doctor

BBC Morning Live’s legal expert, Gary Rycroft said he thought he was suffering from asthma

A BBC star has explained how he was horrified to be ‘hours’ from a potentially lethal heart attack after undergoing a surgical procedure. BBC Morning Live’s legal expert, Gary Rycroft, told hosts Rick Edwards and Helen Skelton that he had been suffering from a few chest pains, but put it down to just getting older.

He decided to do the Couch to 5k challenge – and said he had never felt better in many ways. He said: “I think it’s typical of dare I say men of my age, where we ignore things. We think we’re getting old. I didn’t wear glasses till I was 50. My hearing really is not as good as it used to be.

“So when I started to get chest pains walking my dog, I live on top of a hill, so I’m up and down the hill two or three times a day walking to work, walking my dog, and I’d say every fortnight or so I’d get a chest pain and it would it would pass really quickly. So I didn’t really think anything of it. I put it to the back of my mind as people tend to do.”

Mr Rycroft said whatever people do they should get any symptoms checked out. He only got it checked out because he was doing the Couch to 5k and thought he’d like to hear from a doctor.

He said: “I actually did feel a lot better and I lost quite a bit of weight. So, I was feeling really good, but I’d started this diagnostic journey with my GP. So, I’d had an ECG. They checked out the electrics of the heart. That was fine. And then in January, I went to have a cardiac CT scan, which is kind of an X-ray of the heart to check out the structure and check out the plumbing.

“And when I got the result of that a couple of weeks later, it was really quite bad news which floored me, which was actually the main artery to your heart is pretty much blocked. And of course, you start googling and it was called the left anterior descending artery. Not very helpfully on the internet, it’s often referred to as the widow maker. So, suddenly I was in quite a dark place to be honest, and it was quite stressful for my partner Jenny and the kids.”

It was when he had the straightforward operation to put in a stent that the full extent became clear. Gary said: “The next thing to do is called an invasive angiogram, where they put a little tube up your wrist, and they fit what’s called a stent.

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“So, I had that procedure. It was all done in about 40 minutes. It was pretty remarkable. And you know, thank goodness for medical science. When I came round from that, the cardiologist was kind of, you know, you’re a very lucky person, because you were probably hours or days from having a massive potentially fatal heart attack. So, that was that was quite a lot to take in.“

Doctor Xand van Tulleken said: “If you’ve had this procedure I mean they are safe. They are very common and Gary’s risk you know it is traumatic having these things. You get much closer to death than you would want to. But if you can manage your blood pressure, your cholesterol, quit smoking, manage your risk factors, your GP will help you with all of that afterwards, you you you know Gary’s life expectancy is pretty much the same as it was before the procedure, which is fantastic. That’s the reason to go and have it done.

Gary added: “This is a silent killer for people in their 50s and 60s and people will have lost people. And I wanted to talk about this because I wanted to say to people, don’t wait as long as I did. I had a very close shave. Don’t wait as long as I did. And if you’re living with someone who’s concerned, encourage them to have that conversation. If something’s not quite right, it’s well worth checking it out.”

Meghan Trainor is turning off the microphone.

The singer announced in an Instagram Story that she is canceling her Get in Girl tour. “This is the right decision for my family and me right now,” Trainor explained Thursday, saying that the decision came “after a lot of reflection and some really tough conversations.”

“Balancing the release of a new album, preparing for a nationwide tour and welcoming our new baby girl to our growing family of five has just been more than I can take on right now, and I need to be home and present for each and all of them at this time,” Trainor wrote.

Trainor apologized to her fans, but promised that she will be “back soon.” She also shared that she “can’t wait” for fans to hear her new album, “Toy With Me,” which will be released April 24.

“I know this will come as a disappointment to my fans, and I am so sorry to let you down,” Trainor said. “I’m endlessly grateful for your love and support always.”

Trainor announced the Get in Girl tour in November and was set to kick it off June 12 in Clarkston, Mich. The tour included stops at Madison Square Garden in New York City and the United Center in Chicago and was to conclude at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles.

Social media users speculated that the tour’s cancellation was due to low ticket sales, with Ticketmaster seating charts in some stadiums showing very few seats sold. Influencer and Trainor’s close friend Chris Olsen took to TikTok to push back against the “predictably vicious” online comments about the tour.

“This is a bigger conversation than just her and people’s feelings toward Meghan,” Olsen said. “The question that always comes up for me is ‘Why? And what is the end goal?’”

The singer welcomed her third child with her husband, Daryl Sabara, via surrogate in January. Trainor, who has been candid about her struggles during her first two pregnancies, explained on Instagram that she was “forever grateful to all the doctors, nurses, teams who made this dream possible.”

“We had endless conversations with our doctors in this journey and this was the safest way for us to be able to continue growing our family,” Trainor wrote.

Dr Xand van Tulleken told viewers ‘it can be like a heart attack for your legs’

A BBC doctor has given a worrying update for anyone who has woken up in the morning with a pain in the leg. Appearing on BBC Morning Live, Dr Xand van Tulleken told viewers they should ‘never’ just write symptoms off as what happens due to ageing.

Many people get aches and pains, but specific discomfort in the legs should be investigated, he said. Host Helen Skelton said: “We’re looking at protecting our health now, though. And if you started this morning with a pain in your leg, you’re not alone.

“It’s thought that one in five people over the age of 60 is living with a blood vessel disorder.“ Dr Xand said “It’s really important that no one should ever regard any symptoms they have as just part of getting older. If you have a symptom and you don’t know why you have it, you need to get an explanation.

“Whether it’s shortness of breath or pain in your legs. There are lots of different causes for pain in your legs, but this morning we’re talking about peripheral arterial disease, which is a sort of intimidating medical term, but really we mean just peripheral, meaning it’s at the outside of your body. It’s in your legs rather than being in your heart or your brain.”

Arterial disease might be the cause – and that’s a condition which can mean there are serious health issues at stake beyond just aching legs. Dr Xand said “Arterial disease is the same problems that gives us heart attacks and strokes. Your blood vessels narrow over time. They can calcify, they harden, they clog up with cholesterol, and you are left with a narrower space for blood to flow through and that means that you’re not getting a sufficient blood supply to your legs and that can give you leg pain.

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“And you can think of it a little bit like in the same way that some people get angina, they get heart pain when they exercise, when they move around. This is a bit like angina for your legs. And sometimes if those blood vessels completely clog off, it can be like a heart attack for your legs.”

The NHS says many people with PAD have no symptoms. However, some develop a painful ache in their legs when they walk, which usually disappears after a few minutes’ rest. The medical term for this is “intermittent claudication”.

The pain can affect 1 or both legs, range from mild to severe, and usually goes away after a few minutes when the person rests their legs.

Other symptoms of PAD can include:

• hair loss on your legs and feet
• numbness or weakness in the legs
• brittle, slow-growing toenails
• ulcers (open sores) on your feet and legs, which do not heal
• changing skin colour on your legs, such as turning paler than usual or blue – this may be harder to see on brown and black skin
• shiny skin
• in men, erectile dysfunction
• the muscles in your legs shrinking (wasting)

The NHS adds: “The symptoms of PAD often develop slowly, over time. If your symptoms develop quickly, or get suddenly worse, it could be a sign of a serious problem requiring immediate treatment.”

Dr Xand added: “The quality of the pain is quite specific. I mean, the way that people describe it and it typically wouldn’t be a pain that you’d get when you’re just sitting still, much like angina. It’s the pain that comes from not getting enough oxygen to your muscles. Those blood vessels aren’t working. And so, people tend to describe a kind of deep, heavy ache, like they’re just not, and you can almost feel that thing of just not getting enough.

“It’s a bit like if you’re lifting weights at the gym, if you go beyond your limits, you know, your muscles really start to hurt. It’s a similar thing. The pain is called claudication, but it’s that kind of pain. And typically, if you rest, it’ll go away again. So, that’s the that’s the kind of pain, but there are other changes that you can look for as well.”

He said people might see changes in their legs which could indicate the problem. Dr Xand said: “If you do look at your legs, you may see some changes if you don’t have a good enough blood supply. So, things like loss of hair on your legs would be an examples. The hair the hair can’t grow anymore because you’re not getting enough nutrients to your leg.

“Cold feet, the warm blood from the middle of your body is no longer reaching your feet. Ulcers or cuts are not healing because your immune system carried in your bloodstream is not reaching those and so you’re getting skin breakdown. You’re not getting antibodies and white blood cells and things like that. Changes in skin tone. So, your skin may look kind of mottled and gray as if it’s not getting enough blood. And then your toenails, you may think, I haven’t cut my toenails in a while. Well, are they just simply growing because they’re not getting the nutrients from the bloodstream that they need. So, those are things that might be a clue.”

Tackling the problem

A main cause is smoking, Dr Xand said, and also making sure people get cholesterol, blood pressure measured and check if you have diabetes. He said exercise is a good way of trying to improve the situation: “This may sound a bit a bit paradoxical, may sound like it’s hard to exercise, you’re getting pain when you exercise, but doing some exercise can stimulate the growth of new blood vessels. It can help those blood vessels open up.

“It will lower your cholesterol. It will lower your blood pressure. It will lower your stress. It will improve your blood sugar. You get so many wins from doing a bit of exercise.”

More information from the NHS here.

The general consensus is that President Trump’s social media post of himself dressed in robes, after a busy weekend in which he blasted Pope Leo and attended a prizefight while an Iran peace plan fell apart, was an attempt to cast himself as a Jesus-like figure.

But Trump says we have it wrong.

“It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better,” he said.

As a graduate of St. Peter Martyr grade school in the San Francisco East Bay area, and as someone who has seen a lot of doctors for various ailments, I feel uniquely qualified to weigh in.

In Catholic school, holy cards are a big deal. You’ve seen a couple hundred of them by the time you hit second or third grade, so you become familiar with the muted ethereal glow, the heavenly gaze and the look of piety. A standard feature is the halo, a clearly defined sphere that sits like a buttered bonnet on the head of the saint.

Let the record show that in his post on his very own Truth Social, which is not always truthful, Trump does not have a halo.

So in total fairness, it’s possible the president was not lying when he said he was supposed to be a doctor.

On the other hand, having seen a good number of cardiologists and surgeons and orthopedic specialists, I don’t recall any doctors who wore flowing robes while bathed in heavenly light, with a flock of eagles coming out of their ears and a team of Navy SEALs busting through the hospital ceiling.

And then there’s the fireball emanating from Trump’s right hand. All of which begs the question: If Trump thinks this is what a doctor looks like, what ailment is he being treated for, and shouldn’t the public be advised?

There’s also the question of creation — not of human life, but of the very existence of a social media post like this from the president of the United States in wartime. It was described as an AI-generated image, but who was at the computer?

Did the president sit down at the end of a long day and churn out an image of himself playing doctor, if not Jesus Christ? Or does he have a team of staffers who do this sort of thing, and if so, how could Elon Musk have missed them when he said the government was bloated and set out to fire half the federal workforce?

You’d at least hope the president would have the courage of his convictions. But as criticism of his post mounted, Trump deleted it Monday morning.

I think he should have stuck with the story — he was portraying himself a doctor because he’s a healer. The next day, he could have been in a New York Jets uniform and told us he’s a quarterback. Then he could have released an image of himself in the Artemis space capsule and told us he’s an astronaut, and he’s thinking of building a string of Trump hotels on the moon. Ask yourself this: Would anyone have been surprised?

A guy who only knows how to go for broke, and always doubles down when things go wrong, has to stick to his guns or the whole shtick unravels. I’d have respected Trump more if he had traipsed around the White House with a stethoscope for a week or two, or maybe performed brain surgery on Pete Hegseth, just to see what’s going on in there.

What’s going on in Trump’s head, if I might volunteer a bit of armchair psychoanalysis, is that failure triggers a sense of grandeur rather than humility.

Things are not going well at the moment, so he’s lashing out. The price of things was supposed to come down on Day One, but thanks to his upheaval of the world economy, prices went up, and now they’re soaring because he helped start a war that made no sense.

A war that has been criticized by Pope Leo, who has pointed out that while the Trump administration has ascribed a religious imperative to the assault on Iran, and Trump promised to blow the country all the way back to the “Stone Ages,” Jesus would probably not be on board.

Trump, who said last year that he wants to “try and get to heaven, if possible,” now realizes he’s not going to get an endorsement from the pontiff.

And so the man who once issued a national call to prayer, said the Bible was his favorite book, joked after the death of Pope Francis that he wanted to be the next pontiff, and has now issued his own holy card, has attacked Pope Leo for being too liberal as well as “weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy.” He has, in effect, anointed himself as holier than the pope himself.

Even staunch supporters of Trump have worked themselves into a lather over this. They’re lashing out at Trump, as if his criticism of the pope and depiction of himself as Jesus Christ are shocking.

My fellow Americans, certain words have been rendered meaningless in describing the current state of affairs. Among them are shocking, surreal, unbelievable, unprecedented and unexpected.

If indeed Trump thinks he’s Jesus, let his penance begin with 100 Our Fathers, 500 Hail Marys and 1,000 Acts of Contrition.

If indeed he thinks he’s a doctor:

Physician, heal thyself.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Actor Peter Capaldi is the latest big name to reject the chance to appear on the next series of Celebrity Traitors after Alison Hammond said she is just too busy

Doctor Who legend Peter Capaldi turned down Celebrity Traitors because he did not want the “level of exposure” the game of trust and treachery brings with it.

We’re getting closer to knowing who will be the next instalment of the spin-off after the success of the first series in 2025, which was filmed last April. Presenter Amol Rajan has signed up, insiders claim, but who else will star in the BBC show? Danny Dyer is another of the big names linked – but Peter won’t be pulling the cloak over his head.

The Thick Of It actor told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme he was asked to take part in the all-star version of the reality TV show, but said no. He isn’t the only one to reject the chance after Alison Hammond confirmed she won’t be heading to the castle – and said she has also had to turn down the chance to host Strictly Come Dancing, too.

Asked why, 67-year-old Scottish actor Peter, who played the Twelfth Doctor from 2013 to 2017, said: “Because I think there’s a level of fame that… I think it propels you into the public eye, at a level of exposure that I don’t really want.

“I like doing, you know, it’s like doing my music things – it’s very difficult for people in that business to understand that you want to keep it small.”

He added: “People keep saying to me, ‘Why don’t you do a bigger tour, or ‘ Why don’t you do a bigger release, or ‘ Why don’t you promote this more? I’m not doing it to be famous.”

On his previous leading role as the Doctor, the Glasgow-born star said he had “a little regret” when asked if he left the long-running BBC sci-fi show too early. He added: “It’s great fun being Doctor Who, but the pressure of it is quite intense.

“You’re sort of on all the time and you don’t want to disappoint anyone because even though I’m not Doctor Who, if people are meeting me they’d rather meet the version of me that is Doctor Who. So you try not to let them down, right?” Yeah, because I’m quite miserable and melancholic, really.

“And that was, that was one of the big changes in my life, I guess, which happened quite late, was I’m quite miserable really, but I thought you can’t be miserable if you’re Doctor Who. You can’t because you would disappoint people so I have to become cheerful all the time.”

The first series of The Celebrity Traitors aired on the BBC last autumn, with its nail-biting finale hitting a peak of 15.4 million viewers, according to the broadcaster.

It featured a star-studded cast including actors Celia Imrie and Nick Mohammed, singer Paloma Faith, author and actor Stephen Fry, broadcaster Jonathan Ross and comedian Alan Carr, who went on to win as a Traitor.

The spin-off series, hosted by Claudia Winkleman, brought in an average audience of 14.9 million people during its run – the biggest TV audience of 2025.

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Doctor Who star Peter Purves is thrilled that fans will finally get to see two long lost Dalek-themed episodes from the 1960s on TV this Easter

Doctor Who star Peter Purves is thrilled that fans will finally get to see two long lost Dalek-themed episodes from the 1960s on TV this Easter.

The actor and presenter, who played Tardis companion Steven Taylor, reckons the classic black and white series is far better than the rebooted modernised version. He said: “It was the golden era. I don’t think the show is a patch on what it was.”

The BBC is broadcasting two episodes from the story The Daleks’ Master Plan with the late William Hartnell as The Time Lord over the Easter holidays. The 12-part story originally went out in 1965 with more than nine million viewers tuning in to watch the wheeled exterminators try to take over Earth.

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But the Beeb then wiped the tapes – believing viewers no longer wanted black and white programmes – and the story has not been broadcast since. Over the years a handful of recordings of the missing instalments have been found and restored. But recently two more episodes – number one and number three – were discovered in a cardboard box in a collection of vintage films. They will finally be aired on BBC iPlayer some 61 years after their original broadcast.

The cast included Purves, who was an actor before he became a household name a few years later thanks to his role as a presenter on Blue Peter. He now claims that the sci-fi show, which launched in 1963, was in its prime back then even though the technology was basic and prompted jokes about wobbly scenery and monsters made from egg boxes.

Purves, 87, maintains that those early stories were more “intelligent” than they have been since the 21 ^st century reboot, featuring the likes of David Tennant, Jodie Whitakker and Ncuti Gatwa.

He said: “I was in it at a time when I think the show, technically, wasn’t very clever. The limitations were in the technology of the time. We didn’t do great sweeping magnificent film sequences.They were very short – we recorded as if it was live. We didn’t stop the tape even if a mistake was made.”

He said that the Tardis “disappearing and reappearing” was as good as the special effects got, at the time. “It was a very different show, but it was led by extremely good scripts,” he explained on The Chatterbox Redux Podcast,. “There are intelligent scripts. They worked on all sorts of levels. And I mean for me, that was the golden age. When they regenerated to Patrick and went to Jon Pertwee, I mean all things then became possible.”

He is less impressed with the modern version. “I mean the whole thing has become so technical and I don’t think it’s a patch on what it was.”

Peter stayed on the BBC show for a year and appeared in ten stories in total. Despite leaving Doctor Who in 1966, Peter revived his character Steven in 2014 for a long running series of audio adventures by Big Finish.

The company started to produce Who-themed stories when the BBC show was cancelled on TV in 1989. Over the years it has attracted a huge fan base as it has brought back many old faces including Tom Baker, Colin Baker, Bonnie Langford, Katy Manning, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann.

“I find the television stories less impressive than most of the stuff we’ve done on Big Finish,” he said. “I think there’s some great stories there. I think to my mind better than much of what’s gone on television. Television’s got consumed by the ability of technology to do wonderful things – but the substance is not there.”

Peter first appeared on Doctor Who playing a character called Morton Dill in a six part story in 1965 called The Chase, which also featured The Daleks. He impressed the show’s bosses, because three weeks later he re-appeared in the same story as an astronaut from the future called Steven Taylor, who ended up becoming The Time Lord’s new companion. He laughed: “I think I am the only person to have insulted The Daleks on screen and not been exterminated.”

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She was also charged with publishing or distributing written material, and using words that were threatening, abusive or insulting intending thereby to stir up racial hatred or having regard to all the circumstances was reckless as to whether racial hatred would be stirred up, in breach of the Public Order Act 1986.

One day at an Idaho hospital, half the newborns Dr. Tom Patterson saw didn’t get the vitamin K shots that have been given to babies for decades to prevent potentially deadly bleeding. On another recent day, more than a quarter didn’t get the shot. Their parents wouldn’t allow it.

“When you look at a child who’s innocent and vulnerable — and a simple intervention that’s been done since 1961 is refused — knowing that baby’s going out into the world is super worrisome to me,” said Patterson, who’s been a pediatrician for nearly three decades.

Doctors across the nation are alarmed that skepticism fueled by rising anti-science sentiment and medical mistrust is increasingly reaching beyond vaccines to other proven, routine preventive care for babies.

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., which analyzed more than 5 million births nationwide, found that refusals of vitamin K shots nearly doubled between 2017 and 2024, from 2.9% to 5.2%. Other research suggests that parents who decline vitamin K shots are much more likely to refuse getting their newborns the hepatitis B vaccine and an eye ointment to prevent potentially blinding infections. Rates for that vaccination at birth dropped in recent years, and doctors confirm that more parents are refusing the eye medication.

“I do think these families care deeply about their infants,” said Dr. Kelly Wade, a Philadelphia neonatologist. “But I hear from families that it’s hard to make decisions right now because they’re hearing conflicting information.”

Innumerable social media posts question doctors’ advice on safe and effective measures like vitamin K and eye ointment. And the Trump administration has repeatedly undermined established science. A federal advisory committee whose members were appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a leading anti-vaccine activist before joining the administration — voted to end the long-standing recommendation to immunize all babies against hepatitis B right after birth. On Monday a federal judge temporarily blocked all decisions made by the reconfigured committee.

One common thread that ties together anti-vaccine views and growing sentiments against other protective measures for newborns is the fallacy that natural is always better than artificial, said Dr. David Hill, a Seattle pediatrician and researcher.

“Nature will allow 1 in 5 human infants to die in the first year of life,” Hill said, “which is why generations of scientists and doctors have worked to bring that number way, way down.”

Vitamin K’s importance

Babies are born with low levels of vitamin K, leaving them vulnerable because their intestines can’t produce enough until they start eating solid foods at around 6 months old.

“Vitamin K is important for helping the blood clot and preventing dangerous bleeding in babies, like bleeding into the brain,” said Dr. Kristan Scott of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, lead author of the JAMA study.

Before injections became routine, up to about 1 in 60 babies suffered vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can also affect the gastrointestinal tract. Today the condition is rare, but research shows that newborns who don’t get a vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely to develop severe bleeding than those who do.

Hill has seen what can happen.

“I cared for a toddler whose parents had chosen that risk,” the Seattle doctor said. The child essentially had a stroke as a newborn and wound up with severe developmental delays and ongoing seizures.

At a February meeting of the Idaho chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, doctors said they knew of eight deaths from vitamin K deficiency bleeding in the state over the preceding 13 months, said Patterson, who is president of the chapter.

Infections prevented by other newborn measures can also have grave consequences. Erythromycin eye ointment protects against gonorrhea that can be contracted during birth and potentially cause blindness if untreated. The hepatitis B vaccine prevents a disease that can lead to liver failure, liver cancer or cirrhosis.

Even if a pregnant woman is tested for gonorrhea and hepatitis B, no test is perfect, and she may get infected after testing, said Dr. Susan Sirota, a pediatrician in Highland Park, Ill. Either way, she risks passing the infection to her child.

Why are parents refusing routine care?

Parents give many reasons for turning down preventive measures, including fear that they might cause problems and not wanting newborns to feel pain.

“Some will just say they want more of a natural birth philosophy,” said Dr. Steven Abelowitz, founder of Ocean Pediatrics, which has three clinics in Orange County. “Then there’s a ton of misinformation. … There are outside influences, friends, celebrities, nonprofessionals and political agendas.”

Abelowitz practices in an area of the county with about an equal mix of Republicans and Democrats.

“There’s more mistrust from the conservative side, but there’s plenty on the more liberal side as well,” he said, “It’s across-the-board mistrust.”

Social media provides ample fuel, spreading myths and pushing unregulated vitamin K drops that doctors warn babies can’t absorb well.

Doctors in numerous states say parents refusing vitamin K shots often also decline other measures. Sirota, in Illinois, encountered a family that refused a heel stick to monitor glucose for a baby at high risk for having potentially life-threatening low blood sugar.

Care refusals aren’t a new phenomenon. Wade, in Philadelphia, said she’s seen them for 20 years. But until recently, they were rare.

Twelve years ago, Dana Morrison, now a Minnesota doula, declined the vitamin K shot for her newborn son, giving him oral drops instead.

“It came from a space of really wanting to protect the bonding time with my baby,” she said. “I was trying to eliminate more pokes.”

Her daughter’s birth a couple of years later was less straightforward, leaving the infant with a bruised leg. Morrison got the vitamin K shot for her.

Knowing what she does now, Morrison said, she would have gotten it for her son, too.

Efforts to persuade

Doctors hope to change minds, one parent at a time. And that begins with respect.

“If I walk into the room with judgment, we are going to have a really useless conversation,” Hill said. “Every parent I serve wants the best for their children.”

When parents question the need for the vitamin K shot, Dr. Heather Felton tries to address their specific concerns. She explains why it’s given and the risks of not getting it. Most families decide to get it, said Felton, who has seen no uptick in refusals.

“It really helps that you can take that time and really listen and be able to provide some education,” said Felton, a pediatrician at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Ky.

In Idaho, Patterson sometimes finds himself clearing up misconceptions. Some parents will agree to a vitamin K shot when they find out it’s not a vaccine, for example.

These conversations can take time, especially since the parents doctors see in hospitals usually aren’t people they know through their practices.

But doctors are happy to invest that time if it might save babies.

“I end every discussion with parents with this: ‘Please understand at the end of the day, I’m passionate about this because I have the best interest of children in my mind and heart,’” Patterson said. “I understand this is a hot topic, and I don’t want to disrespect anybody. But at the same time, I’m desperately saddened that we’re losing babies for no reason.”

Ungar writes for the Associated Press.