It's an unpleasant fact of life for patients and their doctors: Sometimes healing hurts. But does it have to?
The spring issue of Stanford Medicine magazine reports on pediatricians who refuse to simply shrug off medicine's collateral damage. It's a special report on pediatric innovation, produced with support from Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.
For most of medicine's history, children were simply seen as little adults. Pediatrics as a specialty came on the scene about 200 years ago - and in many ways it's impressive how far health care for kids has come. This issue's articles describe some of those advances. Among them: Building an arm implant that grows as the child does, and stopping teen depression before it starts.
In addition to the stories about children's health, the issue includes a few other major pieces:
• A chronicle of one team's effort to grow a functional intestine in a petri dish.
• The story of a severely depressed physician and the treatment - electroconvulsive therapy - that he says saved his life.
The new issue of the magazine is being mailed to subscribers now and is also online with some Web-only features:
• A slideshow of pediatric patients' art.
• A conversation with actress and UNICEF goodwill ambassador Mia Farrow about her work with the most vulnerable children around the world.
Illustration by Greg Clarke
