The Fundamentals of Pediatrics

Choose to train in a residency program that teaches both the fundamentals of pediatrics and the innovations in this field of medicine. What are the fundamentals? If you had to give a definition, you might say that the fundamentals of pediatrics are knowing how to provide care for the "normal" infants, children, and adolescents who need preventive medicine and low-acuity management. Through your years of training, you will learn what "normal" is. You will learn the important scientific statistics and the basic guidelines of good care, and you also will develop the ability to look at (and listen to) a child and be quickly reassured (if normal) or concerned (if abnormal). Sometimes you can’t say what first catches your attention causing you to seek further into a child's symptoms -- the pitch of the cry, the depth of the breath, the focus of the eyes, the tone of the fingers. This discernment is an important difference between a pediatrician and other physicians seeing a child. It is important to expose yourself to normal healthy children in order to develop this skill. From the first time you see a child in a Normal Newborn Nursery, through caring for them over three years in your continuity clinic,. This experience of working with healthy children is invaluable to fine tune your accessment abilities. After completing your training in the Tulane/Ochsner residency program, you will know quickly whether a child is normal or when a child is in danger.

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