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Telemedicine
By R. A.
Chan
Dropping off her two children at a neighborhood day-care center,
Marybeth Hoyt worried the Emily, 2,
who was cranky and hadn’t eaten breakfast, might be coming
down with an ear infection. Ordinarily, Hoyt
would skip work for a few hours to visit a family doctor.
On this recent morning, with the help of computers, cameras
and other telemedicine tools, she got Emily diagnosed by a
University of Rochester
pediatrician in just 10 minutes.
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“I saw the
doctor on the (day-care center’s) computer, and he
saw me, and we talked back and forth,” she said,
still in awe over the extra layer of care offered since
May at a Volunteer of America Children’s Center near
downtown Rochester. A staff nurse at the center used a
camera-linked stethoscope and an endoscope to examine
the toddler’s lungs, ear and throat. The doctor,
watching from afar, concluded, “there was a definite
ear infection but that the chest sounded good,” said
Hoyt, 27, a clerical worker. “I was very happy it
was just done with, and we had the medicine within an
hour,” she said. “It’s nice to be able
to go to work and know my children are looked after by
a credible doctor. You don’t even have to be there,
and they’ll check them.”
Telemedicine has evolved over the last decade as a way
to bring medical care to rural areas. Doctors can monitor
patients via video screen as well as verbally directing
medical procedures long-distance. Aided by school nurses,
hospitals have telemedicine units set up at several schools.
The project in Rochester, largely sponsored by a $330,000
federal grant, is one of the first in the country to offer
“virtual house calls” at a day-care center,
this one serving 250 children ages 6 months to 12 years
from mostly low-income families with little or no health
insurance.
“Clearly it’s where the need is greatest this
is a logical place to start,” said Dr. Kenneth McConnochie,
a pediatrician at the University of Rochester’s Strong
Memorial Hospital and director of the telemedicine program.
“Clinicians involved find they’re able to make
observations that are as accurate as being there,”
he said, noting that a child’s regular doctor is
notified of each course of treatment.
Reducing the need for costly trips to the emergency ward
or after-hours doctor visits, telemedicine might serve
to improve children’s health and reduce health care
costs, proponents say. “This is a glimpse into the
future of medicine,” said McConnochie’s colleague,
Dr. Neil Herendeen. “Using telemedicine, we do everything
we normally would except touch the child. We rely on the
nurses to be our hands. … The hope is that more children
will receive the medical care they need because of the
hassle-free option telemedicine provides.”
The two doctors have diagnosed mostly everyday illnesses
such as colds, rashes, coughs, asthma, ringworm and pink
eye in more than 125 children at the center and ordered
in prescriptions from a pharmacy around the corner. “Even
when illness requires exclusion from child care and the
parent needs to pick up the child, the need for an office
or emergency department visit is often avoided,”
McConnochie said. |
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Movies
Make Readers
When a book becomes a movie, a child’s relationship
to the page does not have to suffer
My favorite scene in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone happens off-camera. It involves a supporting
cast of concerned adults who decry the fact that
a pretty good movie was made from a terrific book.
Some-how the success of the Harry Potter movie
is used as evidence that a bunch of muggles are
ruining their children’s ability to imagine
for themselves what happens inside a book or tainting
their desire to ever pick one up. Soon enough,
the thinking goes, our kids will be terminal couch
potatoes, unable to conjure up anything more adventurous
than an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. This
argument intensified as the holiday movies season
kicked into full gear with the Dec. 19 U.S. release
of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film
in a $300 million trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s
classic fantasy cycle.
As someone who, when a child, was fed a steady
diet of Mr. ED and believed that Charleton Heston
really was Moses, I may not be in a position to
pass judgment on the damage Hollywood can inflict
on a young mind. But as the mother of a typical
adolescent, I have to say that movies can lead
a child to books, though sometimes and adult needs
to illuminate the way.
Stanley Greenspan, author of Building Healthy
Minds, says a child’s imagination develops
in babyhood and is enhanced as kids grow, especially
if adults pretend with them and challenge them
to become “scriptwriters” in their own
dramas, with lots of scenarios, subplots and intrigue.
“In later childhood, books leave more room
than movies for conjuring,” Greenspan says,
“but movies can bring literature alive and
stir the imagination.” Greenspan and others
say the most important aspect of movie watching
is the conversation after the final credits roll,
when kids can be encouraged to think critically,
be curious and go looking for answers in a book.Bonnie
Kunzel, head of the Young Adult Library Services
Association and an expert in fantasy literature,
says, “In libraries, the most successful
promotion we do is to ask people to ‘read
a movie,’” meaning a book that kids
have first experienced on the screen. The Harry
Potter movie has led to a bump in reading of the
already popular Harry Potter books, which has
led young readers to C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles
of Narnia) and Tolkien. “We can’t keep
Lord of the Rings on the shelf,” Kunzel says.
Tolkien purists who can’t bear to see images
of Middle-earth put on the screen shoud take some
comfort in the fact that the paperback version
of the trilogy is flying off the shelves.
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first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring,
is currently No.1on Publishers Weekly’s
mass-market best-seller list, re-issued for
a new generation of Tolkien readers and promoted
with a still from the movie on its cover.
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