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? LiveJournal Find more YOUR 2019 IN LJ Communities RSS Reader Shop YOUR 2019 IN LJ Help Login Login CREATE BLOG Join English (en) English (en) Русский (ru) Українська (uk) Français (fr) Português (pt) español (es) Deutsch (de) Italiano (it) Беларуская (be) loldoc — Subscribe Readability Log in No account? Create an account Remember me Forgot password Log in Log in Facebook Twitter Google No account? Create an account loldoc Recent Entries Friends Archive Profile Add to friends RSS Welcome to LolDoc's BragFile! Anatoly Belilovsky, MD LolDoc's BragFile I: Video Interviews loldoc April 2nd, 2010 This is the WNBC interview about Seasonal Affective Disorder: This is the CBS interview on Swine Flu: This is the Telemundo interview (en Espanol) on Swine Flu (Grippa Porcina). This is a Miami radio interview about (you guessed it!) swine flu! And now for something completely different: NHK TV (Japanese news) interview about the Chernobyl disaster: On the art of history taking in asthma: On the diagnosis of asthma: The best interviews are not embeddable: New York One http://www.ny1.com/7-brooklyn-news-content/ny1_living/110800/study--one-dose-of-h1n1-vaccine-may-be-enough-to-protect-kids Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/22200273/swine-flu-reality.htm Leave a comment Share Flag LolDoc's BragFile IV: Print Interviews! loldoc February 14th, 2010 ---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- ------------ ---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- ------------- Battling Contagions of Superstition and Ignorance; A Ukrainian-Born Physician Coaxes Nervous Immigrants to Accept Western Medicine By LISA BELKIN Published: August 11, 1992, NEW YORK TIMES Three-year-old Leonid Rozental had seen the vaccination needle and was screaming as Dr. Anatoly Belilovsky approached. "This will be like the bite of a big mosquito," said the doctor in Russian to the boy. Then, he gave Leonid the shot and a lollipop in quick succession. "He should have had this when he was 2 months old," the doctor said, referring to a standard vaccination intended to prevent a type of meningitis. But Leonid and his parents moved to the United States from Russia four months ago, where, Dr. Belilovsky said, doctors are trained to be sparing with vaccines for fear that they will hurt, not help, the child. Bridge Between Two Worlds As a pediatrician in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Dr. Belilovsky is a bridge between two medical worlds. Brighton Beach is a haven for immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and each day Dr. Belilovsky confronts the medical care in that part of the world. He has seen children with undiagnosed heart problems that are now harder if not impossible to correct; children with severe anemia because their mothers had poor prenatal care; a handicapped child who died of measles because her doctors were trained not to give vaccinations to handicapped children. "I have cabinets filled with charts of kids who didn't get their vaccinations on time," Dr. Belilovsky said. Dr. Belilovksky is typical of doctors throughout New York City who work in neighborhoods steeped in other cultures. Doctors who treat Mexican immigrants, for instance, see high rates of immunity to certain antibiotics, which are as available as aspirin in Mexico. Those whose patients are natives of the Caribbean grow accustomed to eggs placed in the windowsills of sickrooms to ward off the spirits of illness and fear. Dr. Belilovsky is particularly well prepared to treat immigrants of the former Soviet republics, where medications have long been scarce and where folk medicine has been entrenched for even longer. He was born in the city of Lvov in what is once again Ukraine, where his mother, Kira Belilovsky, worked as a pediatrician. A Practice in Brighton Beach He and his family moved to the United States in 1976, when he was 15 years old. Dr. Kira Belilovsky took the tests required to practice medicine and her son graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, Princeton University and the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. After completing pediatrics training three years ago he joined his mother's practice in Brighton Beach. Of the 5,000 patients in their office files, 80 percent are immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Dr. Belilovsky remembers his mother's complaining that she might as well forget everything she learned in Soviet medical schools and begin again in the United States. Recently he read some of her Russian textbooks and has come to understand what she meant. "Genetics," he said of the books his mother used as a medical student, "was described as a bourgeois pseudoscience developed to perpetuate the class system. The whole of psychiatry was covered in one paragraph." Once he joined his mother, however, Dr. Belilovsky had to do a lot of relearning too. His first surprise was that his Russian was not adequate for the job. Though he had spoken the language since he was born, his vocabulary stopped growing at age 15 and he was lost when trying to explain medical problems to patients. Antibiotics? Oh No! Even when he knew the words he had a difficult time communicating. "I remember the first time I told a family their child was O.K. and would only need some antibiotics," he said. "Their faces fell. I thought I was giving good news, that we can cure this, no problem. Their faces said, oh no, it's so serious it needs antibiotics." Back home, he learned, his patients had been told that antibiotics would damage a child's liver and should only be given in cases of extreme illness. At least twice a week, he estimates, he has to persuade a mother to give such medication to her child. "I go out in the waiting room," he said of how he approaches those conversations. "I pick out a patient who had a good result with the same drug and I say, 'Tell this lady what happened.' " It requires similar coaxing for some parents to sign vaccination consent forms. "The fear of vaccines is unbelievable," he said. "Over there doctors believe that any tiny problem is a reason not to give the shot. He sneezed twice last week. He's sensitive to ragweed. Anything." Leonid, for instance, was born slightly prematurely and doctors delayed his diphtheria vaccination for a year and did not give him several other vaccines at all. Vaccinations Are Easier It is easier to win the arguments over vaccinations, he said, than those over antibiotics. "They can't go to school without them and I'm not going to give them a note saying otherwise," he said. Dr. Belilovsky spends time talking patients out of as many things as he talks them into. Transplanted medicines, for instance. Nearly every family brought the contents of the medicine cabinet with them and Dr. Belilovsky's first advice is "throw out all the medications from the old country." "Those that I know what they are, I don't know how they're made," he said. For years, he said, patients have been asking him about a fever-reducing medicine widely used back home but unknown in the United States. Earlier this year, he said, he saw a listing of ingredients for the medicine and was appalled. The drug contained aspirin, which has been linked with Reye's syndrome in children, and amidopyrin, which, Dr. Belilovsky said, was taken off the American market decades ago because it was potentially fatal. "It works, sure," he said. "It will drop the fever of anything. Problem is it will sometimes drop it to room temperature." Less dangerous, he said, are the variety of folk medicines on which his patients sometimes rely. Cupping, in which suction is created by applying a warm glass to the chest wall, is harmless, he said, unless it prevents a patient from getting to the doctor for more effective treatment. Gridding, in which a tic-tac-toe pattern is drawn on the skin in iodine, to relieve inflammation, is just as ineffective, he said, but potentially more dangerous. He recently saw a child with a second-degree burn ...