Holistic Pediatrician, The (Second Edition)

I got the first edition of this book nearly 5 years ago when my first born was an infant. It has been incredibly useful for avoiding the doctor - who usually can't really help anyway, or wants to prescribe antibiotics too frequently. Children often run the risk of getting something even worse than what they have by a visit to the doctor's office. This book is a guide for what to do with certain situations. It helped me to make my children more comfortable while a virus ran its course. This book gave me confidence to know that I was doing that best thing for my kids and gave guidelines for when to go to the doctor. I have two kids - 5 and 2 - who have NEVER had the need to take antibiotics. I give this book a lot of credit for the my healthy kids.

I thought the first edition was terrific. But the newest one is even better. This books contains BOTH mainstream and complementary therapies -- all the latest studies. It's easy to read, and yet my pediatrician said SHE learned new facts from it. MUST HAVE on any parent's bookshelf.

Dr. Kemper is truly a help to all young parents with questions about their child's health.

If you have a sneaking suspicion that your pediatrician may not know about safer and more effective remedies for your child's illnesses that are natural or alternative, The Holistic Pediatrician is a wonderful reference -- for two reasons.First, you'll learn about the most effective treatments for many common ailments facing kids -- irrespective of the ideology behind them. Dr. Kemper recommends medical intervention when needed, but she also endorses massage therapy, acupuncture, and other alternative therapies for specific problems. Her endorsements are based on clear reasoning and concrete evidence. Second, this is a book that your pediatrician will love to learn from. Medical doctors are often skeptical of alternative therapies. But the Holistic Pediatrician presents such compelling evidence (with hundreds of scientific citations) that even the most conservative physician will appreciate most if not all of Dr. Kemper's recommendations. In other words, the Holistic Pediatrician will allow you to have your cake and eat it too -- to use the best alternative medical therapies for your child without needing to sneak behind your doctor's back to do it. Read a book on alternative therapy without a solid review of evidence, and you are gambling with your child's health. (For example, food allergy is not proven to be a major cause of ear infections, and changing your child's diet to prevent them may harm his or her growth and brain development!). Read this book, and you can have confidence about those alternative therapies that TRULY can improve the health of your child.

As the mother of a 9 month-old baby boy, I have found this book to be a fantastic resource. We look things up in it all the time. It's clearly written for parents. I truly appreciate that it's based on the evidence of what's been proven to work and what has not.The book does not offer false promises of miracle cures, or buy the line that just because something is "natural" it's also safe. I really appreciate this. I totally disagree with the chiropractor who wrote in. I have spoken with some chiropractors, though, who were really out in left field in terms of their recommendations of treating every ailment with chiropractic, and Dr. Kemper definitely is NOT out in left field.