zlacker

>>rossan+(OP)
When I was getting ready to turn dad for the first time, I read a few books on pregnancy, children and parenting. My trust on medicine dropped substantially when I discovered that doctors have poor notion of statistics, so they take for granted improper studies results.

I remember one classic one is the "no coffee when pregnant", the study says this causes problems, the test was performed on rats and by feeding them coffee in the amount of 3/4 of their body weight. We can agree that with this amount, it's reasonable it could cause problems. Very different from one cup of coffee though.

The other study that was done is about Amniocentesis, this one is more interesting the chance of miscarriage is considered 0.1% but this was before the operation was performed with a live ultrasound to look at the needle while performing it, which (probably) makes a big difference. Before, doctors performed an ultrasound and then went in blind.

There was also a serious bias towards a certain type of population. But of course doctors don't bring this up at all.

Last thing is sids, it's a terrible type of diagnosis that pushes parents against the instinct of sleeping with their children, even though this is commonly done in non-western cultures and can save a lot of pain to the parents and give a lot of security to the child. Do your research though, medical community reports risks and I'm no doctor, just a dad who read a few books.

Glad my children are healthy. Every time I read about some illness for children I feel an incredible weight on my heart

>>Fire-D+Fu5
When my wife was pregnant 15 years ago, I did a lot of similar reading about various things. One was home vs hospital birth, and at that time at least, there was a strong vibe of "home birth is best birth" going around. Many people linked to a study (which I can no longer find!) in Norway maybe? It was a big study that "showed" that home birth was safer than hospital birth. However, if you dug into the study, you'd find one particular interesting nugget: if any of the home birth participants experience any negative medical event, even during delivery, they were removed from the study. It was preposterous. In the end, all the study said was, "home births that happened without incident were safer than hospital births", or, in other words, "safe births are safer than non-safe births".

>>gilbet+nN6
The home birth obsession makes me so angry. My wife had a really bad postpartum hemorrhage when our daughter was born. Thankfully, we were in the hospital, so the obstetrics team was able to stop the bleeding and get her stabilized. She'd have likely died if it was a home birth.

What's even crazier is that in most of the US, midwives only need a high school diploma and a midwifery certificate - or in many states, no education is required at all as the title "midwife" is not protected. The vast majority of the rest of the developed world requires midwives to either be professional nurses with additional training in midwifery, or to have a special four year midwifery degree (eg: here in Canada, midwifery is a bachelor's degree). Many parents in the US who opt for a home birth are likely unaware of how underqualified many American midwives are compared to their international counterparts to respond to an obstetric emergency.