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Tuesday, January 03, 2006Dr. Johnson, a pioneer in the growing field of adoption medicine, is trying to assess the health and well-being of Dmitry for a family considering adopting him. Given the increasing understanding among adoption experts of the health risks facing orphans in certain developing countries, scanning a photo of a child has become a common practice, more reliable for finding abnormalities like fetal alcohol syndrome, which smooths the groove between mouth and nose, than for detecting imperceptible risks, like attention deficit disorder. Those are generally hidden in the incomplete or incomprehensible medical records sent from orphanages. Dmitry's file is a litany of indiscriminate labels like "pyramidal insufficiency" - a red flag for cerebral palsy - that Russian doctors put on all infants born prematurely to impoverished mothers, Dr. Johnson said. Equally useless is Dmitry's hepatitis B test, administered too early to be of value. International records, especially those from orphanages, are extremely unreliable. They often use archaic and ambiguous terms that are hard to interpret. But a photograph isn't much of a substitute for a physical exam. One of my children had very slanty eyes when he was an infant, and I found more than one doctor discreetly checking the palms of his hands for a simian crease when they examined him. They may have been tempted to call him Down's if all they had was a photograph. posted by Sydney on 1/03/2006 08:02:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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