Thomaston Pediatrics

I just wanted to mention an office visit I had yesterday that is still on my mind. A 4 month old check up, the baby was so social, looking at me, smiling, interacting well, and was blessed to have such a good, caring and loving mother. I love when these 2-4 month old babies are that interactive, it reflects several good things about their care at home. These days it seems that I am seeing more babies with Autism, developmental delays, things of this nature, so my “antenna” is always up when I’m checking these babies. I’m not only checking the physical things during the exam, but I’m also making mental notes about the psychosocial development of the baby as well. It’s very important to pick up these babies early when these issues exist. Anyway, I’m always telling the mothers how important it is to interact with the baby, talk, sing, read to the baby, this helps foster the baby’s psychosocial development. It’s truly one of those things that you get out of it in proportion to what you put in it. There is so much more to taking care of a baby than changing its diaper and/or sticking a bottle in its mouth. Unfortunately, I see the whole spectrum in my practice, there are those babies that are blessed with a loving and caring home environment, and then there are those that are not as fortunate, it’s sad, even after providing care for 40 plus years, the latter situation still bothers me so much, but in contrast when I have an experience like the former it brightens up my whole day!

I wanted to share something that I was reading in one of the pediatric news journals, an online activity called the Benadryl Challenge. Apparently, this has been going on since at least 2020, on and off, it’s an activity where adolescents ingest large amounts of Benadryl hoping to get high and hallucinate and videotape the effect. Children have died doing this in the past few years, teens in Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma to name a few, and most recently 3 in Connecticut. The amounts of Benadryl are 10-20 times the normal dose. As crazy as this sounds, there are several documented cases of not just fatalities but several medical ill effects such as seizures, heart rhythm abnormalities and induced coma. Anyway, obviously what contributes to this being so widespread is because parents are not supervising or even aware what their older children are doing online. It’s just sad these things are occurring. I wanted to mention Benadryl is OTC but it is not an innocuous drug. It can cause some significant side effects even at normal doses. We see significant drowsiness, hyperactivity ( “off the chain” behavior) and sometimes just limited effectiveness. Benadryl is referred to as a first generation antihistamine and crosses the blood brain barrier giving us central nervous system effects; whereas second generation antihistamines such as Zyrtec and Claritin do not cross the blood brain barrier, are much safer and more effective, and they are also OTC. Just some food for thought as we go through the summer season and have the need for antihistamine use.

Good afternoon, I just wanted to mention that Thomaston Pediatrics will be closed Monday, May 25 for the Memorial Day holiday. We will reopen Tuesday May 26 for regular office hours. We will be open every day this week Monday through Friday. Thank you and I hope everyone has restful and safe holiday weekend as we kick off summer! Thank you