When J visited her new pediatrician for her recent physical, she told me in her practice they checked cholesterol levels for all their patients. I looked at her in astonishment. J is only three ! Yet, the worst was not over. I almost fell off my chair when I heard the reading.
J would have to go on a diet post-haste. No more whole milk, cream cheese or eggs. J sat beside me smiling coyly at the doctor as she played with beanie babies. I wanted to burst into tears. J is at the twenty-fifth percentile in the weight charts. Now I was going to have to starve her until she fell right off it. What the doctor was prescribing for J sounded like an ultra-lite version of South Beach meets Zone diet. I had decided to seek a second opinion even before I left her office.
Once home, my resolve had already weakened. The HDL and LDL counts were too powerful an adversary and numbers do not lie. I found myself telling the daycare center to stop serving her whole milk. I did not feel at peace with having age-old wisdom on children's diet displaced by two life changing numbers.
I found a way to explain my situation with J in an article on powerful medicines which included an excerpt from Dr Jerry Avron's essay where he says
"...One early attempt to measure the benefits that come from medications and other health care interventions was based on the notion of 'human capital', and flowed directly from industrial cost-benefit analyses. A decision on whether to repair a machine or retool a factory would start by calculating the future productivity expected from the equipment, given its age and condition...We've all confronted this kind of choice with our cars or refrigerators or computers, though usually not with our grandmothers."
I had only to extend the car and grandmother analogy a little further to see where this was coming from. Children like J were being treated like manufactured goods on an effective preventive maintenance schedule.
Why wait forty years to detect and then put them on Lipitor when Mommy can go South Beach on her three year old for the cost of a cholesterol screen. Getting value out of human capital can get no easier than this. For some reason, I don't believe that J and I are winning in this game.
I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
Comments
am not a doc.... but cholesterol counts is a controversial topic in itself...
what'll happen if they discover ten years later that lipitor causes more problems than it prevents and that raised cholesterol levels by themselves are no cause for worry....wihout other factors being involved...
Why cant I shake the view out that lilitor makers pay for all this paranoia to be propogated?
Cholestrol for a three year old !!! What are the medical implications here ? Isnt a little fat okay around that age !? We are talking about
flesh and blood .. not an oiled machine ... a little swing of ups and down in "specifications" over the early stages of the life cycle is okay i guess !
but as i said .. this is waaaaaaaaaaay beyond my comprehension !
Cheti - exactly my feelings when I found out. Shock and awe.
Priya.
Shock and awe and some indignation it is!! Ditto Cheti's reaction here!!
Hey, what ever happeend to balanced diets that worked so well for us when we were kids!?? We've all turned out fine!!