Weekly Check-Up: Not About Exercise or Obesity. It Could Be The First Sign of the Apocalypse.

By | September 20th, 2007 at 8:29 am

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Yeah, there will be no talk of working out with a baby in a front pack or how your children are eating empty calories because you didn’t read them Goodnight Moon enough times in utero. If the seas boil and we all start speaking in tongues, I take full responsibility. However, this is another interesting issue: researchers are looking at the practice of genetic screening tests, and raising some good questions. A study examined what couples actually did with the test information, and found that if parents consulted with specialist physicians, the rate of pregnancy termination dropped. You can read more here, but the researchers are saying perhaps we need to rethink how we institute these programs, and what other services (counseling) we should also have.

I think this raises a related issue: how do we use medical information we might not totally understand and make a decision about things that are often very emotional for us? Doctors are expected to deliver facts and diagnoses, but when the diagnosis has to do with you or your child or pregnancy, it sure gets hard to know how to proceed, and sometimes the decisions involve a certain amount of heartbreak. Hearing your child might have a genetic disorder or is somewhere questionable on the weight scale or maybe isn’t developing at a certain expected rate: these are all really frightening things. While the researchers are looking at the implications for genetics in general, I think we could extend it to medicine and hope more attention gets paid to the really emotional side of these issues in general.

Also, a cookie a day can add 20 pounds to a kid in four years. Sorry, just averting the apocalypse.

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