![]() ![]() Instead of the usual infections, she has seen an overwhelming number of mental health crises, including kids coming in with suicidal ideation or having attempted suicide. When Sonia Taneja, a first-year resident in Boston, interviewed for spots in pediatric residencies last year, she told interviewers she wanted a program that would have her “inundated with patients.” She was interested in pursuing a broad specialty such as emergency medicine or primary care, and expected to become an expert at treating the basics. RARIFY BUTTER HOW TOIn a 2013 survey of pediatricians, two out of every three people polled said they lacked training in how to treat mental health conditions in kids. While they might still lack “bread and butter” experience, interns have gained hours of treating mental health emergencies - training that, in another year, might be far less intensive. “Being a supervising doctor next year for interns, I think that will just require approaching the year with continued humility,” Pandya said. His supervisor was taking a nap, so he asked another resident to come take a look. Was this normal, or is his asthma worsening? He didn’t have enough real-world experience to know for certain. But as Pandya watched his loud breathing, coughing, and snoring in his sleep, he grew nervous. In April, almost a year into his internship, Pandya had a patient with asthma and sleep apnea who received medication overnight to help his breathing. “But there’s something about doing the thing and seeing the thing and being forced into decision-making at that moment.” “You can academically read about it all you want,” he said. Pandya said he’s seen maybe 15 cases all year. When Nishant Pandya, a pediatric intern at Yale, talks to his senior residents, they tell him about how they often treated eight kids with bronchiolitis, a common respiratory infection, in just one day. This summer, interns will advance to second-year, “supervising” residents, even though some have little to no experience with certain basic conditions. But for trainees who expected to cover plenty of ground in their first year, it’s intimidating to feel so uncertain and unsteady. The attending on duty gathered all the medical students and Hartman’s co-interns to come take a look at the ear, as if it were a rarified orphan disease they may not see again.įewer asthma attacks and fewer kids giving each other the flu is good. When he peered into the patient’s ear and realized that’s what it was - “that’s a bulging tympanic membrane!” - he had to look up the right amount of amoxicillin to prescribe, the dose not yet committed to memory. It wasn’t until nine months after he first treated teens with eating disorders that Hartman diagnosed his first ear infection. ![]() He saw one 16-year-old girl, who he was told had come to the department for treatment before, who was now refusing food, her heart rate dipping into the 30s.įor physicians new to pediatrics, this has created an inverse training experience: they’re treating children with mental health concerns daily, but don’t see nearly as many of the “bread and butter” conditions that define pediatrics like the contagious, spreadable bronchiolitis or flu. Hartman found himself running between the ward and the adolescents, intercepting pages. All of them found that the pandemic had exacerbated their stress. ![]() Some patients had been there for weeks, Hartman said, and were well known to the service due to their long-term eating disorders, while others were new. One night in June 2020, there were around a dozen patients in the ward, all with eating disorders. His first rotation of his first year of residency was in the general pediatrics ward, and on nights, Hartman and the other interns covered the adolescent service, seeing teens starting from puberty. In his first month as a pediatric intern at the University of California San Francisco, Alexander Hartman saw his first patient with an eating disorder. Exclusive analysis of biotech, pharma, and the life sciences Learn More ![]()
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