Category: Pediatric Advice

March 23, 2020

by drplasticpicker

The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging. The silver lining is Harvey Weinstein and Paul Rand have coronavirus. I don’t wish ill will on anyone, but I hope they have to wait in line at their local ED. I took a vacation day prior to knowing the pandemic was going to happen, as the kids originally had the day off school. The kids are home due to school closures, and I decided to just roll with life and keep my day off. I return to work tomorrow.

But rather than wasting energy and ranting at the poor decisions being made at various central government level or becoming unreasonably upset when I see former premed students on Facebook at weddings when they are doctors and supposed to model #socialdistancing and #flatteningthecurve, I will instead focus on things that are in my realm of control. I will today write about 5 things you should not waste money on.

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February 23, 2020

by drplasticpicker

I saw one of my long-time teenage patients recently. Her little sibling had a follow-up appointment and she was just with her family that day. Outside the clinic walls, I exercise my social awareness and skills and do not just blurt out comments. But when I enter our building and I put on my HMO badge, I am YOUR PEDIATRICIAN. I take my role seriously. I even wrote in my HMO on-line bio ten years ago.

“There is no greater honor than being the doctor for your child. I take that role seriously and try to provide you with sound advice and guidance based on the latest medical research, along with common sense. I believe we function as a team (family, teachers, and doctors) to make sure our children grow into productive, contributing, and healthy members of society. I believe in fully vaccinating your children and the power of prevention.”

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February 22, 2020

by drplasticpicker

It is 441AM on a Saturday morning and I am typing away. In about an hour and a half, the sun will be rising and it will be time for me to plog to the beach and pick up another bag of ocean plastic. Daylight Savings time is coming. On March 8 at 2AM, we will move forward an hour and it will be 3AM. That means on March 8, I will likely instead of waking up at 4AM will wake up at 5AM. The blogging and beach cleaning most mornings and the deep restful nights of sleep, has reset my body to be with the earth. On March 8, I am going to be fine just as I was fine the last time our clocks “fell back.”

I am sitting at the kitchen table looking at the first house plant I have ever purchased. It is a “ponytail palm” from Home Depot. Last night, we had to go shopping for our daughter’s History Day project. Her middle school friends are coming over later to have a marathon work session, and we had to pick up supplies. We went to the local Michael’s and Home Depot. As someone who has been picking up ocean plastic pollution for the last 6 months, walking into a deserted Michael’s on Friday night with the light reflecting off all the new plastic and glittery things was a bit discombobulating. I know at some point all those shiny plastic things will become more weathered plastics for me to pick up.

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February 10, 2020

by drplasticpicker

It’s Sunday morning and I usually would go to the beach, but my body is very tired and I am afraid I might fall. I am trying to stay in tune with my body and most mornings I have the energy and the need to go plastic picking. But last night, we had our department party and it was a big success. It was fun to put on the little black dress I wear just once a year and fancy sparkly wedge heels. Mr. Plastic Picker agreed that I looked nice. Mr. Plastic Picker looked very nice too in his blue blazer from Macys. Despite leaving early the fun and the revelry early at 9pm, drplasticpicker is too tired to go plastic picking. Plus I have to work this afternoon at our after hours clinic from 130-5pm. Humans are not meant to stay up late, and the world is not meant to have so much light pollution as humans are partying late into the late. Light pollution is causing the insect apocolypse https://drplasticpicker.com/xeres-invertebrate-society-can-a-pediatricians-avatar-drplasticpicker-help-save-the-western-monarch-butterfly/.

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January 18, 2020

by drplasticpicker

The great thing about this blog, is that @drplasticpicker can write whatever I want. And what I want to do is save the earth and the oceans, save my patients and their families, and for everyone to be healthy and equal. Is that too much to ask? One way I can get what I want, is to expound upon the objective truths I know as someone who has been a pediatrician for over 15 years. The cause of a lot of the worlds’ problems is that kids have learned to snack on foods that are too processed, too high in salt and too high in sugar. Processed foods with too much salt and too much sugar lead to Taste-Bud Dysfunction. I have coined a new condition. You, the many toddlers in my practice who are picky eaters . . . Yes You, the teenagers who are prediabetic. Many of YOU have Taste-Bud Dysfunction. Something is wrong with your Taste-Buds that you can’t taste the natural sweetness of an apple or the natural flavor of unsalted food. This is not your fault, it is the fault of big corporations that have fooled at least two generations to think that packaged food is food. Indeed most packaged food is not food, it is junk, and for drplasticpicker – it is also trash that litters the beach.

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January 5, 2020

by drplasticpicker

If you have reached this post, you are either a real new patient of drplasticpicker or a sentinent being out there in the internet universe looking for inspiration, free entertainment or were mistakenly directed during an Ecosia (not Google) search on Dr. Pimple Popper. Yes, Dr. Plastic Picker’s name was chosen trying to direct traffic from Dr. Pimple Popper. She picks zits under sterile technique. I pick ocean bound plastic using old bread bags as gloves. We are all doing a service.

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November 23, 2019

by drplasticpicker

“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Rules the World” was a poem written in the 1800s by American poet William Ross Wallace. Before it became a title of that god-awful scary misogynistic 1980s movie, it was a poem that glorified the power of motherhood. The second stanza,

Infancy’s the tender fountain,
    Power may with beauty flow,
Mothers first to guide the streamlets,
    From them souls unresting grow —
Grow on for the good or evil,
    Sunshine streamed or evil hurled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
    Is the hand that rules the world. – William Ross Wallace

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November 19, 2019

by drplasticpicker

One of my patients who is now about 10 years old always amazed me. He had a set of loving parents who both worked quite a bit, and was cared for from birth to about 4 by both sets of grandparents. His grandmothers fed this child the way their family has been eating for generations, and I watched them mold an amazing human-being and also an amazing vegetable-eating. I would argue that the two are correlated! This young boy ate bittermelon as a toddler, and still eats it to this day! It has taken me 40 years to be able to eat this very healthy, yet very bitter gourd vegetable (bitter melon 1/2 cup, 1.3 g of fiber).

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