When did playing outside become a disease?

I couldn't believe when, watching TV the other night I saw an advert for Oralyte for healthy kids. For those who have not come across this before, it marketed in the UK as Dioralyte and is a drinkable  salts and glucose mixture used to help rehydrate patients who have severe intestinal problems and had nifty little animations demonstrating how salts ad electrolytes are lost through sweat and how easily they are replaced by Oralyte. This advert was encouraging mothers to feed this stuff to their children who "become dehydrated when playing outside. I'm sorry....what??????????

In a society which seem sdetermined to prevent children from playing In streets parks and gardens, walking to school and generally rushing around on bikes this seems the final step to far. Kids who are playing outside require (I'm told from my friends with kids) frequent feeding and watering and if this is done the there is no need to seeking medical treatment.

It  seems to me that this is a cynical attempt to frighten parents into buying a treatment for their kids that is unnecessary and redundant. Whilst electrolyte replacement compounds have been used to treat severe diarrhoea in children there is no evidence that in ordinary thirst it is any more effective than ordinary water or fruit juices especialy in healhty individuals.
This does 2 things, firstly it exploits parents by implying that the old way to look after their children in the summer is to make them drink electrolyte supplements and secondly it emphasise a more important trend in today's society to find medical ways of treating ordinary life experiences. Is this how we want our children to grow up - frightened to play in case they dehydrate?

Feet of clay?

The first professional idol I had was a ward sister called Angela Knight. I worked on her ward at the start of my third year of training and she was the first person that I looked at and thought " When I'm a ward sister I want to be like her!" Fortunately my placement was only for 10 weeks so I left the ward with my awe intact. Since that innocent time I have been sadly disappointed in my ( very few) idols since. Finding an individual I held in great regard operated, on closer inspection, in a cloud of glamour with little substance behind the show, meeting a key nurse theorist who changed the way we think about nursing and finding them to be inarticulate and shy was a massive disappointment. It shouldn't detract from the esteem in which I hold their work but somehow....

And maybe that is the way to ensure that your professional idols maintain their mystique, appreciate them from a far and never, never get to know them!