> a baby you have regularly scheduled appointments through the first year to make sure developmental milestones and for the correct immunization schedule
Sure. None of this requires a doctor, though.
> pediatric nurse actually told us it was safe to feed him in the car seat on the drive home
This is bad advice. But I'm failing to find studies that quantify the risk. You're correct that they shouldn't have said this. But I'm not convinced no doctor would advise similarly.
If everyone wants their kid to be seen by a doctor, we either need to lower the standards of doctor or normalise perfectly-well kids being seen by NPs. (That or a higher billing code if a patient demands a doctor for routine care.)
I find this to be true also. But how can this be? Either feeding a baby in a car is not that big of a deal, or something about the cars or carseats changed? I think it's more like the former.
I'm sure you can get all kinds of dated advice from board-certified physicians too.
Not that big of a deal, grand scheme of things - accidents are rare. It's just that our tolerance for risk has gone down a lot over the last 50 years - likely because of decreased other-cause mortality. When children were dying of disease, the relative risk of a car accident seemed small; now (with a safer world), it seems proportionally bigger.
There's roughly 1/366,000 chance of getting into a car accident on any given mile driven (not a great thing to average out, but still, back of the hand calculation). I'm sure that adjusting for weather conditions could get that number down further (if you assume good weather).
Let's say feed a child over the course of 10 miles: 1/36,600 chance of anything happening (hypothetically). Sure, if you do it every day that would be different - or if you live in an accident prone area that somehow skews the estimate. But the absolute risk, while there, is small.
In many cases it's kind of like texting while driving - it surely increases risk, but it can't increase it a crazy amount given how much texting while driving we observe with only a slightly elevated accident rate. But on a nationwide scale, every accident is a tragedy.
what does "feed in the car" mean? a bottle or breast-feeding? Obviously the kid should be in a carseat and restrained and protected, so i'm assuming bottle?
What reason would you not give a baby a bottle in the car?
"no pillows no blankets in the crib" was the newest info when we had our last child. I'm trying to remember other things that were different between the kids, but funny thing about having children is there's amnesia about the whole process.
I just assumed bottle. To be totally honest, I'm not even sure why it's a bad idea. I'm just going along. Infant in arms in a moving vehicle is bad because of the lack of restraints. That's all I know.
Sure. None of this requires a doctor, though.
> pediatric nurse actually told us it was safe to feed him in the car seat on the drive home
This is bad advice. But I'm failing to find studies that quantify the risk. You're correct that they shouldn't have said this. But I'm not convinced no doctor would advise similarly.
If everyone wants their kid to be seen by a doctor, we either need to lower the standards of doctor or normalise perfectly-well kids being seen by NPs. (That or a higher billing code if a patient demands a doctor for routine care.)