Chicken pox symptoms and treatment

Pediatrician Lawrence Kagan, MD, shares advice for parents on how to best treat your child's chicken pox symptoms and how to tell if your child is still contagious
Chicken Pox Symptoms And Treatments For Children - Kids Health Tips
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Chicken pox symptoms and treatment

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Chicken pox is a common viral xanthan that historically used to happen to all children. These days we've vaccinated against it, so we see the incidence of actual active disease to be significantly decreasing. Chicken pox is a week-long, viral illness. Usually starts with 1-2 days of fever, stomach cramps, headache, during which time you're contagious, even before the outbreak of the rash. And somewhere around day 2, you develop a rash. They're small little pustules or blisters that occur on the face or trunk and then spread to the extremities. The rash lasts about a week, and as long as you have the rash, as long as they're still blistering, you're contagious. The complications of chicken pox are rare. Things like encephalitis and major complications of chicken pox almost never happen. And now that we have the varicella vaccine and fewer and fewer people are getting the disease, we really almost never see it happen. I would say the biggest and most common complication we have from chicken pox is that children find the rash to be itchy. They like to scratch it. And the moment you scratch a chicken pox lesion, it becomes secondarily infected with bacteria. And even if the infection is super mild, it will result in a scar. So we've all seen kids, or adults for that matter, that have small little pockmarks on their face. And that's often because of an earlier chicken pox infection.


Pediatrician Lawrence Kagan, MD, shares advice for parents on how to best treat your child's chicken pox symptoms and how to tell if your child is still contagious

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Lawrence Kagan, MD

Pediatrician

Lawrence Kagan, MD, FAAP, is a UCLA honors graduate, with a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry. He received medical training at USC Keck School of Medicine, and completed his internship and residency in Pediatrics at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. In addition to passionately studying neonatal, general pediatric and adolescent medicine at CHLA, he had the opportunity to train under some of the greatest minds in subspecialty pediatrics, diagnosing and managing the rarest and most complicated childhood ailments. Prior to opening Westside Pediatrics, he worked as an attending physician at the CHLA Emergency Department as well as at Cedars Sinai Urgent Care. Dr. Kagan is a native of Los Angeles and is happily married with two children.

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