The Clinician's Guide to Pediatric Chronic Illness

Part II is the description of the individual conditions that affect children and adolescents. The intent is to present in detail the most important chronic conditions. The question of which conditions are important is debatable. To the families, the condition that they deal with every day is, by definition, the most important. The compromise, which is "author's discretion," is to detail the most common and well-known conditions. These conditions are fairly predictable and include asthma, diabetes, and AIDS. In addition, the majority of conditions that are included in pediatric textbooks are also presented so that there are a total of 30 or so "well-known" conditions andmorethan 100 other conditions.

There are two appendices. First is a listing of all of the sources of information that were used to help in providing the data for this book. The second appendix lists resources and organizations that potentially can help clinicians and caregivers (including parents) in the care of children with chronic conditions. Internet sites can act as a starting point for information about chronic conditions. These are current at the time of writing and most of them should be stable enough to be useful in the long term.

The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Hazelden Press, Inc., in particular Karen Chernyaev who guided him through the editorial process in the early phases of the project. Many people contribute to the publication of a book and the author is grateful to the publishers, McGraw-Hill, especially Martin Wonsiewicz, and to Alan Hunt of Keyword Publishing Services Ltd.