LETTER TO THE EDITOR, RESPONSE FROM AUTHOR: Developmental milestones: Even the Physicians don’t know enough and what we need to do?

Madam, we thank Dr Ahmad Zaheer Qureshi for his comments on our letter to editor. While we agree with his recommendation of Opinion based articles and observations may be narrated with great caution, we would like to emphasize that our correspondence should have been read in the context of the specific background we explained. We had the opportunity to work together and independently in different areas of Pakistan in the last seven years. We worked at the Armed Forces Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, Rawalpindi (The largest tertiary care referral Rehabilitation Institute of Pakistan with a separate Cerebral Palsy clinic)2 and interior Sindh where FR used to be the only Rehabilitation physician in a radius of 400 km. Although we didn t document every case of delayed milestones we saw, but there were some common observations we noticed and shared with the readers. We were unable to quote references to national and international studies on this topic because childhood disability in Pakistan just like adulthood disability is neglected and the research is lacking.3 And we didn t want to lose an opportunity to provide food for thought and stimulate debate on an important topic usually not addressed in Pakistan based biomedical research e.g a Medline search (on 8th March 2013) with the key words Developmental delay and Pakistan generated seventeen results only