Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

It Takes a Wiki to Cure a Child's Cold
Thursday, January 25, 2007

Of course, as soon as Mrs. Feiler Faster decamped for Davos, the girls came down with colds. And as any parent knows, it takes a village to cure a cold -- largely because everyone has a different theory. Dahlia Lithwick explores this phenomenon and likens it to the Wiki-method of trying to arrive at conensus. Reading her funny piece, I was reminded of what my wife's aunt said about treating colds: Swamp it with medication, herbal wraps, and home remedies, and it will disappear in a week; do nothing and it will disappear in seven days:

Now, my husband and I had more or less finalized our wiki entry on caring for babies with colds. We had agreed, for instance, about the germ theory over the outside-with-wet-heads theory. We were, in the main, for hot liquids, baby Tylenol, hand-washing, and humidifiers. But as our boys are increasingly exposed to a growing number of end users, the markups of their illness wiki began to proliferate. One of the great-aunts quickly submitted the milk markup.
"No milk, no cheese, no yogurt," she wrote definitively. I went back that afternoon and edited this out. "The pediatrician has assured us that there is absolutely no connection between dairy and mucous," I wrote. My mom was spurred on to correct my error. "Absolutely no milk," she marked up my markup. "Also, no baths!"
When the baby started to smell funny that night, I checked his wiki for any Recent Changes. I noted the no-baths entry with some surprise and responded with a hasty edit: "Baths are okay," I wrote. "He finds them very soothing, and they are better than a sandblaster for the welded-on green mucous."
By the morning, "definitely no baths" had been reinstated, and "warmer slippers and indoor hats" had been added in by the lady at the supermarket who heard him coughing in the checkout line. Beginning to doubt myself and the gurus from What to Expect the First Year, I found myself mulling over these modifications. "Should we really be overheating him if it isn't cold out?" I typed into the comments section.

Labels: Family

Posted by B Feiler at 8:34 AM
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