I came to realize that there was a long-standing scientific controversy in the field, and I felt that I had no choice but to get to the bottom of things myself. Although I am not a medical doctor, I hold a PhD in neuroscience and am familiar with critically reading scientific literature. I decided that I would invest as much time as necessary to learn everything I possibly could on the subject. At that point, there was nothing in my life more important than finding out what had really happened to my son.
i’ve interacted with the author, who wrote a very nice spike sorting package called `phy` that i used several years back (and iirc turned me off using hdf5 as a result), and came away very impressed with what was so obviously a sharp mind. very odd to recognize the name in a totally other context. Not very pleasant to hear about such a rough time either!
It is the perfect combination of crap.
Cyrille Rossant may save a lot of lives, in both parents and children, if this becomes common knowledge.
I put him in preschool to get him to talk. He could use sentences but wasn't.
At the start of kindergarten, first, second and third grade, I spoke with the teacher, explained he was difficult, let them know I welcomed communication on any issue. They were thrilled and relieved. Parents are often part of the problem.
By fourth grade, my son was no longer obviously "the weird kid." That teacher reported me to the social worker for letting him know up front my child was difficult and please don't hesitate to discuss things with me.
The social worker called me, we talked for a bit. She knew both my kids. Laughed it off as a silly misunderstanding. Months later, his teacher let me know he did eventually get the memo that my child had quirky interpretations of social things.
After my son finally got a proper diagnosis for his medical issue, he gained twenty pounds in one year and this did wonders for his social skills. Then he lost five pounds.
He still felt better than he ever had and neither of us were concerned. His medical team implied I was in danger of being reported to children's services as an abusive mother.
Because his condition predisposes people to being very underweight, pediatric clinics for the condition routinely include a dietitian and yet the standard recommended diet is "junk food" because it's high salt, high fat, high calorie and cheap.
I had not been feeding him junk food, but I dutifully put a big bowl of snacks in the middle of the coffee table. He regained 2.5 pounds, they decided that was adequate and didn't need more follow up visits.
We got home and, with no longer being under threat of being turned in as a neglectful or abusive parent, the first thing he did was hand me the bowl and tell me "We are never doing this again. I feel terrible!"
We resumed feeding him a high quality diet in line with the high fat, high salt, high calorie recommendations.
It's awful to be so protective of your children and be accused of abusing them based on no real evidence. I wish this project well.
How did you determine them to be credible?
My assumption is that any citation to a rumor should be totally dismissed if these questions can’t be answered.
Holy shit. Parents bring baby to ER ... results reveal that baby was shaken (article later confirms this was not the case) ... parents lose custody for 2 months. Horror story.
So please don't bring "rumors" into a discussion here. That's exactly the kind of harmful behavior the article is trying to fight against.
the whole thing just gives one the serious heebie jeebies
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/09/15/texas-shaken-b...
But wasn't that valid cause for concern, especially for someone who should be a growing boy? If being underweight was a serious medical concern for him, losing 5 pounds seems like a big flashing red warning that something could be going wrong.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your story, but from what you've written, it sounds to me like their intervention successfully ensured he was eating enough when he wasn't before?
Weight isn't the only metric that matters.
Now do this repeatedly during your long and illustrious career.
Definitely a tangent, but attributing that attitude to higher education is like someone attributing a doctor saving their life to an act of god. Like yeah if you squint I guess that’s true.
My experience with higher education has been that of administrators taking advantage of my naivety for profit, elitism towards those not in academia, and dismissal of any ideas that wouldn’t directly result in a grant or a good headline.
I wouldn’t really say that the author’s “mettle” is a result of the same environment.
What it actually means is "something for which social workers will decide whether to take your child away from you for". That's a pretty big escalation from a "valid concern", but one that happens if "the system" decides you are a target. "A valid concern" is in that case a code word for "credible presumptive evidence of child abuse". A child being underweight is a valid thing to be concerned about, it is not on it's own credible presumptive evidence of abusive parenting, no.
“How it was said” was literally presented as unsubstantiated rumor. It’s not worth reflecting that when someone says “I heard a rumor that X…” it sounds like an unsubstantiated rumor. It’s just the basic structure of English language.
There are issues with the way/how quickly we diagnose shaken baby syndrome without exploring other potential diagnoses, and with how severely/quickly we take kids away from their parents once we "think" we have a shaken baby
> [O]ur nanny was eventually cleared of all charges, but it took four years for the court to recognize my son’s medical condition (a rare occurrence in France, as I later discovered) during which we were forbidden to speak to her and she was forbidden to approach children, thus losing her means of livelihood.
It is so emotionally charged though that there is and has been great hesitation to assign this cause of death because of the emotional effect on the parents.
There are huge swaths of people doing the work required to make it better, every day. It's not as easy as turning a dial from "bad" to "good"
This sounds very much like presumed guilt rather than presumed innocence.
But whether a person does use them, and for what, is entirely due to the person themselves.
Holy cow is modern medicine still as smugly wrong as it’s always been. Every generation laughs at all the stupid stuff the previous generations believed, and then acts so confident that they’ve got it right this time.
And as a result you get unworthy nurses making moms feel intense shame for not “trying hard enough” to somehow magically produce milk.
They had absolutely no reason to believe I was abusing him. Most likely, they were just trying to cover their own butts and err in that direction rather than in the direction of "what's best for this child?"
That's without getting into larger concerns of "What on earth is wrong with the world that a junk food diet is the medically recommended diet for a serious medical condition?"
And medical incompetence by staff, not doctors, is also awful. My brother hated reading. He got glasses, still hated reading, my mother wondered why he could be so disobedient in that regard. They said, well, the prescription is right, he can clearly see fine. Turns out two years later that the lenses were installed on opposite sides. Right lens on left eye, left lens on right eye. A simple mistake, but the consequences...
If we had taken him home without knowing about the condition I'm pretty sure a 'SIDS' cause of death would have been one of the possible outcomes regardless of the actual cause (which would have been very hard to determine after the fact).
Breastfeeding is one of the worst things hoisted upon mothers who are told "you must try no matter what" - seemingly ignoring the mental and physical health of the mother and the father all the while.
Well, "dangerous" for who? For a lot of people involved in "child abuse" – from medical professionals to child services to the police – a false positive carries basically no consequences: you report it, or follow up, or do whatever your task is, "to be sure", and that's it.
But a false negative can have a lot more consequences, including losing your job, lawsuits, becoming the centre of a media circus, becoming the target of an investigation yourself, etc. etc.
Also see: most Amber Alerts should not have been sent, and are just simple cases of runaways, miscommunications, or family drama. But the official "pushing the button" to send out an alert has the same incentives as above.
The incentives are pretty obvious.
What you’re talking about would require a lot more than just one well meaning doctor.
It's an issue in many Western countries, where we've seemingly become risk-averse to the point where it's causing more harm than good.
You can, but it's a crime, much like buying banned drugs etc.
> do they expect a dad to raise a kid that is not his?
Yes.
surely you don't actually believe that? I don't think the result of this is just 0 false positives. The result of that is a lot more crime, and a lot more injustice.
They recommend sugary foods. It's a condition that puts one at high risk of diabetes.
They recommend ice cream as a high fat, high calorie food. It's a condition that predisposes people to having trouble tolerating milk and milk products, especially from cows.
First off, this was genuinely valuable during the first few months. Gigantic medical institutions were moving at a glacial pace and were making proclamations literally months behind the state of the research. In order to conserve masks, propaganda was put out that masks were only effective if you were a medical professional, and the most common way I saw this rationalised was that the general public was simply too stupid to wear a mask in a sanitary way. So I proceeded to wear a mask in a sanitary way. Then after a few months mask stocks started to pile up so propagandists THEN pronounced that more science was conducted and masks were actually effective for everybody!
That positive outcome aside, what other people saw was that the younger people got, the lower the risks of COVID, and the higher the risks of getting vaccinated. In fact, it seemed from the numbers (This is for the earlier strains of COVID), that for certain populations (young people who lived like hermits, in other words, hacker news readers) it could be on a selfish individual basis, be irrational to get the COVID vaccine. The risk from myocarditis could actually outweigh the risk of COVID itself. It was however, always in the collective interest for as many people to get vaccinated as possible, to reduce the transmission of COVID, and reduce the consequent strain on medical resources and the direct/indirect deaths this caused. Public health institutions did not get into this nuance, because it wasn't in the collective interest, so they just told everybody the vaccine was good for you. I proceeded to get vaccinated, and the main person I held discussions with did not, after both drawing the exact same scientific conclusion. Not every anti-vaccer was stupid, some of them were just massive civil libertarians.
What I saw from people who DIDN'T do their own research is that they were UNIFORMLY misinformed because they tended to either believe institutions who would lie to them whenever it served their purposes (2 weeks to flatten the curve!), or believed whatever podcaster told them about Ivermectin.
Or what basically every prosecution does, when it knows that the science behind some things isn't airtight but still presents it in the best possible light to get a conviction.
Unless the person above is, of course, an anarchist who has no answer for what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell. I would say that as imperfect and heavily flawed as our system is, "Perfect is the enemy of good."
I was molested as a child. I know a fair amount about abuse.
There isn't always a clear bright line between ignorance and abuse. Assuming the worst can make the problem worse.
People tend to not be paragons of virtue who have all the answers for everything they run into. Some people can be helped to become better parents.
I thought long and hard about that while sending care packages to a couple of welfare moms. Declaring them unfit moms and having their kids taken and placed in foster care wasn't some magic solution that guaranteed a fabulous outcome, so I chose to try to help them succeed to whatever degree I could, on a limited budget and from a distance.
Anyone with the wherewithal can learn to “read and understand research” it’s not a magical power bestowed upon the few who receive recognition from some long standing bloated institution.
Attributing the drive and work of an individual to such an institution is weird and elitist.
I should note that if said institution paid for, assembled the team, and provided resources, then that institution obviously deserves credit.
I want recommendations and best practices to change as our understanding of things improve though. The alternative would mean that either no more research is being done, or doctors are just ignoring anything they didn't learn while in school.
Voltaire (1694-1778) wrote a satirical account of a medieval university's oral examination on medicine: the examiner asks why morphine puts people to sleep, and the student confidently replies that morphine has a "dormative essence". This is a bit like saying that things with an essence of gravity fall towards the earth, whereas things with an essence of levity float towards the sky. The examiner proudly accepts that answer and bestows upon the student the title of doctor.
This was very funny to anyone educated in the time Voltaire was writing, since they would have known that morphine puts people to sleep because... it has round molecules with no sharp edges...
Edit: correction below, thank you thaumasiotes.
I don’t understand. You can’t just go to the store and buy infant formula?
Do not perpetuate the myth that the vaccines slowed the spread.
Stay away from mommy blogs/forums. Those are the most toxic cesspools I've ever witnessed. Things are changing, some of the newer ones are not nearly as bad, but man the judgement is super real.
Nurses are one thing, but personally, the worst is family members who think they know better and don't understand the data and that times have changed.
FORMULA IS PERFECTLY FINE.
For instance, people who get accepted into Harvard but don't attend have the exact same life outcomes to those who get accepted and do attend. The same is now true for college in general once you account for opportunity costs.
Prosecutors in America have one goal: close the case. At any cost, close the case. They are not interested in justice. They are not interested in finding the one who actually committed the crime. They are interested in closing the case. If that is “working as designed”, then we need to change the design.
Woah
(I realize after writing this out that being at the mercy of your hospital sounds draconian, but it can be really really great if you have a good nurse or midwife. They teach you how to bathe and swaddle the baby, how to nurse, how to rock them to sleep, etc. All skills you’ll need once you leave)
We had to worry about my wife dying because they wouldn’t suggest a C-section and we didn’t think to ask for one (her induction didn’t take for several days). We’re quite confident they’d have let her die before suggesting one. Thankfully, we thought better in time.
The other side is nursing is hard, and so it is easy to cheat and use formula when you could with a little effort nurse the baby just fine. (Nursing is generally slightly better for the baby, but the difference is tiny. Nursing is generally a lot better for the wallet though)
Also think back to before we had good evidence on transmissibility/infection. Myocarditis hit the young, who were the last to be vaccinated, and consequently among the last to be researched. So the evidence of the vaccinations effects on transmissibility/infection led the evidence about myocarditis. Before either of those bits of evidence came out, the vaccines were nevertheless VERY effective at reducing hospitalisations from COVID-19 caused by early strains in those initial trials. I've also only really heard of the Pfizer trial's being severely criticised after the fact.
So there was good cause to get vaccinated the entire time, although the value of vaccination kept dropping as new strains kept cropping up which were seemingly less impaired by vaccination, and after omicron I saw a huge amount of people start to skip vaccination.
The training the she did is the possums program from Australia, if somebody wants to look it up I think some resources are available for free.
It was Molière (<1622 - 1673), who wrote a play that featured an apothecary (explaining the functioning of opium to laymen), but no examinations.
Really the advice given is simply ridiculous. I honestly think most men who's children have nursed can give better advice than the lactation consultants. One that always makes me roll my eyes is the idea that a breastfed child should eat for a few minutes and then be full for an hour or two. That is simply... Not how it works. Babies like eating and being with mom. Breastfeeding mothers should expect to be with their newborn all the time. We are lucky to know many breastfeeding mothers and I don't know any family where the baby is satiated after ten minutes. And yet... The professionals are convinced this is how it works
I once proved that my wife got the wrong prescription by just holding her old and new glasses up at arms length and seeing that things looked way different through them. The glasses place agreed.
It’s just incredible the injustice that can be done in the name of protecting children. I really do wonder if it’s cultural or some kind of innate psychological irrarionality that seems stronger in some than others. I love kids and care deeply about their welfare, but people sometimes try to make me feel bad or that I’m the weird one for being able to think (I believe) fairly rationally about the risks and dangers that they face, instead of massively over-exaggerating!
Or of course the opposite, keeping an appropriate eye on relations and acquaintances when people assume they’re totally safe but it’s actually somebody with that level of relation who’s likely to be a danger than a stranger.
Can you point to some canonical sources on this? Preferably things that were published in the last year or so.
My understanding is that effects on infection and transmission were overstated and very short lived anyway. Didn't everybody get covid eventually, multiple times even?
I think there are people drawn to the absolutes. I can maybe see how it can be comforting to have a black and white issue to try to solve / help. A good side to be a part of in a world that to some seems very bad or confusing.
Some old friends of mine are very much into these kinds of children’s issues. But when they talk to you about it it’s all emotion, it’s not even clear to me that they know much at all other than a sense that the bad guys are out there, maybe some strange legislation they support and so on. They’re not interested in justice, just this absolute sorta cause.
Nothing. Those people are one-in-a-million anomalies. If it weren't for the media hype surrounding them, their impact on society would be comparable to the impact of deaths from lightning strikes. What do we do about people being struck by lightning? Nothing.
Questioning witnesses is literally the DA's job. That doesn't magically stop being the case just because the witness is an expert. The DA is indeed qualified for this. You could even say it's one of the main reasons the DA exists.
Indeed. And not just in relation to parenting. The average doctor is constantly trying to emulate TV doctors, just like the average police detective is influenced by what they see on CSI, and every archaeologist wants to be Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. It would be hilarious, if it didn't have such disastrous consequences for regular people every day.
The author of this post admitted that it took him countless hours to discover that medicine basically has this issue wrong and only after being particularly motivated to do so. If the DA has so much medical expertise that they know better than the doctors, then what exactly is he doing being a DA?
The idea that the main purpose of the DA is to know better than doctors is ludicrous.
This is why using experts for advice is great but everyone should still be encouraged to do their own research.
I think that's being way too charitable.
In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, and where prosecutorial success is measured by number of scalps taken, the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense than it all being just a big pile of incompetence and misunderstandings.
So to be plain: No, DA's don't (and aren't supposed to) just take experts by their word. They ask clarifying questions, and often bring additional experts offering contradicting testimony.
Do you seriously think courts operate by "the doctor said so, case closed"? We wouldn't need courts if that were the case.
The first is practically necessary but unsatisfying given well-known concerns about scientific replication, knowledge dissemination, and industry incentives.
The second isn't practical for most people.
I don't have detailed interventions to suggest right now, but it seems clear that we need better _systems_ that result in less dogmatic behavior among experts and legal systems.
They had no care for my wife's ability to heal, rest, or anything, just subjecting us to the worst kind of institutionalized checklist torture. The medical system cares for nothing other than preventing lawsuits and providing a place for doctors to do their 1 hr of work on their 18 patients a day.
> Do you seriously think courts operate by "the doctor said so, case closed"? We wouldn't need courts if that were the case.
For certain things.. yes. If a doctor tells a jury that these injuries could only be sustained via shaking trauma, most juries will believe them over a rogue doctor or a non doctor. Doctors have some of the highest trust ratings of all professions. Attorneys have some of the lowest. That means convincing the jury the doctors are wrong.
The blame should lay at the feet of the medical professional bodies.
B. infantis and human milk oligosaccharides create a feedback loop that encourages the formation of a robust immune system during a critical period [1]. Some formulas contain b. infantis, and some contain 2'FL, the HMO present in breastmilk. The most robust strain is EVC001, which has been shown to be present at a year after 21 days of supplementation. In an observational study, it reduced the diagnosis of necrotizing enterocolitis in very low birth rate infants by 73% [2].
I wish this was common knowledge, but most formulas do not contain these (often they contain other pre and probiotics) and babies are missing out on the specific sugars and bacteria that we know impact the development of the immune system.
1. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00660-7 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35032555/
Why would we have to? We can just hire M. Rossant.
There are way too many instances of infants "failing to thrive" because their mothers are bullied into relying on breast milk which they simply aren't producing enough of.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/peerReview?id=10.1...
I've certainly had peer reviewers trying to get me to cite their own papers in my articles, however I've never seen an instance where a peer reviewer alleged that an article I've cited was by someone disreputable.
I have not seen result like this obtained in a randomized, controlled trial, and it is almost certainly false as stated: you're almost certainly exaggerating for effect, but doing that in scientific context is bad intellectual hygiene.
All results of this sort that I have seen have been purely correlational, and as such suffer from selection bias. This might be true, but the evidence is far from conclusive, and if such consensus exists among medical professionals, it only shows how susceptible they are to groupthink and parroting the stuff they heard from the cathedra.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medsch...
People will probably find it offensive but it does explain a lot about why the stuff being taught is almost always not questioned.
This post in particular:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101211180021/http://www.medsch...
You just need a court order to do a paternity test, they're not banned but regulated by law.
This is just speculation, but I bet those groups (or their members) aren't always calmly and coolly trying to find the best policies protect the welfare of children. Instead they feel themselves on a kind of righteous moral crusade, and what's more heroic than swooping in to take the child away from the clutches of the villain? The feelings of heroism could obscure understanding the harm the "heroic act" could cause.
If we were applying the default "random stranger" rules, the story never would have been shared in the first place.
Can you accidentally shake a baby? Can my 2 year old daughter get shaken baby syndrome when older children on an inflatable castle with her jump and bounce too wild around her (she can't jump yet but loves the bouncing)? I've also often seen parents throw their children a bit in the air and then catch them. The children like it and laugh.
I'm not even speaking of law and police but medically. Can this seriously hurt my daughter?
Are people absolutely nuts? Is this just a thing in France or is this elsewhere in Europe or even the US? You're actively encouraging people to not bring their children to the ER by doing this crazy nonsense.
- Medical science handles variation by simply assuming that large enough samples will average out variation. This loses a ton of information as the “average person” is a construct that almost certainly doesn’t exist.
- news media on medical science glosses over all uncertainties in the name of clickbaity sensationalism.
- lawyers are the incentivized by our adversarial legal system to adopt aggressively hyperbolic interpretations of the science to sue people and extract money.
- medical associations then tweak policies to protect against malpractice
Run this loop enough times and lots of noise gets amplified.
My hope is the AI+sensors ushers in the era of truely personalized medicine.
We either accept the randomness of fate or we live in self-made prisons.
In a (somewhat) post-scarcity society attention from others is hard currency and narcissism is at an all time high.
That's a lot of work, a lot of malice, a lot of hate, from a lot of people, for a very meagre result.
If that's how you view your government you must live a really painful existence
> As the global population grew 21 per cent, between 2000 and 2019, the number of prisoners worldwide jumped by more than 25 per cent, according to the UNODC data.
So, worldwide trend is upward.
> While Northern America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe have experienced a long-term decrease in imprisonment rates of up to 27 per cent, other regions and countries, such as Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, have seen up to 68 per cent growth over the last two decades, the study revealed.
So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand?
Overall your own source supports their point and contradicts your own.
And crimes weren't solved, people not prosecuted, criminals not punished
For much of history life didn't even exist, that's not an argument for or against anything
Power is not a meagre result. For those people who live by it, it is the ultimate goal, and they will use any means to obtain and expand it, no matter the cost to others.
It's more that 'shaken baby syndrome' is caused by more things than just a shaken baby (and evidence that shaking does not cause it even.)
> the more neutral and objective term of “retino-dural hemorrhage of infancy” (RDHI).
It also has some similar pitfalls, as they are not necessarily specialists and it's still hard to disagree or do something else even if in your own home in the face of the supposed expert.
That's the banality of evil.
So, one may perceive incarceration as an improvement.
Plus majority of it never went through tria, because trial is just too much risk. So, there are not all that many actual checks and balances
"The state" doesn't benefit in any way from locking people up. In fact, it costs them money (both directly and in lost taxes from the lost salaries and wages of those incarcerated).
An argument could be made that prosecutors benefit from higher incarceration rates through the incentives you described. And an argument could definitely be made that private corporations paying well-below-market rates for prison labour benefit.
I've been there with my wife and I'm only the husband.
Everything you say is true, but by saying this and in this manner, you lack empathy. You sound just like the mommy blogs and their followers that I'm speaking against who spout facts with no room for life's situations. My wife sincerely believed she was less of a mother because of people like this.
I say it again: Formula is _perfectly_ fine. Use it a little or as a total replacement. You're not a lesser mother/parent for it.
This seems to have led to the pendulum swinging too much in the opposite direction, where they now seemingly force foster kids to meet their biological parents against the kid's will[2]...
[1]: https://rett24.no/articles/norge-felt-i-ni-nye-barnevernsake...
[2]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/mener-fosterbarn-presses-til-skadel...
I've been as the husband there and are all your facts don't allow for people's situations.
Formula is perfectly fine.
Judges can issue preliminary injunctions before trial in all places in the world. A justice system that can't take any coercive action until the end of a trial would simply not function.
In particular though, cases like this aren't even related to the presumption of innocence. The state believes that the child has suffered harm, so a judge takes them in protective custody. Who is harming the child remains to be determined, but taking the child into custody is supposed to protect the child immediately.
Of course, this can be, like in this case, wrongly applied to disastrous effects. But it has also saved many children from abusive parents, where leaving them without state protection for years while the trial advances would have scarred them permanently or killed them.
I cannot imagine losing custody of your child while he's in an emergency situation for a couple months. This must be a nightmare.
Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Rather than some doctors and legal professionals assuming SIDs was a simple explanation for a not very well understood medical phenomenon probably with many causes.
Not like it hasn't happened before. And you're overestimating the required massiveness of the conspiracy IMO.
They see a lot of bad stuff which causes them to have a difficult time admitting that sometimes bad stuff just happens on it's own
Reminds me of the police/detectives that "just know he did it" because they don't understand that people grieve differently. I really empathize with the people that don't have a meltdown and cry when they hear some horrific news. I don't think I would either in many cases. I'd want the cops to do their job and go find the perp so I'd talk to them in a calm and concise manner telling them what I knew; even though that's likely highly suspicious behavior.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/child-abuse-or-med...
This also reminds me a lot of the indoctrination we went through at the hospital when my daughter was born.
Despite being a high risk pregnancy we were railroaded into a natural birth. After nearly 24 hours of horrific labor she spiked an extremely high fever and they had to do a c-section, making us feel like failures. They found that our daughter wouldn’t have made it otherwise.
We were castigated because my wife took medicines that entered her milk and were made to feel like failures for considering not breast feeding. She had to pump milk at five AM before she took any medicine to minimize the exposure to the extremely toxic medicine that would be present in her milk. She didn’t produce enough milk and we were at wits end. The nurses and doctors at the hospital were unhelpful and treated us like abusers. When we went to our local pediatrician he laughed and said entire generations were raised on formula and to stop killing ourselves. It was the best advice we were ever given.
Likewise my daughter couldn’t sleep on her back. She wailed every night. I read everything I could find on SIDS and I realized the correlation for back sleeping was very weak - almost statistically irrelevant - and even then the prevalence of SIDS was very low. Yet I knew for 100% my daughter wasn’t sleeping. I knew if I told anyone I would be lectured, and I worried might even be reported. The after nearly a week of not sleeping I flipped her over one night with my heart pounding. She fell asleep immediately. She didn’t die.
She’s nine now and an incredible athlete and has a sharp and brilliant mind. None of the doomsday stuff occurred. No autism, no weak immune system, no weight problems, intellectual deficiency, or all the other warnings we were given about c-section, formula, or belly sleeping. Over the years I continued to read the research and there’s basically nothing compelling about any of this advice, at least not at the level of stridency parents experience.
It just turns out that they had far too little data and that in real-world conditions they weren't anywhere near the 90+% claimed effectiveness.
Even so, the latest population-level research still suggests that the vaccines were 50-60% effective at preventing Covid-19 entirely, at least for some months.
Perhaps something to help you cope with this is that our brain although fragile has a lot of redundancy around it.
On a fall or bounce our neck will decelerate our fall/bounce, there is no need to be an athlete, our muscles have a contraction reflex if they are violently streched (myotatic reflex), less so for very young babies with weak neck muscles (think less than 6/9 months).
Then our skull is filled with fluid which has inertia so the force on the skull is not directly transmitted to the brain. You have to slush the liquid around quite a bit before your brain experiences any meaningful force.
Effectively it is only with some extreme force or internal bleeding compressing the brain that brain damage would occur.
Or do you have _evidence_?
I think the most productive thing I can at least try to do is to raise awareness among lawyers, doctors, and all professionals involved. No one has the time to dig into it as much as I did, but perhaps I can organize and present our current knowledge as clearly as possible. The book is one little step in this direction.
If you read the rest of the article, you will realize that this was the absolute happy path in that kind of situation. That's the real horror story: that the default path involves stuff like losing custody forever, incarceration, suicide, divorce etc.
AI can lie. It means a "truely personalized medicine" would sometimes poison its patients. See for instance Donald Knuth experiment with Chat GPT, starting with "Answer #3 is fouled up beautifully!" with some totally wrong AI answers https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt
Of course medical science could make a better use of statistics, get help from AI, and discern more profiles (e.g. one US adult out of two is obese, and it's often unclear how to adjust medication to person mass). But that's a long process, with no obvious path, and much distinct from the magic "AI will solve it all".
The takeaway of biomechanics studies is basically that you should be much more careful about accidental head impacts on hard surfaces.
It's the classic "N guilty men" problem, aka Blackstone's ratio: if you risk putting one innocent person in jail, how many guilty people you need to catch to make it morally justifiable? 5, 10? 100?
You have to pick a number, or else no kind of criminal justice can exist.
B) Beyond that, my understanding is that once a child is past the infant phase where they cannot support their own head, they’re fine. Humans are not all that delicate. Bumps and falls are inevitable, I don’t see how we would have seen success as a species if the risk were outsized. And I guess we’ve been around for a while by now.
C) TFA does mention this a little but it is split across a wide gap and is not the focus. I pulled the two quotes I think are relevant below.
> And yet, although subdural and retinal hemorrhage may be caused by non-accidental trauma, especially when impact is involved, they simply are not specific for it: indeed, it has been demonstrated that a wide range of accidental events and medical conditions are plausible alternative causes. Particularly fragile infants may sustain severe head injuries following minor household falls. Others may suffer from genetic conditions, metabolic disorders, blood clotting abnormalities, or infections.
> On the other hand, there exist dozens of documented cases of witness reports of shaking, videotaped shakings, and spontaneous admissions of shaking, but without subdural and retinal hemorrhage. In fact, there is virtually no known case of a reliably-documented event of violent shaking without impact of a healthy baby resulting in isolated subdural and retinal hemorrhage (additional markers of trauma would be expected in such cases). In contrast, there have been numerous cases of videotaped or witnessed short falls resulting in these very medical findings, considered “impossible” by the shaking hypothesis.
So it’s like they say: it’s not the fall that gets you, it’s when you land.
I also found this argument absurd: I was suspected of losing my temper on my child, and it's my calmness that was interpreted as a sign of danger!
It reminds me the Robert Roberson Texas death penalty case that John Grisham recently wrote about [1]: "He told hospital staff that she had fallen out of bed, but they didn’t believe him. They didn’t know he was autistic and decided he didn’t show the proper emotions given the dire situation."
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-o...
Here in Sweden this child abduction idiocy is upheld by three doctors who all refer to each other as the experts proving baby shaking is real. It's a disgrace.
For the people in child welfare organizations, for social workers, for doctors, for police, for judges to change their mind about current and future decisions requires them to change their mind about past decisions. The necessary implication is that many of the people they have persecuted in the past were, in fact, innocent. It requires them to admit that they personally have likely caused untold suffering to parents, caretakers, and children.
This is hard for anyone; but if you've lived your life trying to be the hero, feeling good about swooping in and rescuing children from the clutches of evil villains, how can you face the fact that you are the evil villain in so many children's stories?
You might call this the Paradox of Judgment: If you don't say that something is that bad, then lots of people don't think it's a big deal and don't do anything about it. But if you do say that something is really bad, then there develop all these pathologies of denialism around it.
It's more likely that a fall (or being thrown) would cause the symptoms.
Most parents don't realize that anytime they interact with a medical doctor (or another professional), they interact with someone who was trained to detect "signs of abuse", which basically can be anything out of the ordinary. They are required by law to report any suspicion of abuse, and they can be prosecuted if they fail to do so. The incentives are pretty clear. Unfortunately, while this obviously protects some children, there are adverse effects such as an enormous waste of human and financial resources to unsubstantiated reports [2].
To quote Wikipedia (this is more generally about hotline calls but this also affects healthcare professionals):
"There are approximately 3.6 million calls each year nationwide (..) affecting on average 1 out of 10 U.S. families with children under the age of 18 each year (there are 32.2 million such families). (...) Of those substantiated, over half are minor situations and many are situations where the worker thinks something may happen in the future.
Each year, approximately 85% of hotline calls either do not warrant investigation or are not substantiated. Approximately 78% of all investigations are unsubstantiated and approximately 22% are substantiated, with around 9% where "alternative responses" are offered in some states, which have a focus on working with the family to address issues rather than confirming maltreatment."
On this topic, I highly recommend "Take Care of Maya" on Netflix.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_reporting_in_the_Uni...
[2] https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/50/1/Articles/50-1_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
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
I remember that as I was questioning the diagnosis at the hospital and trying to make sure there wasn't another medical explanation, I was basically threatened by doctors who told me, "Just stop asking questions and accuse your nanny as everyone else, or you'll be the one in trouble". Apparently, it was very unusual for a parent to refrain from accusing the nanny when she was the suspect number 1!
I actually know one case where the parents (with a high education) were "too fast" in exonerating their nanny and tried to find a second medical opinion on their own to find out why their child was sick. Well, the judicial system didn't like it and they ended up being accused themselves. Their child was taken away for 4 months. The trauma was so intense that their family didn't survive and they eventually divorced (that's unfortunately the fate of many, if not most families).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/texas-death-ro...
Well, this wouldn't even be that bad, if sample size were actually large enough.
I think it's reasonable to say that billions of babies may have been shaken in the past, yet the vast majority (of the order of 99.9% or even much more? [2]) are not diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome, since this diagnosis has an incidence of ~1/3,000 among children < 12 months in developed countries. In the countries where the incidence of shaking appears to be >50%, it is striking to note that the SBS diagnosis actually does not exist, i.e. doctors are not trained to diagnose it.
On the other hand, actual cases of severe inflicted head injuries probably affect < 1/10,000 children < 12 months, and I think most of them involve external evidence of trauma. Those that do not probably involve extreme forms of shaking far beyond what most of the billions of "shaken babies" sustain.
In other words, I've come to the likely conclusion that the intersection of babies who are effectively shaken, and babies who are labelled with "shaken baby syndrome", is an abysmal proportion of the first set, and a small proportion of the second.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074937970...
[2] Excerpt from the paper above: "the ratio of children hospitalized or dying from inflicted neurotrauma compared to the numbers of reported shaken children may be estimated at 1 to 152."
That means if you see 'AHT' without bruises (etc) it was probably not actual shaking.
Is that even legal ?
Anyone trying to get between my kids and I is going to have a very bad day.
In any case, these situations are extremely rare, much more than those involving any kind of head impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
We got 800,000 or so right now. Fight unemployment? Lock more people up.
People like me who challenge the science behind the diagnoses of SBS face an absolutely unprecedented and unreasonable pushback, like I've never seen in any other area. Basically everyone who has worked on this side has faced threats, insults, personal attacks, cancellations, boycotts, and so on. The "cognitive bias" you mention (does it have a name? perhaps cognitive dissonance?) is a likely reason for this amount of antagonism.
Whatever it is:
- If it's in the name of protecting the children, odds are it is not justice.
- If it is not justice, at some point the excuse will be to protect the children
Probably a faux pas here these days, but reminds me of Elon Musk’s First Principles.
That was 20+ years ago, my career was not there so I left clinical work but the ability to function during high stress and deal with the present mentally stuck with me. I also could mostly leave it at the door and it didn’t weigh on me outside work (I think most healthcare workers can do this, it all just becomes normal.
Since then, I’m the one that springs into action instead of paralyzed by shock/surprise. Saved someone choking in a restaurant, pulled a pregnant woman from a burning car after an accident, just a few weeks ago someone had a stroke at a park and I had to figure out best way to help - all these had many other bystanders just watching it happen and they all just were frozen until I came over and took charge barking order about call an ambulance or telling them exactly how to help. I’ve also learned that when something really bad happens in my life, like bad diagnoses/death of loved ones, my immediate response is to help and support what ever immediate actions are needed, talk about what needs to be done, help others experiencing immediate and usually uncontrollable grief. My grief usually starts a day or two later once all the immediate concerns are addressed.
Anyway, we don't need this level of scientific detail and knowledge to say that no one should ever shake a baby. All brutal gestures are obviously harmful and dangerous.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00381-022-05577-6
This is only true, because prior to these times, people were killed instead. Or beaten to within an inch of their lives. Local "justice", lynching, mob action, used to be far, far more common.
And of course, many people used to be worked to death. Or sold into slavery. Or die from horrid conditions in jail. Or forced into the foreign legion.
While I agree that something may be wrong in the US, there are many regions in the world where the above still happens.
My personal opinion is that the advantages of co-sleeping far outweigh the risks. It is much less stressful for both the parents and the baby. My wife simply slept topless, turned (half-sleeping) to our baby whenever it was crying, and immediately fell back asleep.
Modern western police forces, with all their foibles, are far, far, far better than mob justice.
Are people even aware of history, and how absolutely bloody it was, with an immense lack of personal rights?
Fixing what's broken now is good. Trying to pretend it is worse than what was before, is absolutely absurd and laughable.
Honestly I don't know which study you're talking about, and I'm not trying to question what you're saying (such studies indeed often use exaggerated amounts because it's more likely to show effects, but it can skew the results of course) but I just found it interesting that depending on what "feeding them coffee in the amount of 3/4 of their body weight" means, well over a pregnancy it's easy to consume 3/4 of one's body weight in coffee.
It means about 150 mL coffee per day for a woman weighing 55 kg, over 9 months.
About SIDS and sleeping with the children in the same bed, if I remember correctly (it's been some time since I had to read about this) the very large majority of cases happened with parents who either smoke or are obese. I think I couldn't find precise stats just for non-smoking, non-obese parents but it seems like SIDS basically didn't happen in this case when co-sleeping. It also almost never happens with immigrant parents for some reason (even though they are statistically more likely to practice co-sleeping, here in Europe).
In other countries the clearance rates are as high as ever. The US is an exception in many aspects in the West, closer to third world countries depending on what metric you look at
> overall, findings showed that the clearance rate in Finland and Switzerland in the years of analysis was very high, in some years of the analysis even reaching 100 percent. Internationally, these rates are extraordinary high, even in comparison with other European countries such as Italy (67 percent and, later, 78 percent) , Estonia (80 percent), England & Wales (85 percent) and France (80 percent)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708187648...
Welcome to healthcare. For many conditions having a medical degree is straight up deleterious to a doctor's ability to accurately diagnose and treat a condition.
To be honest the text you are quoting doesn't talk about Western Europe at all, and I think if you exclude Western Europe, then "Northern America + Eastern Europe" is most of what remains of "western countries". Australia and New Zealand, while part of western countries, are so small that they are basically insignificant for statistics.
The data in the source[0], though, says the number of prisoners in Europe as a whole (as well as Northern America) has decreased (Figures 10, 12, and 13) confirming what GP said. Eastern Europe is quoted specifically because the decrease has been much more important (basically, the numbers are becoming similar to Western Europe).
There's no question that the trend in the West has been a decrease in incarceration rate, with Australia and New Zealand clear outliers.
[0]https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics...
But as an altruistic move for the greater good it is good.
I have recommended some citations to be removed as a reviewer. It’s not useful to keep citing discredited articles that should have been retracted. Keeping them in new articles just makes them more likely to be read uncritically and further propagate bullshit.
OTOH, the argument is “the article is rubbish”, not some kind of as hominem attack because I don’t like the main author.
My point goes beyond that one: yes, variance is a problem. But _even_ _just_ getting good averages, for all their faults, requires a bigger n than many studies have. Especially observational studies.
I don't think this is a very solid maxim. It seems to imply things other than justice can only occur if protecting children is a claimed motive.
A bit like temporary restraining orders pending trial in the US.
If you’re in a bouncy house with kids, consider avoiding any bouncing yourself.
Not everyone is equipped to do this kind of literature review (that’s not research), or have access to all these papers. Everyone needs to be critical and skeptical to a reasonable extent, but this kind of “do your own research” attitude is damaging. People just end up trusting dodgy but authoritative-sounding YouTube videos and blog posts because they cannot read scientific articles.
From Cialdini: "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."
"Confirmation bias", where you tend to see what you expect to see, is narrower; but still I think doesn't capture what we're talking about. We're specifically talking about resistance to accepting the idea because accepting it would mean reclassifying actions you yourself had taken from "very good" to "very bad". It's kind of weird that it doesn't have a name -- I'm convinced it plays a pretty big part of human behavior, much more than is commonly acknowledged.
When medical experts claim they're 100% confident that this child was violently shaken at this specific time, and that you were the only person with the child at that time, how can you defend yourself when you haven't done anything? There's nothing you could ever do to convince courts that your word has more value than the confidence of highly reputable experts with decades of experience.
This is an instance where the prosecution's case relies on the confidence in medical authorities, and where it is extremely hard to challenge it as the subject is so difficult on a scientific and technical level. In the US and other adversarial jurisdictions, you see an incredible level of technicality during oral debates, with extensive and long-running discussions around extremely obscure points related to the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the infant nervous system in highly specific pathological situations, where infants frequently suffer from multiple rare medical conditions or risk factors. Few people in the world have the required expertise, and even fewer accept to testify in courts! There's also an obvious financial imbalance between the State and the defendant.
In inquisitorial jurisdictions like France, this is even worse as there's basically no system in place to challenge the views of the State's experts.
So, yes, litigating these cases is extraordinarily challenging because the only way to prove the defendant's innocence is to challenge the opinion of overly assertive medical experts by digging into highly difficult (and multidisciplinary) science.
That's exactly it. I'd love to discover scientific literature about this phenomenon, and I'd also be surprised if it doesn't already have a name and an extensive literature. But if that's the case: I think there are research carriers in psychology to make here...
Edit: ChatGPT found "belief perseverance" [1] but, again, that's not exactly what we're talking about, which also relates to a personal sense of morality and "being one of the good guys".
A lot of the comments here are missing this key statement. While there can be medical explanations for things that look like SBS, it’s exceedingly rare
Infants are routinely given vitamin K and vitamin D to prevent bleeding and to prevent bone development issues. Imagine if there was something else that could be given to prevent brain bleeds. That would save a lot of children.
Acknowledging that formula is a safe alternative and that you don't need to stress.
That's only the case if overall children taken away from their parents end up with better outcomes than in societies where children aren't taken away from their parents, have you seen any data showing this is the case? Children in foster care tend to have horrifically bad outcomes, statistically speaking.
There simply is no data to prove they ever prevented transmission. The trials were the best place to prove that, and they DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO TRY.
The harm we cause is better explained by systematic reasons (workload, case complexity, red tape, worker burnout and apathy, racism)
The term is used to describe the stages a country has been through, and there’s plenty of evidence that as countries develop further, the nature of those developments may or may not be beneficial.
Brexit, online safety and other forms of “progress” come to mind.
If they are experts. The problem lies in distinguishing those who actually do have expertise in the field in question from those who merely think that they do and can persuade others that they do.
In many medical contexts there is no such thing as an expert because the data simply doesn't exist, they are sometimes simply more capable than the general public.
Thousands upon thousands. By some estimates upwards of 10% of incarcerated individuals. The situation is just accepted. The general consensus is always that locking up too many people is better than than too few. It is on defense attorneys to check on the system.
The fact of the matter is, the article here is a brief overview describing none of the actual scientific literature at a level that should be convincing to a medical practitioner. But you read it and are apparently convinced of the author's point. So, a layperson (I assume, in your case) is presented with some well-written evidence from an authoritative perspective, alongside broad contours of the actual medical evidence but no details, and is convinced that it's true. Is it so hard to believe that a child welfare worker would be equally convinced under the same circumstances when talking to a doctor, neurologist, trauma surgeon, etc. who believes the opposite as this author?
When I was 14 or so I fell off my dirt bike and broke my arm, both bones in my forearm.
Went to the hospital. About 5 people asked me how it happened taking about an hour, while I was WRITHING in pain.
Finally, I complained to the right nurse and she got me something for the pain. It was just enough to stop crying, not enough to stop feeling it.
I later found out that the intake nurse was concerned about abuse.
I was dressed head to toe in dirtbike gear. I was a 150lb 14 yr old. my mother was 110 lbs.
They delayed treatment so multiple people, nurses, doctors, and hospital staff could all ask me what happened and compare if I told them the same thing.
That’s why the SIDS reduction measures are mostly ‘sleep on the back, in an empty crib, with nothing soft around’.
But it’s much easier to tell a grieving parent that there’s nothing they could have done, than that their baby got unlucky and suffocated to death.
https://3dc.org.uk/press-release-preliminary-study-of-uk-sha...
Louise Woodward was the nanny involved and the court case was televised. Was huge at the time I remember.
This exact thing has happened to me so many times, on so many different medical topics, that it is now my going in assumption that if I review the literature, this is what I'll find. The most flabberghasting case was one in which I was able to determine the standard of care the doctors insisted on was in flat contradiction to the established science in the course of an afternoon. As a mathematician by training, I am used to checking the reasoning behind everything I believe for myself. I can understand not having taken months and months to delve into a deeply technical topic, but when the state of affairs can be determined in an afternoon? I cannot fathom spending a career giving people advice and never having looked that far.
My favorite example of obvious, silly unscientific behavior is the basic set of practices and beliefs surrounding blood pressure. Blood pressure varies a lot, second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour, and day to day, with an astonishing range, for a very long list of reasons both benign and concerning. It is an obvious fact, well known and easy to establish by anyone with a measuring device and a little statistical curiosity. The literature, the instruction books shipped with measuring devices, the procedures followed by doctors and nurses, the procedures they say they should be following, bear all the hallmarks of the behavior of the statistically unsophisticated seeking patterns and meaning in randomness. But my very favorite behavior is the sheer cognitive dissonance. I have had nurses take my blood pressure while varying the circumstance - sitting, lying, this arm, that arm - until they got the answer they wanted, reported it to a doctor, who compared it to a chart with great authority and made a claim about my health over a span of months and years. I have had a five minute conversation with a doctor about the statistical variation of the number and the fact that best practices involve taking many measurements and he opined that it wasn't really valid unless you measured it over twenty four hours... and then said, "anyway..." and proceeded in the next sentence to diagnose me and argue strenuously for a prescription based on a single measurement and no context.
One of the things I find cynically, darkly entertaining is how often the standard advice is, not just random, not just useless, but exactly wrong. The diet they insist on to manage gallstones is known to cause gallstones. The treatment traditionally insisted on for diabetes is known to kill you faster the more exactly you comply. The saline typically used in hospitals, compared to an electrolyte balanced solution, is known to kill patients. They institutionally get saline wrong!
The absolute theatrics and bureaucracy required historically to institute handwashing in hospitals indicates a cultural problem, and the current state of affairs suggests to me that it remains. I am not talking about advancing scientific knowledge here - I am talking about accounting for things that are well known and can be checked with little effort so long as one is not intimidated by basic science. The prospect of professional mathematicians behaving this way is laughable. Everyone knows the discredited results and no one would dream of using them. The prospect of cybersecurity professionals taking years to apply a patch after a security flaw is discovered beggars belief. Yet here are the doctors, insisting with great pomp and authority on easily checkable wrong things, and they have apparently been doing so in many domains, for a very long time. I know there is value in medical advice, and in many situations I seek it, but it is enough to make one want to throw in the towel and consult the aromatherapists and their healing crystals - at least they won't insist on something destructive!
The words "scientific medicine" clearly do not mean what I would think they should mean.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00029...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/54/7/203/1...
Regardless, cherry-picking even such an incredibly gerrymandered “West” ignores the entire point of the source: the human population in prison has risen faster than the human population itself… pointing to minor improvements in the world’s largest prison state and what remains of the ex-Soviet gulag system states while ignoring considerably larger regressions in, for example, a nation colonized specifically to be a prison does nothing to contradict that fact.
I don’t think it was supposed to be aspirational.
Note that I carefully did not say anything about what abuse is. Unfortunately there is no agreement and I don't want to get into that debate (it is well worth having, but it would change the direction I'm trying to go here).
I've seen cases where parents call the ER after a collapse of their child, only to see their child wake up just fine a few minutes later. The EMT tells them it's not necessary to bring their child to the hospital given the child has recovered, but the parents insist. At the hospital, sometimes they have to insist too for a CT scan to be performed. This is where doctors find subdural bleeding and the parents end up accused, the child is removed for months, etc. Yet, the child gets no particular medical treatment. None of this would have occurred if the parents hadn't insisted!
Further research was of course done - on rats - with much the same methodology.
Medicine is really prone to falling for this sort of thing - and it’s honestly no great shock, recalling the calibre of people at school who went on to become doctors. I studied physics, for Christ’s sake, and knew more about metabolic pathways than third year med students who I would help cram.
Honest question, trying to parse your statement (and bear in mind I don't live in Europe, so I'm surely missing the obvious): do you mean that in Denmark there is a bias against Eastern Europeans, such as Romanians?
Edit: excellent, got a downvote for asking an honest question and clarifying why I wrote it. Is this an example of the fine discourse we are supposed to have here? This is an honest question, I'm neither European nor a native English speaker and I have difficulty parsing the sentence I quoted. How on earth does this warrant downvotes?
They do a lot of mental gymnastics trying to run from the idea that their main function is to imprison and take away peoples rights, often without due process.
Medical industry is rife with abuse. They routinely kill people out of spite, torture dying people and their families, and want to be shielded from any criticism... so fuck all the patients and look for reasons they're "not righteous", etc, so you can dismiss them.
It's quite interesting (and disturbing) to see how much culture evolves around deflecting blame and victim blaming.
If you consider "the West" to be (as is commonly admitted) Europe, Northern America, Australia and New Zealand (with maybe Japan included) then incarceration rates have decreased in the West. Even if they have increased in minor countries (AU + NZ).
You're getting stuck on a sentence of the summary that talks about a subset of the data, but I'm not sure why. I also have no idea what you mean about a "nation colonized to be a prison", but honestly this looks to me as if you're just trying to push some idea without vocalizing it, which is a bit off-putting. If you're talking about the US, then yes it does have a much higher incarceration rate than anywhere else in the West, but it's a clear exception within the West and it is still decreasing.
"After a Quarter of a Century, Have Any Lessons Been Learned from the Trial of Louise Woodward?
Twenty-five years ago, the Louise Woodward trial in Boston (the ‘nanny murder case’) thrust shaken baby syndrome (SBS) into headlines across the globe, raising worldwide consciousness about the hypothesis that infants and toddlers could be seriously brain injured, even killed, by violent shaking. Although the case was tried in the early days of SBS prosecutions, the underlying science was fiercely disputed and litigated at trial. A quarter of a century later, although science has advanced, the issues remain just as hotly disputed and poorly understood, and yet parents and caregivers continue to be prosecuted and families torn apart based on the hypothesis."
Foucalt has his critics, but it's not immediately obvious that the massive incarceration problem in some Western nations is better than public execution at the whim of monarchs. And some forms of torture, Foucalt argued, have changed from the theatrical and public to the more subdued torture of everyday lives of prison inmates.
Except they can force people to pay them more, all they need is plausible justification (like combating crime, or terrorists, or drugs, or viruses, or whatever the current societal scare happens to be about).
According to Wikipedia, as to the distribution of this condition,
> The birthmark is prevalent among East, South, Southeast, North and Central Asian peoples, Indigenous Oceanians (chiefly Micronesians and Polynesians), certain populations in Africa, Amerindians, non-European Latin Americans and Caribbeans of mixed-race descent.
So you can see how, in a Western European nation, even if no-one is being biased in the sense of "hating foreigners", the false accusations would cluster in "non-indigenous" populations, for want of a better word (I originally had "immigrants" then realised that isn't the correct split I'm looking for.). Personally I believe there is no defense for doctors, courts and social workers not knowing about this and checking for it before making any accusations.
This doesn't seem to apply to Romanians / Eastern Europeans specifically, unless they have partly Asian ancestry, but it does show that there are conditions that can be mistaken for abuse that appear in some cultures more than others.
Hm, sounds like an assertion that ought to be checked by a historian, possibly ACoUP's blog? (Yes, the one who writes about Rome, he is sometimes featured in HN). He specializes in demolishing misconceptions people/Hollywood have about history.
For example, many historians have been writing, recently, about how medieval society was far less brutish and cruel than portrayed in pop culture. There were laws, rights the monarch gave their subjects, culture, etc. Lots of what we "know" about the middle ages from Hollywood is simply wrong.
>> My hope is the AI+sensors ushers in the era of truely personalized medicine.
> AI can lie.
The first hope is compatible with the second fact. It is possible that carefully _designed_ AI systems (that have different architectures than 'vanilla' LLMs) can serve a useful purpose here.
There is a lot of interesting conversation to be had in 'the conciliatory zone', leaving plenty of opportunities to disagree when it is warranted.
> Basically, you want to replace statistics ("large enough samples will average out variation") with AI. I'm afraid that's cargo cult instead of science.
There is a whole lot of _assuming_ going on here, followed by a mischaracterization. This is not the paragon of curious conversation.
I don't expect perfection, but I still think we should try. I don't mean to pick on any one person; I do this sometimes as well. I'm just pointing it out because, well, it is right here, right now.
Think about the impact on the system. Seeing the anti-pattern above too often can drive people away. I think it does. Who remains? People who somehow aren't bothered by it? Downselecting in this way is self-defeating.
I'm probably just as frustrated as anyone here (if not more) regarding (i) the state of medicine, (ii) perceptions of what current AI technology can do, and (iii) many other serious problems. But we shouldn't not let this frustration bleed into our personal interactions.
It is both a waste of our time and (worse) damaging to the community ethos when we take an unnecessarily pessimistic view of _each other_. Some online fora are 'good enough' (though flawed) to help us connect and build bridges as _people_. It doesn't help when we fall into the all-too-common pattern of sniping without asking questions first and clarifying meaning.
Again, nothing personal. This is more of a rant and request.
But it's far more common for academics to be able to do it because that's what academics learn to do. It's a large focus of the training.
It isn't elitist to say "car mechanics are good at reading and acting on the information in car engine manuals", that's just what car mechanics are trained to do and get consistent practice at doing.
Given a more developed country, I'd presume there are more people willing to adopt/do foster care for the right reasons and the social workers can regularly check upon the welfare of the child, thus there can be legitimate reasons to lower the threshold of taking a child out of a family setting vs a less developed country.
Constructive criticism is good. But what I mostly see (and often do myself) is just grousing.
Obviously a parent who is spending nearly all their time with a newborn knows them best and is likely able to make the best judgement about what works for the child, but the purpose of the advice is to avoid a class of scenario that occur most often. due to issues that are very difficult to detect and often go completely undiagnosed, as they pertain to early development and often improve naturally over time.
The technical report by AAP the other year does an excellent job of presenting the current evidence in an as objective way as possible, I highly recommend it:
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/1/e20220...
You will note that efforts are being made to disentangle diagnoses from the broad SIDS label and that while SIDS cases are trending downwards, it's likely due to both proper classification and education.
The point of preventative measures is to avoid the issue entirely. Sure, tummy sleeping might not be a problem for you (or maybe it was and you just got lucky!) but by generally recommending back sleeping, a class of issues is avoided.
So all in all, I really don't see this as bullshit at all. Caveat that you gotta do what you gotta do, but I'd rather this advice persist than not. We should hope that no one ever has to endure the loss of a child.
Did you mean: richer?
Not just years, but generations in some cases.
Homeschooling is debatable, if the children are evaluated to be equal to their regular schooled peers, I don't think the child should be taken out of the family environment, but should be subject to further wellness checks by social workers.
Many parents of 'mentally disabled' kids put the kids in foster care because the parents need a break from the constant care of a kid who isn't normal. Many other kids end up in foster care because they have been abused. Both of those will make the kids much worse than normal and thus much harder to care for.
Kids that are close to normal but end up in foster care often end up adopted fairly quick - there are plenty of families who want a kid but not their own (I personally know several people with genetics they don't want to pass on - there are other good reasons to not want someone else's kids) - but they will try to select a kid who is going to be easy to raise thus kids who will end up normal don't spend much time in foster care.
Sadly, that varies enormously with the social status and wealth of the accused.
If you have the requisite "knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education" you can testify as an expert. No need to be a lawyer, don't need to be a doctor.
You gave yourself that knowledge and your knowledge exceeds that of the typical "they shook the baby" expert. I'd go with you any day.
Anyway, it's not meant as an ad hom, but it helps to step back and think why people are involved with certain roles.
To be clear: here the author only bothered look with his well-trained eyes because he was sucked in after the law intruded into his life. It's easy to assume that everyone is highly-skilled. But... highly-skilled people don't usually choose to work for peanuts without other reasons. Fields like this are neglected.
As the warrior poet Maslow put it, "if the only tool you ever have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."
> Evans said the syndrome remains a fair medical diagnosis and also notes in the report that SBS was not the sole cause of child's death.
There ought to be a law where lawyers deal with legal interpretations and advice and medical doctors deal with medical interpretation and advice.
In a sane world, she'd be taken off the bench until she completes some remedial legal coursework and several dozen hours of medical talks from this century.
[1] https://www.cbs19.tv/article/news/local/judge-denies-recommending-east-texas-death-row-inmates-appeal-exoneration-new-trial/501-39bfdd8e-b687-4065-9b34-25b60c320e6cOne can teach themselves how to be a mechanic and pass the ASE. Most go through some course to learn the trade, of course. It’s more structured that way and many find it easier.
I’ve never had my auto repair shop attribute their mechanic’s skill to where they learned to be a mechanic. I never turned down a mechanic bc they didn’t go to the brown or Harvard of car repair.
On the other hand I’m an expert in my field, but I’ve been turned down from at least 1 job specifically because I didn’t graduate from Brown university. (It was a backend job for the now-defunct Delivery Dudes)
OP attributed the mettle of the author to higher education and academia, which I think is weird and elitist.
Attributing success or ability to an institution fosters that kind of weird elitism.
I do not disagree with you. I just caution as does the author that you can't rule out criminality either.
Swaddling the baby and forcing it to sleep on its back, may have a tiny statistical benefit for SIDS, but it causes tons of problems at a time when people are taxed to the limit of their abilities.
We could reduce the incident of breast cancer by removing every woman’s breasts, but that would be an improper risk assessment.
The biggest factor linked to SIDS is poverty, and after that it’s stuff like going to bed while under the influence of drugs and smoking.
The solution to reducing risk and harm is not to always err on the side of assuming abuse and making families prove otherwise.
>The results of this literature review suggest that heavy caffeine use (≥ 300 mg per day) during pregnancy is associated with small reductions in infant birth weight that may be especially detrimental to premature or low-birth-weight infants. Some researchers also document an increased risk of spontaneous abortion associated with caffeine consumption prior to and during pregnancy. However, overwhelming evidence indicates that caffeine is not a human teratogen, and that caffeine appears to have no effect on preterm labor and delivery.
So it's possible caffeine consumption is a sign of a troubled pregnancy rather than a cause of it. I'm sure there's a point where caffeine becomes problematic but that could be said of a lot of things.
There's a paper in NEJM or JAMA that pointed to this as a likely explanation but it's been a few years and don't have time to look for it now. I think they were looking at timing of caffeine consumption and nausea symptoms?
That's your assumption.
You're missing the point, which is that you can supplement formula with both 2'FL and b. infantis and get immune system outcomes that are more similar to those that occur while breastfeeding [1]. The fact that milk typically faciliates a cascade of changes that lay the foundation for a healthy immune system is not at odds with formula feeding. Formula is adequate macronutrition, but if we cannot be honest about the ways in which it is not on par with breastmilk, we will never close the gaps.
1. https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2023/05/18/Abbott-s...
I explicitly said, do your research at the end of the message.
P. S. The book might have been one of the following, I can't remember:
Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong--and What You Really Need to Know (The ParentData Series Book 1) from Emily Oyster
What to expect when you are expecting
I think it's the first one. I read many at the same time, so it's hard to remember which one had the information.
I'm pretty sure I have seen such things in nature documentaries, where a mother shakes a stillborn/dead child as a last ditch attempt to bring them back to life.
If that really was what happened, I would struggle to convict the mother for murder if I was on the the jury...
There are of course ways to improve the legal system, more equal access to quality representation is my preferred improvement regardless of system, but you can't just look at one element of the system in isolation and declare the whole concept bad. That's "The CPU produces waste heat so we need to remove it completely" type logic where you find one thing that sounds unambiguously bad and ignore that it could be a symptom of great net positive function of that thing. Doesn't mean it's perfect either, just means it needs more than a shallow dismissal.
Also, the Innocence Files is a must-watch on Netflix [3].
[1] https://innocenceproject.org/
I'm sure that you're not doing that here, but unfortunately people with genuinely honest questions have become collateral damage caused by disingenuous actors, especially among people with itchy downvote-trigger-fingers.
Sigh.
My potassium had been just fine when I came into the hospital. At this point, I stood up and read the content of the saline bag, considered how many times I'd seen it changed, did a little noodling about sodium potassium balance, and dramatically downgraded my opinion of the experts in charge of my care.
Let's imagine a mother seeing her baby who suddenly stops breathing. Panicked, she gently takes her baby under the armpits: "Please wake up!". The baby is brought to the hospital, doctors find subdural and retinal hemorrhage, she is accused of shaking her baby.
At the police station, investigators are told by doctors that SBS is 100% certain, that the baby was shaken just before collapsing. They keep pressuring the mother, who swears there was no shaking, no trauma, no accident, no short fall, absolutely nothing. The baby just collapsed with no triggering event. This is a story that is repeated again and again by most parents and caregivers who are living this situation.
This is such a dramatic and emotional situation for parents and caregivers that many will actually doubt their own memory (that actually happened to me, briefly, and yet I never went through a tough police interrogation in custody). Anyway, innocent and sincere persons will actually try to find rational explanations. They will retrospectively try to find any sort of mild movement of the baby's head that could resemble shaking. Police officers will say what they're told (which is actually true): mild shaking will not cause this, only extremely violent ones will.
At one point during the interrogation, the idea will be brought up that, perhaps, the mother accidentally shook the baby after the collapse as a resuscitation attempt. In the end, it may well be the only rational explanation? The mother may even end up believing that she involuntarily harmed her own child while trying to save him, and that will be the charge brought by the prosecution that leads the mother to trial.
In reality, this gesture was likely to be far too mild to do any serious injury to the child. However, in this particular context, it may well be the only explanation that could be accepted by both the investigators and the defendant. In these cases, it's more likely that the child collapsed due to some undetected medical condition leading to a respiratory arrest (akin to what happens in SIDS).
I've seen this pattern over and over again. It has actually be well studied by psychologists in slightly more general contexts. The book contains 2 chapters (by Keith Findley, Richard Leo, Deborah Davis) on the extremely important issue of SBS confessions, as this is basically the main evidence of the diagnosis today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_confession#Coerced_inter...
That's exactly it.
Oh do correct me if I'm wrong. I'd love to hear your personal experience. Anyway...
How can you close the gaps when the mother isn't producing milk?
I'm actually confused because you keep telling me it's better, with links and everything, but... It's simply non existent for a lot of mothers. Non producing or a bad latch is enough to put a newborn baby at risk after one week.
It's like you don't believe it's possible.
That's why you're just like the mommy blogs. "You must feed 'em breast milk. It's soooooo important"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_avoidance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_(Freud)
HN and software engineers have bias to over-focus on the cognitive, but I think the key experience here is emotional distress.
If toyota cars unintentionally accelerate and kill people, but sometimes people mistakenly accelerate and kill people. If I am driving a toyota and accelerate and kill a person, if 100% of all cops/investigators believe the first case doesn't exist, and the second case is the only possible answer, I will be thrown in jail without a second thought; my life is destroyed, and it wasn't even my fault.
But more than that, we don't even know what the ratios are, is it 90% / 10%? is it 10% / 90%? is it 50/50? Because everyone believes it is 0%/100% we can't make the "N guilty men" decision at all, so we need a hard stop, evidence, and re-start.
I know you were downvoted, but I think your thoughts are exactly the problem I am trying to point out. So thank you for commenting on it.
Now it’s important to understand what is meant when people reference incarceration numbers. A lot of these are people awaiting trial on charges they will be found guilty of but receive minimal sentences via plea bargaining. Another large portion are illegal immigrants that are awaiting processing for either integration or deportation.
So if you erase those 2 groups it’s mainly violent people. There’s an abundance of violent people in the USA compared to Western Europe and certainly Asia I’d say.
Thankfully people have responded and now I both understand the sentence and the why!
I'm guessing if some kind of Commanche social worker turned up to look at a case of blue spot, they'd go "Yeah that's a birthmark, about half our children have it, our nation even has legends about it. Have a nice day!".
A challenge is where the ripped-off children wind up, a foster home system with it's own abuse issues.
There may be some overlap between systemic racial mistreatment and child abuse - however the nuances seem to set them far apart. I believe conflating the two makes it harder to get the full measure of each.
It's not that they can't be compared. It's that they ought to be fully considered in isolation first.
We can close the gaps by subsidizing Evivo's EVC001 b. infantis and making it a standard that every formula contains 2'FL. Individuals can choose these formulas and purchase b. infantis already. If we were to make it so that all babies, not just NICU babies at hospitals aware of the research, get these two things, public health outcomes (especially those related to autoimmune conditions) should be better than if we continue allowing formula that is not as analogous with breastmilk. We can have better lactation support that is current and evidence based (such as that from ABM contributor Katrina Mitchell https://physicianguidetobreastfeeding.org).
Another reason mom blogs are toxic is because people read past others points when issues are really emotionally charged for them. Really sorry your wife struggled. Formula is fine, but there are reasons breastmilk is pushed, especially since milk is supply and demand and it's hard to identify those with true low supply and those whose bodies just haven't ramped up production yet. Hopefully as a model of immune system response and the impact of b. infantis and HMOs gains more awareness, there will be less pressure since we are assured babies are getting many of the same benefits.
Just to defuse this a bit. My #4 used to collect skull fractures. He'd slip away in a nanosecond and would be 50' above us two heartbeats later. We put him in a padded helmet for a year or so. It stayed on sometimes.
As an adult he can still disappear in an empty room.
No. This is misunderstanding due to my lack of clarity. Apologizes.
The biggest problems with Medical data is that 1) incredibly small scale data is collected to make assertions, 2) the data is horrendously de-normalized
In Radiology, a common validation approach is have radiologists review cases on the order of 250 studies to make assessments about a radiology product. This is considered the gold standard for FDA. Look into it more, vaccines, treatments. The sample sizes are fucking tiny.
The statistical assertion is that these relatively small samples capture the variation sufficiently to demonstrate efficacy across devices, treatments. These are then extrapolated to the US and wider populations. Do you believe that this is rigorously true?
The rationale underpinning this is simply practicality. You cannot get thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of patients/doctors/etc to get a strong signal and confidence. For drugs, it's super hard, but for devices and software interventions, it way easier to get data.
That brings us to the second big problem: the data structure is completely highly varied and denormalized.
1) From a pure structure point of view, it's basically free text fields that doctors sporadically fill.
2) From a underlying truth point of view, each hospital across the world has different protocols for care delivery. A histopathological FNA procedure might have a completely different meaning in CA, NY, or EU. This might simply be because of workflow, timeline, or just people using the words wrong.
What I mean with AI+Sensors:
AI doesn't need to solve the problem of intuition around medical problems. The biggest impact will likely come from the relatively mundane task of simply structuring and normalizing the data. Sensors simply help to generate more data
To be more concrete, you don't want (and shouldn't trust) this:
Prompt: "Please diagnose this person"
You want this:
Prompt: "Here is 100 TB of data from 100 different hospitals each with different workflows and patients for histopathology. For each patient, synthesize a CSV with the following schema "AnonPatientID, AnonCaseID, Pathology Result, Pathology stage, Incidenctal findings, ..."
Then I can do the analysis myself.
Hope this makes more sense.
(I work in healthtech and med device and I promise you: Demoralization at the state of medicine is a rite of passage after which you can begin to address practical problems)
Mostly they are operating on priors. The prior probability of a separation being the right thing to do is very high, because they have a _long list of mitigation before they actually can take a kid away. In the case of a doctor-approved immediate physical danger, they are regulated into acting on behalf of the immediate safety of the child while the investigation is ongoing but even that is considered temporary.
The goal of any foster care situation is to get the kids back with the biological parents, so time is on their side, provided they are not living in a circumstance that disallows the kind of attendance and involvement that the state would require to clear a caseworker to re-unite the family. Sadly, many are.
Source: Foster parent.
This wasn't SBS though, she just kept adopting out her kids to devote more time to her drug habits.
This is why Max Planch (German physicist) has quipped that science advances one funeral at a time.
If the same "tactic" is used, why not come up with a good counter? A point stands whether it's being asked disingenuously or not.
You absolutely don't have awareness of everything nearby when you're asleep. You are inherently incapable of even determining this because you're sleeping. I'm sure you react to some stimuli but that doesn't mean you can expect yourself to react to every potential stimuli that you would want to.
Why is the default, to accuse the caretakers with phantom (unfounded) certainty, absent any other good evidence?
Isn't the latter the official standard most places? Innocent until proven guilty. It's just not really a dilemma if you ask me. If you have authority to do something based on some event, then you have to prove that event happened.
The (darkly) funny thing in the case of Germany is that this lack of diversity in education has created a generation with the fertility rate of South Korea (ie dying).
In this case, the state creating a monoculture that results in the ‘destruction’ of the existing state goes to show why evolution values diversity far more than monocultures.
https://www.nbcboston.com/investigations/massachusetts-dcf-e...
CPS is a human organization. There are no algorithms and the guidelines rarely perfectly fit the situation a case worker is given. Keep this in mind. CPS is horrifically under funded meaning that intelligent and competent staff readily leave the field for better paying gigs.
The biggest problem I see with foster care at large is the rampant classism, sexism, racism, and other isms. The providers tend to be solidly middle class degree bearing people who have no personal connection to primary instigating factors of foster care involvement. Namely and typically presenting cross generationally: poverty, crimes of despair or desperation, and trauma whether that be internal or external to the family unit or community such as neighborhood violence, caregiver assault, or tragic loss.
It easy for providers to casually profile incoming children and their families as poor uneducated violent predacious drug dealing junkies. Providers are given extreme control over the entire family and their extended relations and use this power to coerce whatever behavior they desire out of the people. If the provider dislikes the family they have a lot of tools to inflict suffering on them and oppositely they have a lot of tools to assist families and keep them together.
Honestly, the entire system is such a god damn mess that it should be rebuilt with the same level of distrust of staff that they can exercise against families.
Perhaps the most pressing single metric to focus may be the foster to prison pipeline.
Sorry for the meandering post, bookcases could be filled with anecdotes and descriptions of the flaws in these systems. In general, I think the failure of child protection agencies reflects the decay in America at large. I could point to stuff like broken family units or loss of religions community but I’m not dog whistling here. Stable healthy nurturing familial units of any relation are obviously better but man in the house rules and other racist/classist measures caused more harm. I’m also vehemently opposed to all major organized religions that are regularly used to justify war and protect child sex predators. Perhaps the collapse of American industry and slow erosion of social safety nets has hastened the social collapse. Perhaps the internet had instigated the collapse of communal organizations. Perhaps winner take all government enforced monopoly capitalism is the cause. Perhaps it was the theft of 50,000,000,000.00 from the bottom 99 by the 1% that lead to this. Regardless, the solution is not going to be found in rebuilding foster care when our social fabric is rotten.
0. https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sop2.10
1. https://www.crimlawpractitioner.org/post/the-foster-care-to-....
3. https://nlihc.org/resource/study-examines-man-house-rules-vo...
4. https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
In cases like this, in the moment, it may be impossible to tell what is actually best for the child. Since removing the child is a form of remediation, it can easily seem to be less harmful than leaving them in a situation that might be actively harming them.
Even if the rules tell doctors that they need to make a report in a given scenario, they should not be following the rules when they know the bureaucracies that handle these reports are dysfunctional and prone to separating children without conclusive evidence. Imo they are responsible for protecting their patients from the system in these cases.
What a leap (the kind the article is calling out by the way). Do you really think all causes for toddler skull fractures are a societal problem?
From anecdotes I hear, that is one of the major problems with the medical system in a nutshell.
The thing is there is no needed ill intent, all parents can be sincere, and yet create a society and culture that stunts their very childrens' growth and lives. In the article, as the author said, how many thousands of parents have been separated from their child, and the infant, now parent-less, will be shuffled from foster home to foster home, all in the name of ending abuse based on filmsy evidence and poor science? It's depressing.
The very desire to protect and love leads to hurting those we intend to help.
I don't think the term Roma has a bad association, because in my experience nobody but the most woke even know it. That is the PC term. People I've encountered just use gypsy or their local equivalent.
> The doctors at the hospital were absolutely, unconditionally 100% certain that no other cause than violent shaking could ever explain blood around the brain and at the back of the eyes.
> As a precautionary measure, the hospital followed mandatory reporting statutes and my wife and I temporarily lost custody of David.
> I disturbingly realized that what I had been told at the hospital, namely that subdural and retinal hemorrhage in infants are almost always caused by violent shaking even in the absence of external evidence of trauma, was an assertion based on very weak scientific foundations.
> Thanks to our incredibly effective defense lawyer, we were cleared of all charges within two months, during which we stayed at the hospital 24/7 with David until we sorted out the legal procedures.
> Every case requires years of intense, dedicated efforts by an entire team of specialized lawyers and medical experts, but there are tens of thousands of cases and few experts willing to defend them.
Hospitals are definitely the weak link in this system. Just looking at the way the story is laid out, the solution is more lawyers and fewer, less expansive hospitals.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I'm glad I don't have to make these calls.
"Honey, I doubled the salt in the pasta this time, how does it taste?" "Oh, it's really salty". "Ha-HA! I didn't actually add ANY salt!"
(do not actually do this to people you like or who like you)
This country has weird culture that's started happening in the last decade where the parents take a back seat and the government/institutions are taking their place. Suddenly, you're hearing schools, doctor's, etc. telling kids they should come to them and not trust their parents. It's terrifying as a parent. Parents should never have to give up their rights in the name of "safety".
MANY social workers feel this way. They got into the field out of a genuine concern for the well-being of the most vulnerable members of our society, and instead found themselves dealing with politics (both real and office).
I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but in my region, they actually appoint a lawyer for the child. This is great, but it also tells you a lot about what everyone else's priorities are that children need their own lawyers:
(1) Parents want their kids back, of course. Not all parents are fit to get them back. But their lawyers fight for the return of their kids regardless of circumstances or reasons for their removal.
(2) Child protection agencies are under constant attack, so at the executive level, they lose sight of the individual kids and are instead worried about the needs of the organization and public relations.
(3) The social workers themselves are handcuffed to do anything about it and have to follow procedure, even if they can see it plainly that the procedure is not in the best interests of the child.
(4) Police want nothing to do with any of it and are quick to wash their hands of these situations.
(5) The children's lawyer somehow has to represent the needs of the child, which may place them at odds with their own clients (the kids).
(6) Activist groups will generally support the parents blindly, because by law, for the privacy of the children, the only parties listed above who can publicly speak about any given case are the parents themselves. So you can only ever hear one side of the argument. That's right: If a father, for example, sexually abuses his kids and as a result has them removed, he's free to say just about anything he likes about the matter, without ever acknowledging that he's a child molester. The other parties can't say a thing about this.
As a result, it's impossible, as a member of the public, to ever know whether it was appropriate or not that the children were removed from the care of their parents. I happen to know, from first-hand experience, that it's a mixed bag: Some parents shouldn't be allowed anywhere near any child ever, much less their own. Others are victims of a system gone haywire. And we, the concerned public, can't have an informed discussion about any of it.
All in all, it transforms child protection into a game of who-has-the-best-lawyers rather than trying to do what's right for the kids. Is it any wonder so many kids end up traumatized by this system?
He experienced 3rd degree burns on his feet and my mother rushed him to the hospital. My stepfather at the time was basically freaking out, my mother was very calm. After it was over the thing she told us is that panicking in an emergency helps no one.
It's a lesson I've kept with me my entire life. Most of the time, for me to truly process things, I need to be alone. I have no doubt I would come across as detached and not caring if something tramautic were to happen to me.
OTOH, I had to put a pet down once and I was crying like a baby so maybe not. I've never been in a situation where I haven't had time to process before really speaking about it to others so I really am not sure what my response would be.
At no point was there any sign of the staff acting like there might be abuse or neglect involved.
I've never encountered a state in which a medical doctor encountering evidence of abuse while seeing a patient is not required to report it, with the exception of some states exempting mental-health professionals told things in confidence (so a psychiatrist, which is also an MD, might not be required to report it depending on the state).
For all they know you've got a father or uncle or whoever that's huge and has anger problems who broke it.
One abusive family member and a partner who's covering for/trying to make up for their behavior (and may be being abused themselves) is a pretty common type of abusive situation.
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.
Here's one among thousands of examples, from a really terrible paper by one such powerful SBS proponent here in France [1] (another of his papers was actually retracted this year [2]).
"Fake news 11: the caretakers’ denial is sincere
Clinicians and defenders can become intoxicated by the denials of parents suffering the agony of having their child in dire condition, and at the same time being grilled for their possible responsibility. The mental mechanisms of self-denial are well-known to psychiatrists. A perpetrator, after a violent burst, and faced with its terrible consequences, can experience a dissociation mechanism similar to witnesses of catastrophes, dissociation being understood as “a break between the memory, the perception, the consciousness and the identity…when faced with unbearable feelings”. Sincere denial easily elicits compassion from the medical staff as well as defenders, a natural response which is enhanced by professional training. Some authors have documented with functional imaging the sincerity of denial in a case of convicted child abuse and concluded that the sincerity of denial is not a criterion for innocence."
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00381-021-05357-8
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00381-023-05889-1
If a child has a serious injury the circumstances should be examined, as it should be quite rare for children to have serious injuries.
That's why places have Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committees.
Still, there are different types and sources of denial, just as there are different sources of emotional bias. "Self-image maintenance bias" and "self-image maintenance denial" can both be about general ways in which we try to maintain our self image (as strong, talented, attractive, whatever). "Moral self-image maintenance bias" or "moral self-image maintenance denial" can be about ways in which we try to maintain our self-image as good, decent people.
I don't think the line is at doctors reporting, and I'll tell you why.
There are many cases of MD's having patients where they know the whole family and can't believe that abuse would be going on, so they don't report things like spiral fractures and pattern bruising in a five year old. Those are markers of serious domestic violence and abuse, but since the doc knows the parent, and the parent has a sorta reasonable explanation, fine.
No. The doctor reports, then the parents get investigated. Sorry it sucks, but the point to fix is the people interacting with the family at the point of investigation, not the report by an MD, because unfortunately the MD is going to lean towards not reporting until it is too late.
In my book, a doctor doesn't get to absolve themselves of responsibility by saying "just following orders" and that it's the investigative system that needs to be fixed. If they know the system is broken, it's both immoral and a deep betrayal of trust for them to report people without strong evidence.
Almost any injury can be framed as possible evidence of abuse. Parents shouldn't have to be afraid that taking their kids to the hospital after an injury will get them taken away. The vast majority of injuries are not from abuse, so a system with a low bar for evidence is going to end up with more false positives than cases of abuse. This is exacerbated by the fact that abusers, for obvious reasons, are often going to avoid getting medical care for the kids they abuse.
If your reasoning were applied more broadly, we'd put anyone accused of a crime, or of even planning a crime, in prison immediately, since otherwise crimes will occur (with people hurt/killed) that could have been prevented. There's a reason the legal system doesn't work this way.
Just that attributing the work and work ethic of an individual to the institution of academia is weird and fosters and propagates elitism.
It's much, much harder again to understand something if it makes your life's work ignoble.
You can be forgiven with this opinion if you have not met or spent time around the types of parents whose children genuinely need to be taken away: neglectful, abusive, and extremely harmful to their kids.
Furthermore, there's the opportunity. With large amounts of data (from software, medical devices, sensors) we can actually tackle this problem at scale.
I was a foster child who was taken from my parents wrongly. A third party (not connected to child services) made a false accusation to the cops, who took me and turned me over to child services without any investigation. Even though I insisted nothing had happened and even though child services failed to produce any evidence (beyond aforesaid hearsay) over the course of their investigation, child services nonetheless fought extremely hard against letting me go home to my family.
In the end, a judge had to order them to return me to my family because they refused to accept that the accusation had been a lie.
In the meantime, I went through three different foster homes. I was a very difficult kid to foster (I cried and screamed a lot, demanding to go home) and so I unfortunately experienced abuse and neglect in two of the three homes. (My first foster home was particularly severe, which was strange because they were otherwise great parents to their biological kids. At least the other abusive home treated their real children equally poorly.)
I relate with much of your comment but this was something I actually considered writing before. The most drastic emotional response I've ever experienced was putting a pet down. I knew it was the right choice, planned it out, to be done at home in the back yard, his favorite place and final resting place, and even made time for one last outing to his favorite lake a little while before.
But with all the planning and forethought, it's like I started grieving before the event happened. So when it did happen, I just cried and cried. Like, sobbing on the floor for an hour type thing. Also, the fact he was mentally still 100% but his body was failing made it a wrenching decision that I was questioning even though I felt like it was the humane choice.
I was really in a funk for about a year after. The first couple months, I'd just randomly cry as some old memory would pop in my head. I was really close to this dog though, was like a child to me and it hit really hard. I got him in my early 20s, then later married but hadn't had kids yet. For some reason, the saddest thought in my head was "he'll never get to meet my kids". I've had 2 dogs since, that have been more like pets than children and I have real children too which changes the dynamic entirely.
This is how I ended up in foster care over a false accusation against my parents (in the US). I'm told that if the accuser had called child services directly, they would have done their investigation first and only taken me if they determined I was in danger (which I was not).
But because the accuser called the cops instead, the cops took me without investigating first and handed me over to child services. Thus I spent the entire investigation period in foster care, until a judge ordered me to be sent back to my family. Even though they failed to produce any evidence of abuse, it still took many months.
It was an extremely traumatizing and harrowing experience (honestly even harder on me and my parents than when my brother got sick and died) and remains the worst thing I have ever experienced. But I find it hard to even talk about because people tend to assume that if a child is seized from a home, the parents must have been abusive. (My parents are extremely not abusive, not even in the mildest sense of the word.)
What's fucked is that I actually know two other families who went through this exact same experience: false accuser calls the cops, the cops give the kid to child services, child services puts the kid in foster care while investigating, the investigation turns up no evidence of abuse, the court forces child services to send the kid home, and the kid finally returns home with lifelong trauma.
Part of the issue is they exist in several systems simultaneously: medical system, child-welfare system, and criminal justice system.
Are they there to cure disease, ensure the child had a safe home environment, or put an abuser in prison. Answer: all of the above.
Here’s a good example:
https://wisconsinwatch.org/2022/01/alaska-couple-loses-custo...
> These people are working in the shadows, in darkness," Lamanna said. "They can show up at your house in the middle of the night with no paperwork, no court order whatsoever, and say we’re removing under the B, we’ve decided an emergency exists."
> According to DCF’s 2022 quarterly report, about 60% of parents are reunited with their kids within a year after being removed by DCF.
Anyone who feels justified in stealing kids from parents in the middle of the night, without any due process, WITH A 60% MISS RATE, is completely and truly evil.
Seriously, more often than not DCF realizes they made a mistake and the kid goes back home. Insane.
And it was fantastic. No crying, no separation anxiety. Feeding was easy, so we all slept well.
Our inability to judge extends to others.
It certainly deserves a better name.
Another example is that a lot of anti-gay crusaders turned out to be closet gays who hated themselves.
I took her to emergency surgery, spent about $2k until the vet basically told me there was no point. They put me in a room, wrapped her in a towel, and brought her in for me to spend time with before we put her to sleep. I just remember after they put her in my arms she looked up at me and started purring and I couldn't have stopped the tears if I had wanted to. I'm not a fan of anthropomorphizing animals, but I like to think she felt safe in that last moment.
Even just thinking about it now gets me upset. What makes it worse is that the actions of my neighbor contributed to her death. I had to chalk it up to stupidity, the alternative would be an impotent rage that would do none of us any good.
That was probably 8 years ago, and even now if I talk much about her my girlfriend will start crying. They're just pets, and yet...
I would obviously suggest to be very honest with yourself, but if you are a light sleeper and don't roll (we didn't), the most you have to be careful of is heat. Otherwise, enjoy the cuddly night
Until we vote out of office the elected representatives who passed the laws that give government agencies such draconian powers, and insist on those laws being changed, we won't fix this problem.
We went from sleeping 2 hours per WEEK (I cannot describe to you how it felt), to getting 8 hours on the first co-sleep.
Never looked back.
So what is the relative frequency of these two outcomes? You can't ignore the wrong applications; if they outnumber the proper ones, then the system is doing more harm than good.
On an ontological level, psychiatry made a huge leap forward in 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III. One of the core goals of the DSM-III was to address the concerns raised in the Rosenhan experiment, making diagnostic criteria more robust and reliable. While there are still many controversies and shortcomings - most prominently regarding the over-diagnosis of less severe conditions - we now have a suite of reliable, validated diagnostic instruments for most serious conditions. For the most part, we aren't diagnosing or treating patients based on the gut instinct of an individual practitioner; we're using objective criteria with proven inter-relater reliability, guided by the over-arching principle that, regardless of symptomatology, no-one is mentally ill unless a) they're experiencing distress and/or b) they're causing significant harm to others. There are many shortcomings in how psychiatric medicine is practised today, but the era of locking people up just because they behave strangely is definitively over.
[Not a lawyer, this maybe a bad idea. But what you’re describing should have consequences for the party that had caused harm.]
So, in this particular case, I would say that the justice system did it's job quite well, and it's a massive failure of the medical system that shaken baby syndrome is still identified as a real thing by real, board-certified doctors.
In the US we have strict laws regarding how social services interact with native populations.
That’s the law.
At the same time, reporting doesn’t guarantee or even suggest any outcome. Most reports end up as entries in a database and nothing more.
The article seems to be dedicated to precisely the opposite conclusion. The author's contention would seem to be that in cases of shaking there is other trauma that doesn't fit the "shaken baby syndrome" theory.
> And yet, although subdural and retinal hemorrhage may be caused by non-accidental trauma, especially when impact is involved, they simply are not specific for it: indeed, it has been demonstrated that a wide range of accidental events and medical conditions are plausible alternative causes. Particularly fragile infants may sustain severe head injuries following minor household falls. Others may suffer from genetic conditions, metabolic disorders, blood clotting abnormalities, or infections.
> But in practice, extremely few medical conditions are checked for and “excluded” before concluding a diagnosis of abuse – the great majority are not checked for at all. Very often, abuse is diagnosed “by default”, because no known alternative explanation was found (or even actively sought). This is extremely dangerous, as it seems to indicate that no further medical discovery need ever be made in the future.
> Overall, the clinical literature supporting the shaking hypothesis suffers from a number of severe methodological shortcomings. The main issue is circular reasoning. It is only in a small minority of “shaken baby” cases that actual shaking has been observed by independent witnesses, videotaped, or spontaneously confessed before police interrogation. Far more often, shaking is “inferred” after the observation of subdural and retinal hemorrhage in infants who are brought to the hospital by parents or caregivers. Physicians interpret these types of bleeding as markers of violent trauma. When asked about these findings, parents and caregivers generally do not provide “acceptable explanations” – but the only “acceptable explanations” today apart from shaking are multistory falls and high speed motor vehicle accidents. This being so, it is considered that parents and caregivers must be lying when they report non-traumatic events such as a sudden collapse, an unexplained respiratory arrest, or a minor fall – even though this happens in case after case
Fractures among children: incidence and impact on daily activities
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/4/3/194
wherein we discover that kids 0-12 break bones at an incidence of 128 per 10,000. Over 12 years that's more like 1536 or about 15% of kids if injuries were evenly distributed, although they probably aren't. Still in the right ballpark.
So serious injuries among kids are incredibly common.
If we launch investigations and get it right 95% of the time we will none the less fuck up millions of kids lives. We would probably be better off selectively investigating when there is at least some reason to believe something is afoot instead of every injury.
This can go quite far, with some experts stating that the histories reported by parents and caregivers bringing a child to the hospital with some injuries are always falsified. This can surely happen, but a foundational tenet of medicine is to listen to the patient/parents.
I've seen experts concluding to abuse in 100% of their cases, including those where children hah obvious, DNA-proven genetic conditions causing the observed injuries. Fortunately, some judges remain reasonable and act as "gatekeepers" by exculpating parents and caregivers despite affirmative opinions by reputable experts. But many don't.
Norman Guthkelch himself (the first to hypothesize a causal link between shaking and subdural/retinal hemorrhage) wrote in 2012 [1]:
"While controversy is a normal and necessary part of scientific discourse, there has arisen a level of emotion and divisiveness on shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma that has interfered with our commitment to pursue the truth."
A French neuropediatrician wrote a medical book in French a few years ago about this issue. When interrogated by a lawyer in a symposium a couple of years ago, the author of the papers linked in my comment above said: "I haven't read this book because I absolutely can't agree with it, since it's written by one of the leaders of a denialist and revisionist school of thought".
How can you even start a discussion in a context where a Godwin point is reached with the very term they use to call you?
A single case where we a video would prove that there was no shaking at this exact moment might help convince many doctors (not all, unfortunately).
Relatedly, this recent medical article [1] reports a case of an alleged short fall resulting in subdural and retinal hemorrhage. As usual, doctors did not believe in the story of the short fall (they assume a short fall can almost never cause them) and they concluded that the short fall was a cover-up for unadmitted abuse. The police was called and, surprise, the whole thing was filmed by CCTV. The videotape proved that the story of the short fall was entirely correct and the caregiver was exculpated.
Interestingly, the doctors did not conclude that their belief was wrong (short falls almost never cause subdural and retinal hemorrhage), but that it was an "outlier".
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10918...
The ones you want to really examine are the kids who go home in less than a week. At one point I think I read that New Mexico had about 25% of children who entered care returning home within days. Those are very likely to be children who were not at risk of harm in the first place.
But yes, we should investigate why the child broke their arm. Does that need to be an in-depth investigation? Not usually. But it's important to understand why these things happen; that's where the data for the study you cited comes from.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0...
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1440-1754....
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12024-014-9600-5
[4] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/143/5/e20183...
The willful ignorance of the dissonance between proclaimed intention and consequences is one of the scariest phenomenons i have experienced and its among proper mob mentality turning in a charged violence prone environment.
Being a bit of a smartass (OFCOURSE just as a teen :) i prodded a bit when some family friend got into some superficial moral signaling about the evils of child labor. I asked how exactly the alternative looks without social safety nets in the relevant regions. Being convinced of having the moral high ground an emotional fever set in and it went as far as a "Well maybe then they should all starve!". Pretty sure i saw the realization of what i just goaded out and if hateful stares could kill i would have been a goner. It has been almost two decades now and the relationship has never recovered. I know some seriously scary people but this is up there.
edit: Sorry for the late edits, was hard to read.
But on the same note, I would also consider suing child services for failing to act according to their own principles and mainly for ignoring evidence.
I'm not saying a false positive or a false negative cannot happen. I am saying that we would have better estimates of both, according to probability theory.
Also: false positives and false negatives are basically impossible to prevent, for a sufficient small margin of error. And that's science.
1. Premise: Organizations always try to stay alive. 2. To stay alive you have to be active and doing things which is rewarded by future money. 3. If your organizational role is "protect children" but who's functional mechanism is to take them away will look for ways to do that.
Similar things happen when policing seems to go awry, if they confuse "protect the public" (goal) with "arrest people for stuff" (doing something)
1. These anti-SBS people are evil sophists trying to help child abusers
2. These views of these anti-SBS people irrational; but they're not evil, just misguided and/or misled.
3. The views of these anti-SBS people are wrong, but they are actually reasonable views for someone to hold, given the evidence they have available to hem.
4. The views of these anti-SBS people are correct.
You're never going to jump from 1->4 directly; you need to start with going 1->2.
So if you're serious about it, then I guess I would start with actually trying to get face-time with some people. Look at the various people in this community, and find someone who seems either more reasonable, or more friendly / sociable: someone who is unlikely to turn down an invitation to coffee / lunch, and unlikely to hate a decent person right in front of them. If there's someone who's has a lot of influence, or is in the "core", that's best; but anyone within one or two steps of the "core" could be a good start.
My goals going into the meeting would be:
* Establish a human connection; see them as a person, help them see you as a person
* Make sure they feel heard and understood. Try to understand how they got into the work they're doing now; and not only the evidence they've seen, but also the personal experiences they've had. Try to mostly listen; and if possible repeat back to them what you've heard them say.
* Share your story, and some of the key stories you've seen or heard. If you can, stick to your observations and opinions; i.e., don't say "my nanny was innocent", but rather, "it didn't really seem possible that the nanny did it; it would have been really out of character" (and explain more about the nanny's character).
I'd call it by ear whether to ask "would you want to know if you were wrong" and "how would you know if you were wrong".
Remember the goal for the first meeting is to get them from 1 to 2: That maybe you're way off base and misguided, but that you're not evil. Getting to 3 would be a bonus if it goes well, but don't count on it; and there's no way 4 will happen over the course of lunch.
That's a lot of work, but you seem pretty motivated. Whatever you end up doing, good luck!
When you get a car engine rebuilt, do they just diagnose, replace parts and then never start the engine themselves to verify it actually works?
Everyone cares about kids, so THINK OF THE CHILDREN is an easy way to both create false urgency to cover totalitarianism and also an excellent shame-generator to suppress protest. C.f. "Drag shows"; "digital privacy"
But we do have an example of another righteous institution misbehaving - churches are now paying back for years of children abuse (Catholic priests abusing children). I don’t see why cases like the one above that forcefully separating children can’t go the same way.
It doesn’t really matter that “most reports are good faith”. Most priests are also good faith…
So, why is this video specifically about shaking? Because of this very specific and narrow conspiracy theory that takes children away from their parents.
Not saying I wouldn't be cooperative. If I doc wants to ask a few friendly questions that's fine without me being present, I don't consider that "getting between" me and my kids.
We don't even know if it was an intentional lie or if they genuinely thought I had been hurt. We never found out what they told the cops.
Bad things happening in some cases is not justification for treating everyone as a criminal. That's how totalitarianism starts.
> like Saudi Arabia is rich but not developed imho > good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment
Saudi Arabia's record on human rights is truly horrible (for example, recently they've started murdering refugees[0]), but the idea of whether a country is "developed" seems to be highly subjective, imho. I don't know for sure (never been to Saudi Arabia), but I'm guessing they check off all the boxes except for human rights[1]. (About a clean environment--I imagine they'd be as clean as Abu Dhabi or Dubai (the UAE) which were a lot cleaner imo or on par with Western cities. I guess this is a matter of subjective matter, but is human rights a dimension a country has to have in order to be considered developed? If human rights is indeed a dimension that needs to be satisfied, would that mean that the brutal treatment of black and brown minorities in the US by the police would make the U.S. a country that's not developed?
I'm asking this since Western European countries also have a track record that has historically surpassed world records for brutality. For example, Belgium[1] was chopping off the hands of African tribal people they had forced into labor (effectively enslaved), Germany murdered 6 million innocent Jewish people[2] and had a habit murdering people even before the Nazis in its colonies as well[3], the British were responsible for numerous famines in India as well as famine in Ireland as well as other atrocities[4], the French committed atrocities[5], so did the Netherlands and the Dutch with the East India Company[6], and Spain and Portugal (along with England and others) were highly culpable in the murder of millions of Native Americans[7].
Did these actions, at least temporarily, render these Western European countries as "not developed" countries?
[0][a] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/21/saudi-arabia-mass-killin...
[0][b] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/middleeast/saudi-ki...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_genocide
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...
[5] https://newlinesmag.com/newsletter/the-dark-legacy-of-french...
[6] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-history-...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Indigenous_peoples
In ED and clinic I have had kids that screened positive for TEN 4 FACESp (see https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...). One of these babies ended up having b/l subdurals, likely abuse. In the end they may have called that "shaken baby", however there were multiple other red flags, the subdurals was only one piece, and the suspected mechanism of the subdurals was repeated drops / falls.
Agreed "shaking" may not be the mechanism but the author lists other mechanisms that can lead to subdurals and retinal hemorrhage where NAT could play role, eg hypoxia via choking, repeated falls from pushing/drops, neglect in unsafe motor vehicle situations.
It's even harder to understand something if your self-conception as honorable depends on your mistunderstanding?
Who has more authority over their children and in which domains?
Medical providers, can they ruin kids' lives in various ways? It's easy to manipulate worried parents.
Schools, do teachers have authority over their classroom, how much? Can they override parents, for example when rescuing them from anti-LGBT?
Nobody trusts churches anymore, so that's not really a problem.