Dear all:

One of my clients was so pissed off at her pediatrician that she is part of a piece that is coming 
out in New York magazine in a couple of weeks.  If you are not aware, New York magazine tends 
to put a negative twist to their articles.  The mom has used an assumed name for her comments 
that will appear in the article.

What got her so extremely pissed off was two things.

She just found out that her pediatrician has written a fictional novel a la The Nanny Diaries making 
fun of her Upper East Side clients.  The mother quoted one section from an advance copy where 
this pediatrician equated two things a mother did as proof of how wacked out this mother was.  
The mother, a lawyer, would take off her lunch break and go home to nurse her baby.  This was 
portray in the novel as just as crazy as this mother's use of tanning lotion rather than sun screen 
on her baby.

The more important factor that drove this mother over the edge was the fact that the pediatrician 
didn't listen to her for a full week about something being terribly wrong with her baby, that her 
baby was drinking a lot but losing weight.  First the pediatrician blamed her milk supply saying 
she should just use formula.  The mom happened to be a copious oversupplier with her first and 
now that her baby is 3 months old, she nurses at night and pumps 30 oz, 2x/day.  Yes, 15 oz 
each time.  (Her baby stopped taking the breast so easily during the day after the experience in 
the hospital).  Then the pediatrician and the hospital blamed the milk - making this failing to 
thrive baby drink formula while they tested this mother's milk for a low sodium content.  Of 
course the mother's milk was fine and the baby who was compromised already threw up every bit 
of formula every time they gave it to her.  I saw the baby before she was hospitalized and knocked 
myself out writing the report to the pediatrician.  The baby drank slowly but huge amounts from 
the breast and terribly from a bottle.  The mother was not lying when she said the baby took two 
hours to take an ounce from the bottle.  The pediatrician never read my reports and told the 
mother that pumping milk into a bottle was a more accurate gauge than my weighing scale.  (I 
wrote another polite report about the anthropometric studies done on the accuracy of these 
scales.)  It turns out this baby has a rare metabolic disorder that caused her adosterone levels to 
be off by a factor of 20 and she needed sodium supplements.  The mom was so mad that she 
changed pediatricians.  I actually tried to be empathetic to the mother and at the same time point 
out that her baby's case was unusual.  Enough so that everyone was scrambling to figure out what 
was wrong with her baby.  But what really clinched it for her was not that her pediatrician didn't 
find a diagnosis right away but that her pediatrician ignored her and didn't read my reports.  So, 
she sees this book as a huge slap in the face and feels it reflects how she was treated so 
dismissively by this pediatrician.

The mom is delighted with her baby's endocrinologist and very happy that she was able to 
breastfeed despite all the negative comments she heard in the beginning.  But she knows she 
would have quit had this been her first baby, rather than her second.

Best, Susan Burger

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