Doctors can help to slow epidemic of teen violence
April 1, 1999 2 minutes read
Doctors can help to slow epidemic of teen violence
Patient education addresses smoking cessation, domestic abuse, and the use of car seats — so why not teen violence? Deborah Prothrow-Stith, MD, says physicians can do better by teens than merely suturing their wounds and sending them back to the streets.
While youngsters are in the examining room, she contends, doctors could talk with them about the price of violent expressions of anger. They could also explain alternative ways to manage it.
Prothrow-Stith, a former Massachusetts commissioner of public health, is now a resident at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s emergency room and director of the division of public health practice at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Most violence occurs among poor minority kids who know each other, not between strangers or gang members, she says. Unaware of how to control anger in the first place, teens compound their risks by not discriminating between life-threatening confrontations and less dangerous ones such as name-calling. But that’s where physicians can intervene, in a sense inoculating kids against violence, she explains.
Prothrow-Stith suggests discussing these points with teens:
• Most deadly or disabling violence occurs among people who know each other and who are not criminals.
• Anger is a normal emotion that young people can learn to control.
• A simple cost-benefit analysis of violence can emphasize that fighting or shooting could cost an adolescent his or her life or freedom.
• A few tension-deflating phrases, translated into the teen’s vernacular, could provide him or her with nonviolent alternatives to weapons.
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