Is being short really so bad?

Joseph Cernich, director of endocrine clinical services at Children's Mercy Hospital, said treating short children with growth hormones has long been a thorny issue, even before it was approved for I.S.S.

Doctors traditionally treated short stature because they believed it exacted a harsh psycho-social toll: being bullied, terrible self-esteem, miserable childhoods that led to unhappy lives.

Research, however, increasingly shows that short people "as adults enjoy life as much as everybody else," Cernich said.

"I can guarantee that there are kids on it that don't need it," he said. "There are some doctors who believe that if they can do it, they should do it. Most doctors don't take that approach."

Cernich has not seen a surge of parents asking for him treat their children. But "there is that demand and there are people paying for it."

Unlike Cernich, Casey believes more people are asking for the therapy.

"Parents desire to have taller children."

Parental pressure

At 4 feet 11, Sally Wilson-Pfeffer of Prairie Village, Kan., is one of them. Until recently, her son, Larry, 18, had given himself a daily injection of growth hormone. He began the injections when he was 9, and it was projected that his adult height might be no more than 5 feet 2.

Larry wasn't worried about it. But his mother was.

"It was terribly important to me," Wilson-Pfeffer said. "I'm only 4 feet 11. I think height is discriminated against terribly. I know that from first-hand experience. I did not want that for my son."

Because they chose to be part of a clinical study for a pharmaceutical company, the Pfeffers did not have to pay the approximate $10,000 to $30,000 a year it costs for growth hormone injections. Had the drug not already been paid for, Wilson-Pfeffer said she would have found a way to pay for it herself.

"I just wanted to give him an extra little boost in life if I could," Wilson-Pfeffer said. "Since I could, I did."

She did not do the same for her daughter, Katie, now 16 and 5-foot-1-inch junior at St. Teresa's Academy, because she believes that girls are not discriminated against as severely for their height.

Larry, a senior at Rockhurst High School, is 5 feet 6 inches, and physicians project he may grow another inch or two. His father is 5 feet 10 inches tall.

"From my standpoint, in second grade, the worry was more my parents, my mom," he said. "For me, I've never really had a problem with my height. I'm a confident individual, so I never really had any problem making friends or anything because of my height.

"But looking back on it, (growth hormone therapy) might have attributed to my confidence," he said. "I think it was worth it."