I have eye cinvergence issues. Daniel has Seccatic eye problems. 25% of Se kids mostly have some type of Vision problem. The eye chart isn't enough anymore. Daniel had Vt I don't suggest it for real young kids. You have to train those muscles to work the way they should. Pt for the eyes. Our eye dr. now uses a computer program for his vt patients. Prisms lenses work on some of us with vision trouble. I use them and so does Daniel's dad. This is an importamt skill for sports/driveing. Seccatic is also very important in reading. Care credit will pay for VT, this is what we had to do the first year of vt. it's a pay plan on a credit card.
On a related note:
Can you imagine a doctor calling Child Protection Services, rather than trying to talk to you about your reluctance to continue your child's treatment? This happened in the case of a girl with cancer. Read more here:
http://specialchildren.about.com/b/a/258972.htm
Here's a checklist to evaluate your child's therapist.
http://specialchildren.about.com/od/therapies/a/checkup.htm
And lastly, when (and how) to fire your doctor/pediatrician:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/08/16/ep.fire.your.doc/in dex.html
Medical and diagnostic mistakes have been on my mind this week, ever since another forum member mentioned her son being evaluated for eye convergence problems at age 6 months. The mighty Mayo Clinic said there was no problem. Now, at age 6 years, it is clear that there was in fact a problem.
On this forum, we are also constantly hearing about parents whose concerns are dismissed with a "wait and see" or a "he's fine." This happened to us personally, when we originally consulted a speech therapist about our son's development. We were not concerned about autism, since we didn't know what HFA looked like, but we were concerned about his language since he's bilingual. We handed the speech therapist all the red flags on a silver platter, and he just chatted with my son, showed him a few flash cards, and gave him the a-okay. Real testing one year later revealed delays of at least 2 years.
With these things on my mind this week, an article I ran across really caught my attention. It's from Parents magazine February 2003 and is called "How to protect your child from medical mistakes." Consider this statistic:
"In a study published in 2001 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers who pored through more than 10,000 drug orders for children at two Boston teaching hospitals found 616 medication errors -- about six mistakes for every 100 kids."
Six mistakes for every 100 kids means one drug mistake for every 17 kids. When we're talking those kinds of odds, we parents have to be vigilant! The first piece of advice in the article was this:
TRUST YOUR GUT!
For more advice, including tips on double-checking prescriptions, here's a link to the article in full:
How scary! I'm very careful about prescriptions and even have a PDR to look stuff up and make sure that we ALL get the right thing and to make sure that it looks how it is supposed to look. I need to get an updated PDR - I used to get them from the local hospital who sold them each year for after they got new ones. I'll have to see if there is anything like that around here...
I have to say that while Mayo did drop the ball at 6 months, they KEPT dropping the ball. At pediatric appointments, I would ask to get my son's vision checked as he was not usually cooperative. I would request this beforehand. They would never do it immediately (even though I requested it) so by the time they got around to doing vision, he was uncooperative. At Head Start, they did screen him - but it wasn't for convergence, it was for vision (and his vision is fine). I really do need to add that this convergence thing is VERY subtle and I only investigated it because my former next-door neighbor urged me to. Her ds has a problem with this and has a huge issue with reading and is going into 3rd grade. She didn't want my ds to suffer so much through reading. We haven't done anything about it yet (vision therapy is QUITE expensive) but I am going to investigate further after ds starts school - I simply have no time before then!
Thanks for the post NorwayMom!
Thanks for the link! Very good article...thanks.I'm reviving this topic because of some horrifying celebrity news. The newborn twins of actor Dennis Quaid were accidentally given a 10,000 unit dose of blood thinner instead of a 10 unit dose!!!
This happened at a hospital rated as one of the best in the nation. The error occurred because a pharmacy technician slipped up and accidentally stocked both unit sizes in the same drawer, against hospital procedure.
The twins are stable, but they don't know yet if the overdose will have a longterm effect. You can read more about it here:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=3896544
In the wake of a medication error in which their hospitalized twin babies were given 1,000 times the proper dosage of a blood thinner, actor Dennis Quaid and his wife, Kimberly, are suing Baxter Healthcare Corp., makers of the heparin that was improperly administered.
According to a Reuters report, the suit faults Baxter for the fact that 10-unit and 10,000-unit vials of heparin have similar blue labels, making it too easy to mistake one for the other. Even after a similar mix-up took the lives of three infants at a hospital in Indianapolis last year, the vials were not recalled or repackaged.
The Quaids are seeking ,000 in damages from the drug manufacturer. They have not yet decided whether to bring action against Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where their twins were treated. Susan Loggans, the family's attorney, is quoted in the Reuters report as saying, "Cedars-Sinai has already apologized and we are waiting to see what they do to respond."
Fortunately, the littlest Quaids are back home and doing fine, and have apparently survived the misdiagnosis without ill effects. But the lawsuit being filed on their behalf may well save the lives of many, many babies down the road.
I understand that human error is always going to be a risk in healthcare administered by humans, and, as Dr. Ted pointed out [*], a foolproof plan only works for the fool who plans it. But I can't imagine why, why on earth, you would not color-code bottles of medication to make sure that dosages are obviously different. It seems like the most basic, elementary, no-brainer thing to do. Surely nurses and doctors working with seriously ill babies have enough to do without squinting at bottles trying to see dosage amounts.
* "It is a shame but a fact of life that there is no fool proof method to prevent mistakes. The investigation will probably show that at least 5 different people should have caught this mistake before it ever got to the patient. It is a basic fact that a 'fool proof system' is only 'fool proof' for the 'fool' that devised it. That is because the person devising the system, thought about of all the ways they could make the error, not all the ways the error could be made. This proves that somebody else just found another way. That is not much comfort to the family but it is a sad truth." -- Dr. Ted on "Dennis Quaid's Newborn Twins Victims of Medication Error"
Source: www.specialchildren.about.com December 6, 2007