Pediatric Abbreviations

Pediatrics is medicine for children: medical specialty concerned with the investigation, diagnosis and treatment of diseases and abnormalities in infants, children and young adolescents.

Examples:
Pediatrics deals with treating children aged 0 to 16 years. All kinds of diseases and disorders are discussed, from newborns, toddlers and preschoolers to adolescents. Pediatrics in Laurentius. In the Laurentius Hospital, the paediatricians treat all illnesses, and two doctors also have their own area of ​​expertise. The majority of patients are neonates and infants up to 3 years of age.

Pediatrics is a medical specialty concerned with the health of children. Healing children, and especially keeping children healthy, is the profession of a pediatrician.

Yet it is not a specialty in the strict sense of the word, because the pediatricians do not deal with a particular organ or group of organs, or with a particular method of treatment, but claim the whole child for themselves. Nevertheless, the pediatricians are regarded as complete specialists; in fact they are age specialists, as one might imagine to be specialists for old age or middle age. Their profession originated in children’s hospitals.These arose at the beginning of the last century in the major capitals of Europe. In our country it was quite late. Rotterdam, where the first children’s hospital was built in 1863, took the lead in this. In 1880 there were already seven children’s hospitals, while later a number of academic children’s departments were added. Today, every proper provincial hospital has a more or less large pediatric ward headed by a pediatrician.

The pediatricians treat the child until puberty, so until about 12 years. This age is a physiological limit, because after puberty one no longer sees the typical childhood diseases, and also because then the diseases that occur in both adults and children no longer show any particular differences.

The fact is that the course of countless diseases in children is different from that in adults. This is partly explained by the fact that the childlike organism is a body under construction, with rapidly growing tissues and a powerful metabolism , with an enormous capacity for recovery and a complete lack of debilitating processes such as arteriosclerosis, but also with a still insufficient immunity to many infectious diseases .

That is why the American pediatrician Jacobi was right when he stated more than 50 years ago that pediatrics is not just about miniature males and females, who, because they have a somewhat smaller body, also need smaller doses of medicines, but that it is a profession with aspects of its own, ‘which has contributed as much to general medicine as it has received from it’.

That these were prophetic words turned out all too often later. As an example, consider the value of the discovery of tuberculin sensitivity by the pediatrician von Pirquet, or the part played by the pediatrician Alfred Hess in discovering vitamin D.

Another special feature of pediatrics is the very important role of prophylaxis. Pediatrics is actually half preventive medicine and much more than in adults a number of diseases can be prevented in children through certain actions.

List of Acronyms Related to Pediatric