Getting it right is that much harder when patients don’t know the words to describe what they’re feeling.

One day, when I was driving home with my three-year-old son Brandon in the back seat of our car, I heard, “Mommy, my chest hurts.”

We had been well trained for this—as a toddler, Brandon had been diagnosed with severe asthma, a condition that didn’t seem to improve even with his daily doses of inhaled steroids and bronchodilators. I asked him quickly, “How bad is it? What kind of animal?”

“There’s a hippo on my chest.”

I slammed on the brakes, made an illegal U-turn towards the local emergency room, and parked half on, half off the sidewalk outside the hospital doors. Snatching Brandon from the back seat, I ran into the ER, shouting, “There’s a hippo on his chest. There’s a hippo on his chest.”

Fasten your seat-belts, parents of autistic individuals, 2013 is going to be a bumpy ride.

Medical researchers from both esteemed institutions and alternative approaches have announced study results that have in turn encouraged, confused and disappointed parents of children identified within the autism spectrum. Three new studies released this week exemplify the roller-coaster ride. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) rates and diagnoses have increased dramatically as has its share of research dollars. 

While the U.S. earned a disappointing grade of "C", how did your state do in reducing premature births?

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The rate of children hospitalized with serious injuries due to physical child abuse has risen 4.9 percent between 1997 and 2009

A study in the current issue of Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, demonstrates that the rate of children hospitalized with serious injuries due to physical child abuse has risen 4.9 percent between 1997 and 2009, contradicting years of reports from our nation’s child protective services that such child abuse has fallen by 55 percent since 1992.

The further we drill into the numbers, the more alarming the information becomes. The rate of children who died in the hospital “because of their abusive injuries” also rose.