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Children are not simply small adults

Published on February 27, 2025   25 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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0:00
I am Dr. Jesse Hackell. I am a pediatrician with 45 years of experience as a pediatrician and I am located in New York. I'm here to discuss why children are not simply small adults when it comes to their medical care. I have no conflicts of interest. In the past, children were seen by the medical community as really nothing more than just small humans. If they were lucky enough to see a physician at all, it would likely have been a generalist or a family practitioner. This might, in some way, explain the very high child mortality rates that we saw up until and into the early 20th century. However, that may be related to many other factors as well.
0:49
So a little bit of history. The American Academy of Pediatrics was founded 95 years ago by a group of pediatricians who broke away from the American Medical Association. They formed a new organization based on the idea that children had unique health and development needs that were not being adequately studied or addressed by the current medical establishment. Since their founding, the Academy has effectively changed the custom that had been in place of treating children as miniature adults. They have established both pediatricians' unique medical expertise and their commitment to speak on behalf of children's welfare in terms of advocating for specifically child focused approaches to health. Over time, the work of the Academy has begun to show the value of many practices such as routine health examinations and immunizations which have now become the standard of care for children and, increasingly, for adults. What exactly do we mean when we're

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