Tips on preventing and treating common childhood diseases

90% of common childhood diseases do not require emergency care. Prevention is far more effective than remediation after illness. There is never a "universal nursing formula" that is suitable for all babies. All treatment methods have to be based on the condition of your own baby. The easiest way to deal with it is to follow the book.

Last week, I met Sister Zhang from the same community. She rushed to the hospital with her 3-year-old baby in her arms. When she touched her forehead, the temperature was 38.2°C. The baby was still lying on her shoulder and chewing a lollipop. She was in good spirits. She had to go for a blood test to feel relieved. As a result, she waited in line for 3 hours. After reading it, the doctor said that it was just a common cold. Just drink more warm water and run less when you go home. There was a wind on the way home, and the fever reached 39°C that night. It was not worth the loss.

Speaking of fever, it is probably the biggest headache for all parents and the most controversial. The older generation always said that "cover your body and the sweat will stop." I believed it when I first became a mother. I wrapped my baby in two quilts, but the baby had a fever and convulsed, which scared me out of my mind. Later, after reading the guide and asking clinical classmates, I learned that the previous mainstream view was to dissipate heat. If the temperature exceeds 38.5°C, take antipyretics, take off your clothes and rub yourself with warm water. But in the past two years, I have come across many cases, and I have found that it is not possible to generalize - if the baby's hands and feet are cold when he first gets a fever, and he huddles up and screams cold, even if the body temperature is only 37.8°C, you can first wrap the baby in a thin blanket to cover the hands and feet, and then quickly loosen the clothes to dissipate the heat after the whole body is hot. It will be better than holding the baby without covering it and making the baby shiver from the cold. Oh, by the way, there is a bottom line here: as long as a baby under 3 months has a fever, no matter how high it is, he should be sent directly to the hospital. Don’t force yourself to take medicine at home. This is non-negotiable. For example, hand, foot and mouth, and herpetic angina, which have been highly prevalent in spring and summer recently, are mostly accompanied by fever. In fact, they are self-limiting diseases. There are no specific drugs. They can be cared for in isolation at home. If the baby is in good spirits, there is no need to go to the hospital to avoid cross-infection.

Besides fever, what parents ask about most is diarrhea. A grandmother once brought her grandson for a physical examination. She said that the baby had had diarrhea for two days. She had starved him for a whole day according to the old method and did not dare to give him more water. When he came, the baby was droopy and was already slightly dehydrated. There has been debate for many years about whether to fast for diarrhea. The old-school method is "jejunum". Just empty out the contents of the stomach after two hungry meals. The current guideline is that as long as the baby does not vomit, he should eat as much as possible, and it should be light. You can eat white porridge, steamed apples, and rotten noodles. The most important thing is to replenish enough water. Prepare some oral rehydration salt III at home and drink it in proportion to the baby. It is much more effective than taking probiotics and anti-diarrheal drugs blindly. Of course, if there is pus and blood in the stool, or the baby has vomited even a drink of water, don't hesitate and send him to the hospital immediately.

In fact, after all, if you wait until your baby gets sick and then worry about it, it is better to spend more time on prevention, which can save 90% of the trouble. Speaking of prevention, there is another topic that has been debated for a long time: Should we create a "sterile environment" for babies? There was a mother who used to wipe her hands clean with disinfectant wipes every time her baby touched the slide in the community. She soaked the toys in the house with disinfectant every day. As a result, her baby often developed allergies and diarrhea, and had to run to the hospital every three days. The "hygiene hypothesis" has been mentioned more and more in the past two years, saying that children's proper exposure to normal flora in the environment can actually help build immunity. Both theories have their own truths. My own experience is: ordinary outdoor play, touching a toy with other children and playing in the sand, there is no need to disinfect it every time. As long as the baby rubs his eyes and picks his mouth before touching it, it is enough to wash his hands with ordinary soap for 15 seconds when he goes home. If he goes to the hospital or has been in contact with a sick child, it is not too late to use disinfectant products. My eldest child was brought up very carefully at that time. Before he was six months old, he rarely left the house and caught colds all the time. Later, I took him to the community to play in the sand and run wild with other children every day, but he never had any problems for half a year.

Oh, by the way, many parents ask me whether they should buy lactoferrin and various immunity-enhancing health products for their children. They say they are more expensive, as long as they can prevent them from getting sick. I tell the truth every time: There is really no evidence-based evidence to prove that these health care products can reduce the incidence of common diseases in children. Instead, I save money on buying health care products. I take my baby for an hour of walking every day, ensure 300-500ml of milk every day, and sleep for 10 hours. It is more effective than any supplement. What particularly impressed me was when a mother came to me last year and said that her baby had a cold every month and whether she had a defective immune system. When I asked her, I found out that her baby stayed at home watching cartoons after school every day and only ate white rice for meals without touching a bite of vegetables. Later, I asked her to take her baby downstairs to jump rope for 20 minutes after dinner every day and eat dark green vegetables at least twice a week. Two months later, she came to tell me that her baby had not been sick all winter.

I keep three things in the drawer of my desk and the medicine cabinet at home all year round: acetaminophen suspension (available for over 3 months, and ibuprofen for over 6 months), saline nasal spray, and oral rehydration salt III. Over the years, these three have solved 90% of the common children's minor problems I have encountered, and are much more practical than those children's medicines that claim to be able to "cure all diseases." For example, if your child has a cold and has a stuffy nose and can't sleep, spraying some saline to clear the nose is much safer and more comfortable than taking cold medicine.

In fact, the longer I do this, the more I feel that there is really no need to worry too much about raising children. When we were young, we crawled around, rolled through mud puddles, and drank cold water. Didn’t we grow up healthy? Nowadays, there is a lot of information, and sometimes you come across this care method, and sometimes you come across that taboo, which makes you easily panic. It is much more useful to observe your own baby's condition more than to follow the standard answers on the Internet - after all, no one knows better than you about your baby's condition.