Amid the horrific news of the devastating destruction brought by the tornado in Oklahoma this week, there is one remarkable bit of good news: as of this writing, only 24 people died. While any loss of life is horrible, and that there were children among the dead is even more...

When I was pregnant with my sixth child, I told my doctor that I didn't want to have any prenatal testing.

You'd think a doctor would be happy about fewer tests to order and results to explain, but he wasn't. The fact that I was 41 years old didn't...

As Mother's Day approaches, I've been thinking about a boy I once wanted to have in my family.

I had been his doctor for a few years before he was placed in foster care. He was curious, charismatic, funny and very smart. He'll either make a really successful CEO, I...

Sometimes, listening to us doctors, you'd think that we have no idea what we are talking about.

That's certainly what anyone would think after reading Ava Neyer's hilarious post, in which she compiles all the sleep advice she read in the books she bought to help her with...

The explosions at the Boston Marathon have changed parenthood forever for me.

I found out about them from my daughter, who was running away from the scene. She was right there, close enough to see the explosions, just yards away.

She asked me to turn on the TV and find...

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Sometimes, as I'm talking to patients and their families, I realize that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Really.

The big catchword in medicine...

Medicine can do amazing things these days. Whether it's face transplants or new treatments for diabetes or curing many kinds of cancer, it can seem like medicine can do everything.

But medicine can't -- and shouldn't -- do everything.

There were a couple of news stories this week that...

A friend of mine is pregnant, and she's having a rough go of it so far, with lots of nausea and vomiting. "You people who have had babies don't say anything about this stuff," she's been saying. "You make it sound so easy. It's a conspiracy."

I don't think it's...

Parents' worries about the safety of the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine are on the rise. And yet, doctors and scientists aren't more worried. What's going on?

In a study just published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers asked parents who didn't want to give their children the HPV...

All of us, especially those of us with children, have been shaken by the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. None of us wants to see something like that happen again -- and because of that, our country has been talking a lot about guns and gun safety.

A

February is heart month -- a great time to think about heart health. While we tend to think of heart disease as a problem of adults, it can start in childhood, and the health habits of childhood have everything to do with heart health in adulthood.

So as we finish...

My 12-year-old daughter became an altar server this winter, and I'm very happy about it. Not so much out of parental pride, although I am certainly proud of her for being willing to do such a public thing, and in church, at...

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

My youngest didn't talk until he was two. I knew he was fine -- but it was hard to get people to believe me.

When I...

Last weekend, a baby boy named Zachary was baptized during mass, and we all clapped when his father held him up, head wet from the font.

I have a boy named Zachary. And this baby looked just like Zack did as a baby: fair with long legs and hardly any...

A study came out this week showing that 7th graders who were exposed to alcohol ads -- and liked them -- were more likely to have problems with alcohol in high school.

Let's be honest: When was the last time you talked about alcohol ads with your kids?...

The other day, a colleague sent me an idea for a blog post. A friend of hers is newly pregnant and feeling yucky, and often wishes that someone would give up a seat for her on the subway -- but since she doesn't have a visible belly yet they don't,...

Lots of people are using complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) these days -- things like vitamins, homeopathic or herbal medicine, chiropractors, acupuncture or massage therapy. But they don't always tell their doctors about it.

In a study just published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers in Canada found that...

The flu is here, big time. According to the most recent influenza (flu) surveillance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
* 29 states are reporting high activity, 16 are reporting moderate (up from 9 the week before) and 47 say that there are flu...

Lots of times, when I ask my patients what they think is the best part of school, they say, "recess."

They may be on to something.

This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) came out with a policy statement titled "The Crucial Role of Recess in School."...

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," said Wayne LaPierre of the NRA in their first public comments since the horrific Newtown shootings that took the lives of twenty first-graders.

We need to learn more about ways we...