Big Changes Coming to Portable Practical Pediatrics (Announcement Pedcast)

Photo by Pixabay Images Big changes are coming to Portable Practical Pediatrics that I know you don't want to miss. It was 11 years ago when my nephew Seth , the rocketman barrister, convinced me to start Portable Practical Pediatrics. Podcasting was in its infancy then and I was hesitant to take on the challenge. Today, I look back at the experiences I have had making this podcast as some of the most meaningful of my life. Let me explain. A busy practicing pediatrician is involved in direct patient care almost every minute of every working day. There is no down time. A busy pediatrician has very little time in the day for researching interesting questions his patients pose or looking up information about a particular disorder or diagnosis. I found this fact very distressing throughout my pediatric career. Additionally, there never seemed enough time to adequately address important topics with families because of the time restraints of a pediatric visit. But with the urging of my children, wife, and Seth, I thought, "maybe I could improve communication with my patients by researching and prerecording information that I knew they wanted to know about. With 25 years of pediatrics under my belt at that point, I was confident I knew what parents knew and what they didn't know. Hence the birth of the "pedcast", short entertaining conversations about practical pediatric topics that had been researched and double checked by an editor. I distributed these podcasts via free mp3s that a family could easily download  and listen to on the fly. My conversation with a family, with all its limitation, had been freed from the boundaries of the office. I felt confident in the 577 posts, made over the past 11 years, were imparting accurate and well researched information. Now,Mom, grandma, Dad, or even a nanny could weigh in and benefit from the conversation. If the pedcast needed follow-up we could pick up that conversation at the next office meeting. I thought it was brilliant and the reason I agreed to devote 2-3