It has nothing to do with not being able to handle it. Julie Rathbun from the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle states that every country has unique ways of writing evaluations and providing medical information. In addition, a child coming from China will have medical needs that will look different than the needs of a child from Russia. Medicine in China, Eastern Europe and Russia is archaic in some regions, mediocre at best in others. The more adopted children a practitioner sees, the more sophisticated he or she will become in their diagnoses and treatment recommendations.
Many new parents spend weeks in their child's birth country with little, if any, medical support.
In my case, I trusted the advice of insightful Romanian women and my own rather shaky instinct. For five weeks, I dealt with conjunctivitis, soy allergy, colic and heat rash in my tiny infant, far from home and the convenience of my pediatrician. A positive outcome of my struggles was a sense of empowerment, when insisting our pediatrician run a series of tests that he otherwise would not have considered. Juliana was the first internationally adopted child I had seen. Lois told me stories of other families.