Amanda Wilde (Host): Meet pediatric doctor Ben Gitterman. Dr. Gitterman is here to address parents' health concerns, including screen time, vaccinations, nutrition, and we'll talk about the best ways we can support children's overall wellbeing. This is Your Best Life podcast from Holy Cross Health. I'm Amanda Wilde. Ben, welcome. It's so good to have you here.

Ben Gitterman, MD: Thanks so much, Amanda. I'm glad to be here.

Host: As a pediatrician, you support children and their parents. What drew you to this field of pediatrics?

Ben Gitterman, MD: Oh, it's funny. I wanted to be not a doctor, but a pediatrician since I was five years old. It was admiration for my pediatrician and then it was really fortified when I was in college, in City College of New York, in an inner city area, and then doing my residency program there, which absolutely made me certain that this was for me.

Host: What did you admire about your pediatrician?

Ben Gitterman, MD: I admired that he cared. He was a short little guy of about 4' 10". I won't use his name for safety's sake. And his wife was a nurse who was in his office with him in a small little office. She was about six feet tall, and I kid you not, and the two of them were an odd couple who were the most wonderful, warm, kind people imaginable.

Even when they gave me shots, they were nice. I really and truly thought this guy was going to help me, keep me healthy and make me feel good. Something about it. I can't get more specific than that. It's just a feeling that stuck with me all my life.

Host: Very memorable, and you wanted to emulate that. And now that you are a pediatrician, what do you find most rewarding about working with children and families?

Ben Gitterman, MD: Oh, there are a couple of things. For the families that I've known for a long time, watching the kids and their families grow from being a baby to lately, the teenagers that I see who are coming out of high school or going into college or graduating from college, it's gratifying beyond belief.

It also really is rewarding. I don't know, to see them dealing with complex issues and conditions and actually helping them get better or at least stay well and navigating through that. That makes a very big difference to me and actually seeing their parents evolve with all this is so gratifying.

It's unbelievable. All of those things put together, make a big difference, and finally helping them when they're in pain. That may sound obvious for a doctor, but it really is true. It's not a corny line.

Host: And then the setting in your office. I just know from talking to you that you are very informal. You're using first name and you bring your dog to the office. So.

Ben Gitterman, MD: You got it. That's right. I actually do. I got this little guy two years ago. It's the first dog I've had in 35 years, and I decided to bring him into the office the first day I came back to work after three weeks with him, and he sits in my office with the computer and the books and stuff. I don't bring him into the patient rooms for fear of allergy or patient fear, but then I invite them all to see him and he's such an integral part of my work that many of the kids who come to see me they say, is Tely here today.

 It's awesome. He plays and he loves it and I love it. And the staff love it. He's like an informal mascot.

Host: So that really sets the tone in your office for comfort, I think.

Ben Gitterman, MD: It is, it sets the tone for comfort and it sets the tone for who I am. And that's the kind of relationship I have with families, which I think it's important because I think it makes kids feel less scared and make people feel good and make it feel as fun as possible.

Host: Now from the parent's perspective, what are some of the most common health concerns parents bring up during visits?

Ben Gitterman, MD: Lately, the most common health concerns have been nutrition, have been mental health issues, which have really kind of exploded, particularly during and since the pandemic with school age kids and teenagers. And finally, the issues of vaccines.

Those are probably the biggest issues that come up lately. Of course, it's obvious for when a kid is sick, but that's not what you're asking me about really. It's more just happens lately.

Host: Let's take those one by one. What is your approach to nutrition and childhood obesity problems?

Ben Gitterman, MD: I don't know how else to word it except to say, let me be really honest. It's almost like a war, that sounds silly. It's a war against fast food. It's a war against what's out there in the front ends in grocery stores or pharmacies. Maybe I shouldn't use specific company names. And those are hard battles to fight, and it's also a war against convenience and easiness because understandably parents are dealing with such a busy, intense schedule that they just have to get through it.

I hope those things make sense. It's a lot of work. So that becomes a tremendous amount of education, a tremendous time explaining, a tremendous battle against carbohydrates, about the quantity of food the kids eat. And also about screens, televisions, iPads, laptops, and eating while they're on these screens. Finally it's peer pressure, of course. When you put all of that together in many things, there's a lot of ways that we are fighting uphill. Walking into a room, it's tough. So the way to work against that or the way to work positively is to start very early on with what nutritional education should be. But it's a tough battle. And everything you hear about obesity and bad nutrition increasing in kids, it's true.

Host: And all kinds of diseases are increasing in kids as well.

Ben Gitterman, MD: Right. That's right.

Host: You were talking about balancing nutrition against the culture and companies and convenience and peer pressure. So speaking of balance, how do you help families balance nutrition, screen time, sleep and physical activity?

Ben Gitterman, MD: The biggest answer to that is that you try to be a realist because you can't tell a kid not to eat unhealthy food. You can't tell a kid anymore not to watch screens. You hope they won't, but you have to look at it from that point of view, and I do it with honesty. I will sit there and tell them, look, when I'm feeling like it, once in a while, I will sit in front of a screen and I will have a half a pint of ice cream.

The difference is how do I do it? Do I do it every single day? Do I do it once on a major holiday? Where do I bring it into proportion? I also talk about, this is funny maybe, but I talk about rice and beans. Or beans and rice. Do you have a pile of rice with a little bit of healthy beans or the other way of round?

 Do you have a plate of pasta with a meatball, if you're not a vegetarian or do you have a bunch of meatballs with a little bit of pasta? Do you see where I'm going with that? How do you readjust? How do you say, oh, my kid doesn't like vegetables. He eats all the other stuff. You talk to them the way they don't often think about mixing things together, about putting healthy milk into smoothies because they just won't drink milk as it is, and you go with it from a practical point of view and also from a creative point of view. But you try to get the families to come up with the ideas and if they don't, to offer them as examples, but again, in practical terms, that can appeal to real people.

Host: Right. That's the big education piece that you were referring to earlier.

Ben Gitterman, MD: Yeah, that's what I think anyway.

Host: Now, vaccines. What are the biggest myths or misconceptions around childhood vaccines? Because I know there's a lot of misinformation that's caught on.

Ben Gitterman, MD: Yeah. It saddens me that there's so much misinformation out there. The biggest things that I hear and that I've seen are number one, that parents think that vaccines are experimental. The second thing that I hear is that vaccines will cause autism, and the third thing that I hear is that vaccines are not really necessary and that's because people in this country haven't seen many of these diseases, so they don't believe that kids need them because the diseases are not out there.

Host: But as we learned recently with the measles outbreak, when people stop giving vaccines, those diseases still come back.

Ben Gitterman, MD: Absolutely true. Not only with the recent one, but we've seen it before when the whole issue, for example, of autism and vaccines came out there and people in areas of the country stopped accepting the measles vaccine. We had the same thing happen. We had other outbreaks of measles. The one that seems to be concentrated mostly in West Texas and the like is not the first time that this has happened.

I've also had the experience, if I can digress, just a little, of having worked as a pediatrician all around the world, particularly in Africa, and I have seen these diseases spread like wildfire and more important maim children when they haven't been able to get these vaccines and people in this country, they don't appreciate this. To them, these diseases and these conditions are distant realities that don't happen in our world because we are modern and sophisticated.

Host: Absolutely. So how do you talk parents through vaccine hesitancy?

Ben Gitterman, MD: By talking gently, by listening to their concerns, by trying to understand where they're coming from, which might be cultural, which might be grandparents, which might be just plain anxiety, especially with a first child. Telling them, look, I hear what you're saying, but we've learned a lot of new information since the past.

Or by saying what you're saying might not be accurate. Or even inviting them to bring in what they've read to show them, or when I say bring it in, I should say, bring up on their cell phones or whatever, to show them where the flaws in that information might be, and we get through it.

Most of the time. I had a child only yesterday, I'm not exaggerating it for this interview, who had never had a vaccine who was two and a half years old and we had a talk through about all of these things and we actually succeeded and got the parent to do it, but it was with a lot of TLC.

Host: So you've given a vivid overall picture of how you respectfully support parents. How can parents best support their child's mental and emotional wellbeing?

Ben Gitterman, MD: That's a great question and that sort of takes us away from the subject of vaccine, but probably, in my opinion, the way they could do it is by listening to their child. That may sound obvious, but it's actually not. And I'll give you examples. Probably one of the best things, is very often parents talk at their child or to their child, and one of the things that I tell parents, especially when their kids get to be older school age and young teenagers, is to have family meals.

And or have one-on-one time with their child, not only to listen to what the child's day was like, but to tell the kid what their day was like. Because the child can appreciate and trust that the parent really is hearing them and is really engaged with them, and that builds a tremendous amount of trust between the parent and the child.

That makes a parent much more confident as a parent in terms of dealing with all of those issues that happen when they get into the teenage years. In the younger years, getting that parent or bringing them along is really with education on a level that they can understand and appreciate.

Host: Like any successful relationship, communication is key.

Ben Gitterman, MD: Yeah, it really is. We've gotta be honest. I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna here. Do I succeed all the time? No. Some parents come in, they want their kids physical because they need it for school forms and they want to get out of there. And that's fair. And we learn also, I think, as doctors to accept those families.

But if we have even some successes, it makes us feel like a million bucks.

Host: Ben, thank you so much for sharing so much useful information and providing a great example of how we might use our pediatric physicians to help support raising healthy children.

Ben Gitterman, MD: Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.

Host: Dr. Ben Gitterman is a pediatric doctor at Holy Cross Health. For more information, please visit holycrosshealth.org. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the entire podcast library for topics of interest to you. This is Your Best Life podcast presented by Holy Cross Health.

Thanks for listening.