Sunday, October 22, 2006

American Children Desperately Need Prevention

I find myself reeling from an exciting weekend I had at a nutritional conference in Memphis this weekend. As an aside it is for a supplement product named Juice Plus which is the essence of multiple fruits and vegetables packed into a capsule. Before you roll your eyes physicians who may be reading this (you know who you are),consider this... Children in our country are desperately overfed and undernourished. This obesity problem has reached catastrophic proportions in the USA. Our pharmaceutical industry nourishes a culture of treating disease with pills for which they are hansomely paid. I spent ten years in conventional pediatrics practice unable to code for obesity prevention in a visit. Insurers are happily providing "sick care" and pediatricians are happy to fill their offices of sick kids for brief visits secretly hoping that they will get sick again so that they can get another 24 dollars and 15 cents from insurance. Is anyone paying attention to the pipelines in vaccine development for major pharmaceuticals?? I am. Within five years it is likely that we will have drastic reductions in our volume of sick visits in pediatrics, due to vaccine development. Conventional pediatricians will continue to curse and complain as their revenues continue to plummett. By this time a new pediatrics practice model will be thriving and rapidly altering the landscape of preventive pediatrics in America. We are the pediatricians who make house calls, answer cell phones, utilize cutting edge software and hardware to provide paperless recordkeeping and spend time with your family educating them about the importance of nutrition through our Personal Pediatrics Nutrition Program. Take a look at www.personalpediatrics.com and watch our story as it unfolds! Dr. Hodge Personal Pediatrics Affiliate Pediatrician St. Louis

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