Dr. Mom: Getting kids to remember their medicine may be a text message away.
Doctors are experimenting with Âtexting to tackle a big problem: Tweens and teens too often do a lousy job of controlling chronic illnesses such as asthma, diabetes or kidney disease.
Dr. Maria Britto, an asthma specialist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, noticed that even when she’s talking to adolescent patients perched on the clinic exam table, they’ll keep texting on their cell phones.
“You have to get in their face a little,” she says with a laugh.
But it sparked the idea for a study to see if a daily medication reminder through text message would improve kids’ asthma control. After all, Britto says kids as young as 12 carry the phones into her clinic, poor and middle class alike.
Pilot testing recently began, with a full study set for later this year. Participants say what time they want the reminder, and a clinic volunteer types out the messages — words spelled out, no mimicking of kids’ text lingo.
Associated Press
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