Can You Identify and Treat Your Children’s Insect Bites (Archived Pedcast)

DocSmo here with another edition of Portable Practical Pediatrics. From the onesie all the way to the three-piece if it involves kids, we talk about it here. Thanks for joining me today. I've got another biking story for you today. You know I'm part of the "Biking friends", a group of adults and sometimes kids, who go biking weekly to a bakery or a coffee shop. We bike about 25 miles and have lots of interesting conversations along the way. Well, in one of my most recent outings with the group I got to ride along side a teen with a rash. His mom was also riding and she asked me to take a look at his rash that was around his upper arm. Mom's question for me was should she take him to urgent care or even the emergency department since his spots looked bigger and angrier than they had the day before. His rash was getting worse and she was worried.  I knew the likely outcome of one of those ED or urgent care visits- lots of medications and therapies that are often unnecessary. So let's break down this young man's rash a little more in today's pedcast and give you my thoughts about a how to identify and manage his rash that turned out to be from insect bites. I'll also tell you what I told this young man to do to care for his rash that turned out to be easy and very inexpensive. Photo Compliments of Pixabay Images Musical introduction How does a parent recognize that the skin spot is a bite? What I saw on this young man when I took a look at his skin was a crop of red spots on his upper arm. The marks looked like typical insect bite reactions. More on that in a minute. He couldn't recall having been bitten by anything so I deduced that they were likely large mosquito bites for the following reasons: he hadn't noticed being bitten-typical of mosquitos (check), the red spots were on exposed skin where insects have easy access to bite (check), the rash was on the upper body, an area not usually accessible to crawling insects but rather flying ones (check), the center of the red spot was elevated compared to the