English B1A CLASS PACK - Bakersfield College

Apart 5To treat these patients, who now comprise almost 20% of my practice, I have to trainmyself in many aspects of adult medicine and treatment which I left behind whendedicating my life to caring for kids. Those adult conditions include the management ofcardiovascular disease, hyperlipidemia and hypertension. I also knew that I would haveto become an expert on nutrition and exercise. (17)If the current trend continues, Pediatric Physicians will have to be trained in both child and adultdiseases to properly diagnose and treat overweight and obese children. Not only are there healthconsequences, these children also suffer emotional and social turmoil that affects them in allaspects of their life.Overweight and obese children are also victims of emotional and social trauma becausethey may be ridiculed at school, teased or treated as outcasts. Due to their excessive weight,many obese children are not able to participate in school sports or any physically strenuousactivity. As a result, they don’t feel a part of the group and feel all alone. The article“Increasing Obesity in Children and Adolescents: an Alarming Epidemic” explains that it’s notunusual for overweight teens who are teased to have thoughts of suicide or to have attemptedsuicide (Wilkinson). To determine how childhood obesity affects a child’s quality of life,researchers studied 5-18 year children in California that were either obese, healthy, or had cancer(Rimm and Rimm 29). Children and their parents were asked to complete a questionnaire thatwas used to calculate scores for psychosocial functioning (Rimm and Rimm 29). The resultswere that obese children and their parents were more likely to consider their “quality of life”lower than the healthy children (Rimm 29). It was also concluded that “The quality of life forthe obese children was as bad as or even worse than what the children with cancer reported”25