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Hi, my name is Dr Chiang Wen Chin. I'm an allergist practicising at Chiang Children's Allergy & Asthma Clinic.
I think padiatrics is a very interesting field.
You see children from all spectrum life.
You see them from very young. They can be little babies in little incubators all the way up to grown-up children, teenagers and adolescents.
The idea of being able to watch them grow up, through their ups and downs, illnesses - I think it's great fun.
On top of that, I think that being able to interact with the children and being able to interact well
and reassure their parents to be able to communicate is a skill and probably something that I enjoy a lot.
I think the challenge in my field is that if you have a very sick child, someone who is young and vulnerable,
parents are absolutely anxious.
sometimes devastated with the prognosis or the outcome of the illness is very bad - that is a challenge.
And we've often faced that in some of the children that come to see us.
Being able to communicate to them, maybe, how we can get the child better or sometimes we can't get the child better is sometimes difficult.
So, those are the challenges we've seen.
I think having compassion, empathy, being able to interact well with children as well as their parents is very important.
Sometimes, being able to understand the different stages of a child's life,
to be able to see what's a good communication tool to start off when they are at a certain age would be useful.
I think in most pediatricians, one of the joys is being able to see the child through illness,
and being able to pick them up even when they are ill,
to be able to communicate with them even when they are ill.
I start off in the morning with a nice breakfast with the kids.
After that, I bundle down to work and start my work rounds in the hospital.
This is followed by a day in the clinic, running around, seeing patients,
quick lunch and then patients in the evening again, and more rounds.
I think there's not much difference whether I work in a hospital or clinic setting.
The routine is almost the same.
I think pediatric allergy is quite an interesting field.
It's been something that has been almost like a tsunami in the last decade or so.
The fact that food allergies are on the rise, eczematous children with bad skin are on the rise.
We've rhinitis, which is nose allergy, and asthma is a problem nowadays.
So, I think in the area of allergies in children is it something of an increasing burden in developed countries.
So, I think it's interesting.
It's a very interesting field because you see a different spectrum of it
and we see different severities of children come to see us.
In the area of where I practice, food allergy and eczema actually rank quite high.
In these areas, for diagnostics we do a food history
and then skin prick testing and sometimes blood testing for the children to be able to determine if the children have food allergies.
In the area of rhinitis and asthma, we do diagnostics with skin prick testing for environmental allergies.
We sometimes do lung function testing to ensure that the lungs are stable.
We also offer sublingual immunotherapy for children with bad nose allergies, rhinities
to be able to overcome dust mite allergy.
I think allergies in this present day and age can be managed.
It is good for the patient and the child to have a good understanding of their allergies so that we can manage it better.
It affects the quality of life of the child and the parent if these allergies are poorly perceived, poorly managed.
Therefore, in my view, I think that if we can help these children and their parents
to have a better quality of life to manage their allergies, they should be managed.