt in the chest in the child with noisy breathing means the child has a chest cold or a lung infection. The respiratory air passages are a single continuous passage from the nose to the lungs. As it goes down to the chest the passage branches into smaller ones. Thus any turbulence in airflow in the upper part of the airway would be felt in the lower airway. This is felt through the thin chest wall of a young infant and often mistaken as chest cold. Usually it is the nasal block due to common cold that causes such vibrations in chest.
- Fresh cow’s milk is better than packet milk for an infant. Both are inappropriate for an infant less than 1 year. While the fresh cow’s milk is unprocessed milk, packet milk is to certain extent processed in the sense, it is pasteurized and comes with variable fat content. Pasteurization prevents infections from being transmitted through the milk from the cow to humans. Thus it is safer. Also if we choose to take low fat milk then it is better. However both are not recommended for children less than 1 year. The protein in cow’s and packet milk is too large and is often allergenic and is not tolerated by the intestine of a young infant. Often this lead to allergic reaction in the intestine of the infant.
- Inhaler usage in asthma is addictive. Definitely NO. Let us understand as to what happens to asthma as the child grows (natural history of the disease). Asthma is a disease of the airway of the lungs. The airways basically over-react to the environmental substances (called allergens). They narrow down and thus making it difficult for the child to breath. This is episodic and is reversible. Among children who develop symptoms before the age of 2 years, 70% would stop having wheeze by 5 to 6 years of age. Among the rest 15% would stop having wheeze by 12 years and the rest (15%) would continue to wheeze well into adulthood. This does not change with treatment. Inhalers basically control the reaction of the airway. Thus the medications only control the symptoms thus preventing your child from getting severe attacks. Depending on the natural history in your child, your child may require it for few years or for life long. That time alone would tell. It has nothing to do with the inhalers. Blame it, if at all, on the genes!
- A plumpy looking child is a healthy child. This is very common. Many mothers like their child to be plumpy looking and cute!! They say that their baby was cute and plumpy at birth. But is lean and thin as he/she grows up. Actually body propositions change as child grows. Head size to body size is higher in a newborn than an older child. As the child grows the head to body proportion becomes smaller. This gives the child a leaner and less plumpy look. In fact children who maintain same body proportions as they had as infants may be abnormal, and may need to be evaluated for the cause of obesity and persistence of infantile body proportions.
- Fever is bad. Even mild raise in body temperature should be brought down with medications. Fever is usually a body response to an infection. Infection is nothing but invasion of the body by various microorganisms. As a response, the body immune system is activated. One of the important aspects of this is raise in body temperature. As the body temperature raises the body immune cells become more active and are capable of functioning better. Thus fever, to certain extent is good. However fever may cause problems when it is very high. It causes a feeling of ill health, dehydrates the child. In a child who has a tendency it does precipitate a seizure. One must remember that the fit does not depend on how high the fever is but on how rapidly it increases the body temperature. Often children develop fit at a low temperature of 100 F. Also 90% of fits happen only the first 24 hours of fever and rarely beyond 48 hours of fever. Thus the idea of treating fever per say should be only to provide comfort to the child rather than to get the temperature to normal.
- Treatment of cold early with antibiotics prevents progression of the disease. Most colds are viral infections. They usually last for 7 to 10 days. Adding antibiotics early in disease will not change the duration of illness nor will it decrease the severity of the illness. It would infact cause antibiotic resistance among the bugs in the child and when needed the antibiotic will not act and the child will end up being treated with higher and stronger antibiotics.
- A mother with cold should not nurse her child. Else she may pass on her illness to her baby. Cold in mothers are mostly viral as is the case with anybody else. The mother would be transmitting the disease through inhalation to everyone in close contact 2-3 days before she develops the first symptom. The baby is the most intimate contact and is often infected. But when the mother nurses the baby she provides antibodies specifically against the microbe she is infected with and thus provides protection to the baby. Thus the baby does not develop severe disease. So nursing the baby is actually the most logical thing to do. If she does not nurse, she would only be giving the baby the infection and not the protection for the same.
- Vaccines protect my child against all illness. Once completely vaccinated my child would not get a major illness. The disease against which we vaccinate your baby is only a small percentage of the disease causing organisms known to us. However the vaccine prevented disease are diseases which are common and often are a cause of serious health problems in the community. Thus protecting your child against these diseases are important, one needs to understand that there are other diseases for which we do not have effective vaccines as yet. Also the protection offered by the vaccines are variable for different diseases. For example while DTP provides 98% protection, chicken pox provides 95% and typhoid vaccine provides only 50%. So even among the diseases for which vaccines are available there is no 100% protection.
Authored by :Dr.S.Subramanian M.D