Dr. Maller’s Blog

At the suggestion of a new mom who has sent me a list of some 11 “old wives’ tales”, I shall try to shed some light in these dusty corners.

1. Doubling your toddler’s height at age 2 will give you their adult height.
That’s the rule for boys; for girls it’s eighteen months. I’ve had hundreds of patients grow up to adulthood, and it’s a pretty good estimate. But everything in biology falls on a bell curve. The eventual height can be influenced by early or late puberty; “late-bloomers” may keep growing through their teens. One caveat: measuring a toddler accurately can be like nailing Jello to a wall. It is also sadly true that our maximum height is achieved around 19 and thereafter we shrink as our vertebral cushions deteriorate. I’ve lost an inch and a half since 19.

2. My newborn had a high Apgar score; should I start saving up for Harvard?
The Apgar score, especially at 5 minutes, is a great help to the medical team in that a high score (8-10) means little intervention is needed, whereas a low score calls for drastic measures. However, the eventual outcome for the baby correlates very poorly with the score and is more influenced by heredity, nutrition and other factors. Besides why would you want your kid to go to Harvard?
I actually met Dr. Apgar once when I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian for my training; she was retiring as chief of anesthesiology. How simple the most elegant contributions to science can be!

3. Bundle up your child or they will get a cold.
This is not only nonsense but worse. If your baby actually gets sick, layers of blankets will trap heat and make fever harder to manage.

4. Shaving a baby bald will cause the hair to grow back thicker.
Nope – and it won’t work for Dad either!

5. Girls develop faster than boys.
Yes, although because of the bell curve you see large variations. Baby boys are larger on average than girls but puberty usually happens at a younger age in girls, as any junior high boy can tell you. If by development you mean social and intellectual skills, girls are faster. Did you know that 58% of today’s college kids are women?

6. If your baby skips crawling and goes right into walking they will be clumsy.
Crawling was thought until recently to be crucial to proper development, not only in physical skills but learning as well. Since the “back to sleep” push to prevent SIDS we have seen a generation of babies resist learning to crawl, but with no discernible impact on later outcomes. “Tummy time” is important for muscle development, so get down and dirty with your baby.

7. Children grow more quickly in the spring (hence the term “growth spurts”).
There’s no reliable evidence that it’s true, but in places with long winters the arrival of more sun may work with vitamin D to hasten bone development. Some say babies grow more during sleep. Imagine trying to prove that!

8. A baby who drools will experience a delay in talking.
This one is new to me, which in itself is quite remarkable. I can’t remember many babies who didn’t drool at times. Delayed speech is on everyone’s mind these days. Clipping a tied tongue has come back into fashion, but for breastfeeding problems rather than speech.

9. Putting breast milk in a baby’s eye will cure conjunctivitis.
I love this one because I recommend it all the time. Most goopy eyes in the early months are caused by blocked tear ducts, and massage with mother’s milk on a regular basis will often clean up the discharge and prevent future surgery. A full-blown conjunctivitis may call for topical antibiotics, however.

10. Mixing rice cereal into a bottle of milk or formula will help your baby sleep through the night.
NOT! Cereal will slow the absorption of the milk somewhat but sleep is controlled by the brain, not the stomach. Eighty percent of new babies sleep “through” the night (really six hours or so) by three months; the others are factory rejects who should be returned – as if! Actually the term “sleeping through the night” is inaccurate. Like adults, babies have a sleep cycle of 45-55 minutes. If you’re lucky they self-soothe and go back to sleep, as we do. If not, it must be Dad’s fault. Why? Isn’t the man always to blame? But I digress…

11. Vaccines are related to autism.
This was the subject of my first blog, Since then the evidence has piled up totally putting this silly idea to rest. Almost all the authors of the original report have renounced it and admitted they were duped; the “study” was financed by trial lawyers and never had the slightest validity in the first place.

12. A wide space between the upper incisors is a sign of superior intelligence.
I added this one because I’ve heard it often. It must be true – check my smile some time!

This all reminds me of a time when I saw an old wives’ tale develop before my eyes. My internship was served at the ancient general hospital in Philadelphia. The nursery had those enormous factory-style windows. The head nurse was an elegant and wise lady named Priscilla Parke (her family was the Parke of Parke-Davis; it used to be common for rich ladies to become nurses). Her insight was that at certain seasons babies were jaundiced more or less than at other times, and she thought it might be the amount of sunshine coming via those windows. It wasn’t but a few years later that phototherapy was discovered as effective for treating jaundice.

With over 40 countries represented in my practice lifetime, I’d probably be able to collect much more folk wisdom from around the globe. Feel free to send me your favorites.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.