Various Aspects of Adolescence *

Those few physicians who confine their attention to adolescents are not infrequently asked in what manner and to what degree the health problems of that age group differ from those of a child or from those of an adult. Adolescents do present problems peculiar to their age, but they are not grave ones and they do not require the creation of another specialty. The proper care of adolescents requires only that the family physician, the pediatrician, parents, and teachers treat these young people as adolescents, not as little children, not as adults; they are not little boys or little girls any more, and they are not adults yet: they are young people who are beginning to be adults. When this simple fact is really understood, many of the matters peculiar to adolescence will no longer appear to be problems; until it is, the adolescent will continue to seem to many to be an enigma. If any one specialty were to take over the care of adolescents, it should be pediatrics. The problems of growth, the contagious diseases, the behavior problems, and the blood and bone disorders which the pediatrician cares for in childhood should be observed and treated by him until his patient becomes an adult. Too often such a patient is abandoned just because he is fourteen: that would seem an inadequate reason for changing from the doctor who for many years had cared for the results of poliomyelitis, retarded growth, friction with parents, or asthma. Those, by and large, are not problems of adulthood-they will have been straightened out by the time the growth process is over. Until that time it would seem best for the patient to be retained by the physician who cared for those ailments from their beginning. There is no better way both to explain and to reiterate the necessity of interpreting and handling these young people in terms of the age group to which they belong than to discuss a few of the conditions which are not only common in them but which also are of particular significance to them. The limitations of this writer's experience is the only excuse for confining these remarks to the male adolescent; the female at this age is just as worthy of special consideration.