Pediatricians Boston MA
Pediatrics
Woburn Pediatric Associates
Specialties
Pediatrics
Boston, MA
Boston, MA
Pediatric Neurology
Marian H. Putnam, M.D. Private Practice of Pe
Specialties
Pediatrics
Insurance
Insurance Plans Accepted: All Blue Cross PlansBoston Health NetChildren's Medical Security PlanHealth Care Value ManagementHarvard Pilgrim health CareMass Health which is our state's MedicaidPrivate Health Care SystemsGreat WestPruCareTufts Health PlanCarpenter
Accepts Uninsured Patients: Yes
Emergency Care: Yes
Doctor Information
Primary Hospital: Children's Hospital
Residency Training: St. Raphael's New Haven; Cincinnati Children's
Medical School: Tufts Medical School, 1974
Additional Information
Languages Spoken: English,Afar,French
Boston, MA
Boston, MA
Pediatrics, Adolescent Medicine-Pediatrics
Gender
Male
Education
Medical School: Univ Of Cincinnati Coll Of Med, Cincinnati Oh 45267
Graduation Year: 1975
Pediatrics
Echinacea for Kids: You Gotta Be Patient
Provided by: 
When the sniffles strike, many parents swear by echinacea for their little ones as well as for themselves. But here’s a surprise: The first large-scale study of echinacea in children has found that it doesn’t lessen their cold symptoms. It may, though, have an important long-term benefit.
Jim Taylor, a pediatrician at the University of Washington in Seattle, enrolled more than 500 kids in a four-month study. As soon as any of the children felt under the weather, parents gave them either echinacea or a fake medicine. Each day, parents tallied the severity of four symptoms: sneezing, coughing, congestion, and runny nose. When the results were in, the kids who took echinacea fared no better than those who hadn’t. Some kids even developed mild skin rashes.
“I was pretty hopeful at the beginning,” says Taylor. “But in the end it was truly disappointing.”
The one potential silver lining is that kids who took echinacea had fewer colds after their first one. “This suggests the echinacea may have stimulated an immune response that lasted longer than the period for which they took it,” Taylor says.
He hopes to explore this preventive possibility in future research. But unless your children tend to be highly allergic, he says there’s no reason not to give them echinacea. Just be prepared for the benefits to take a while to show up.
Copyright 1999-2009 Natural Solutions: Vibrant Health, Balanced Living/Alternative Medicine/InnoVisi...
Personal Journey�Curing the Incurable
Provided by:
By Dale Moss
Have you ever wanted to throttle a doctor? “I can’t find anything wrong with him,” the new pediatrician announced, shooting me a look that said, “It’s all in his head. Or yours!”
“Try harder,” I replied. “I know my son. He’s no malingerer.” Healthy ten-year-old boys don’t have faces that are ghostly white, punctuated by charcoal circles around their eyes. They don’t need antibiotics every two weeks. And they don’t come home from school and go straight to bed, too tired even to eat.
Our answer came when Gordon returned from the bathroom bearing a urine specimen that looked like Coca-Cola. The doctor and I both gasped, and one look at her face told me this was really serious.
The medical roller coaster ride had begun ten months earlier, when one summer day Gordon came down with excruciating abdominal pain that seemed like appendicitis. It took three days of his being tethered to a hospital IV for the surgeons to decide it wasn’t, sparing his appendix but leaving unresolved the cause of his pain. The mystery deepened through fall and winter as this formerly healthy kid began coming down with sore throats, colds, flus, and earaches. A talented athlete, he now could barely drag himself around the basketball court.
A tissue biopsy confirmed what specialists suspected: My son had IgA nephropathy, a disease few people have even heard of. It’s a slowly progressive illness in which the kidney’s filtering units, the glomeruli, become chronically inflamed. That initiates a process of destruction and scarring that gradually destroys the glomeruli, and over time the kidneys lose their ability to cleanse the blood. When they’re down to about 15 percent of capacity, dialysis or transplantation is necessary. Doctors can offer little in the way of prognosis or treatment. And unfortunately, the disease has a tendency to recur and attack the transplanted kidney.
Indeed, Gordon kept getting worse. Often too sick to go to school, he started working with a home tutor—and I started taking antidepressants to deal with the strain. One day, having gone to collect yet another day’s homework assignment, I burst out crying in the school’s hallway. His classmates looked at me in horror, thinking Gordon must have died. When I got home, I found him pale and exhausted in his bed, and he asked if he was going to die. “No,” I lied. “This is just temporary.”
“Gordon speaks of when he gets better,” I wrote in my journal that evening. “It’s not the time to tell him he may not.” A year later, worn out by pain and near-constant illness, he confided to me that he wished he had died.
Eventually, it seemed like we had cycled through just about every potential remedy, alternative or otherwise. We tried acupuncture, herbal remedies, and hypnotherapy—all to no avail. We also tried various drugs to tame Gordon’s symptoms, including an anticonvulsive and an antidepressant, but they caused intolerable side effects. It was clear Gordon was caught in a vicious cycle ...
Copyright 1999-2009 Natural Solutions: Vibrant Health, Balanced Living/Alternative Medicine/InnoVisi...