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
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.
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).
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.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00029...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/54/7/203/1...
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
And it was fantastic. No crying, no separation anxiety. Feeding was easy, so we all slept well.
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
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.