Reading an article in the Forum, I recently learned the University of Montreal was creating a new program in adolescent medicine. I had never heard of this subspecialty before. My colleague and I wondered whether society was not just on its way to medicalize adolescence, as it did for ageing. This gave us the impetus to explore on our blog what this medical domain was about.
Qu’est-ce que la médecine de l’adolescence? Pourquoi faire des adolescents une clientèle spécifique? Tout en déboulonnant quelques mythes au passage, Jean-Yves Frappier, médecin à l’hôpital Sainte-Justine, démontre comment son savoir-faire et son savoir-être auprès des adolescents lui permet de pratiquer une meilleure médecine. D’où l’importance d’assurer une relève par la création d’un programme de formation spécialisé dans ce domaine.
Adolescence is a time of developmental transitions of high relevance to health policy. Growing decision-making capacity, separation from families, integration into peer groups and development of identity mean that adolescents are increasingly making health-related decisions. Parents, providers, and policy makers struggle as the obligation to protect comes into conflict with adolescents’ developmental need to make decisions, make mistakes and move forward. Our experiences with the Indiana State Plan for Adolescent Health demonstrated that adolescent involvement in health policy can both meet developmental needs and be good health policy.
Adolescence represents a time of transition between the dependence and vulnerability of childhood and the autonomy (the capacity and ability to make free informed choices) of adulthood. Young children lack this capacity; others have the moral and legal authority to act for them, provided they act in child’s best interests.
Quels sont les problèmes de dépendance que rencontrent les jeunes d’aujourd’hui? Comment intervenir de façon efficace auprès de ces jeunes… et bien sûr, de leur famille? Les relations de contrôle et d’attachement sont au cœur des interventions novatrices évaluées par Karine Bertrand. Psychologue et professeure à l’Université de Sherbrooke, elle nous livre les résultats de ses plus récentes recherches.
Adolescence has changed. Downward shifts in the age of onset of puberty and upward shifts in the age of achieving the social role transitions that historically marked adulthood means adolescence now continues for longer. Rather than 10 to 19 years, adolescence is increasingly viewed as extending up to 24 years. This extended length is consistent with new understanding of cognitive maturation which continues to at least the mid-twenties, and greater appreciation that both pubertal maturation and brain development drive many health-related behaviours in adolescence and young adulthood (Sawyer et al., 2012).
According to Elizabeth Alderman, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, most health issues facing teenagers nowadays can be prevented. But preventing implies getting access to quality healthcare in the first place. In this interview, she explains the Montefiore Adolescent Primary Care Initiative she created in 2005 to improve the quality of healthcare provided to teenagers in the Bronx.
