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A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

cambridgeblog.org

151–160 of 639 posts

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing shook my faith in the medical system more than having kids. 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.

> unworthy nurses making moms feel intense shame for not “trying hard enough” to somehow magically produce milk. 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 understan…

Formula is adequate as far as macronutrients go, but it lacks sugars present (at varying levels-about 20% of the population are FUT2 non-secretors and cannot produce the α1,2-fucosyltransferase enzyme that is used to make human milk oligosaccharides), stem cells and bacteria present in breast milk. Women in the US are often deficient in the strain that can metabolize the human milk oligosaccharides, b. infantis, and it's not clear afaik to what extent bacteria gets passed vertically in breastmilk. The microRNA present in breastmilk can modulate gene expression, but the extent and effects are unclear.

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/

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#152
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell 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.

That’s nuts. Even if you were correct about that, and I’m not admitting any such thing, it isn’t how people work. If the state doesn’t provide justice, then the mob will.

"Justice" is an incredibly malleable idea that is largely shaped by what people are told. Until very, very recently, nobody gave a fuck about serial killers, or even knew they existed. If the hype stopped, there wouldn't be any mobs to worry about.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#153

The worst part here is: He spent months researching 500 medical papers to even realize this was a problem. No way in hell will a single defense lawyer get someone to be able to research enough to figure this out. As stated, how many people are in jail or lost their kids due to something that didn't actually happen. And how many people don't know that a minor bump in the head for a baby could be life threatening, but…

> No way in hell will a single defense lawyer get someone to be able to research enough to figure this out.

Why would we have to? We can just hire M. Rossant.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#154
post #145
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell 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.

That's not true. We have things in place to protect people and objects from lightning strikes. For example, lightning protection systems on tall buildings.

Those protect the building, not individual people. Nobody carries around mobile lightning rods, even though they were invented centuries ago.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unworthy nurses making moms feel intense shame for not “trying hard enough” to somehow magically produce milk. 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 understan…

Maternal milk is better than formula in every possible way and there is a perfect scientific consensus around this. Formula is the least worst substitute to maternal milk but going around and screaming that formula is perfectly fine, as if it was as good (or even better!) than maternal milk is denying some very well-established piece of science for likely ideological reasons.

Milk is better than formula, but formula is better than starvation.

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.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#156
post #154
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. We have things in place to protect people and objects from lightning strikes. For example, lightning protection systems on tall buildings.

Those protect the building, not individual people. Nobody carries around mobile lightning rods, even though they were invented centuries ago.

It protects the people in the building. Likewise, arresting a serial killer protects anyone they would have killed next.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#157
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting and unusual perspective - we have the one person in this thread who supports wildly expanding the death penalty. 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."

> what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_wick

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#158
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possession is nine tenths of the law. It's not someone else's child if it's in your house and you need a genetic test to deny responsibility. This idea that bloodlines are relevant is anachronistic superstition. Several of my friends are not genetically related to their children. It's simply not relevant.

Why are you trying to play off your limited anecdotal evidence as universal? It has been the most important thing since the dawn of human civilization and continues to be so. What if someone just dropped off a random child at your doorstep and tells you you’re responsible for its upbringing now. I can understand people that want to adopt but that’s a conscious decision they made on their part.

> It has been the most important thing since the dawn of human civilization

Technically this is appeal to tradition. Certainly it's true that our various worldly cultures are strongly influenced by this idea, but factually speaking... before paternity tests, there was literally no way to know for men if a child was their paternal child, especially in societies with very little physical attribute variance. Therefore , it's not really true that "it's the most important thing," because we've never been able to tell for certainty who a child's father is until very recently. Even with physical attributes, our knowledge of genetics is relatively recent in human history, so there's probably lots of false positives / negatives (with hair or eye color for example).

> What if someone just dropped off a random child at your doorstep and tells you you’re responsible for its upbringing now.

This doesn't make sense in the context, is this a red herring or a strawman or similar? I believe the discussions is around situations that would normally involve a paternity test, which to me all essentially double checking whether a woman could have been impregnated by some other person than the expectant father.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#159
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be replaced with what? i'm all for making changes that are an improvement, but just burning it to the ground for the sake of it with no end game is not an improvement

A system that does not incarcerate anyone for any reason would be much preferable to the atrocities that are the current criminal justice systems in most of the global west (and especially of course the United States).

Have you thought about moving to Somalia?

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#160
It's interesting the instance cited about authors of a scientific paper being compelled to remove a reference because a peer reviewer alleged that the researcher behind it is "a lousy and dishonest researcher". What's more interesting is that PLOS ONE repeated the allegation. I am curious whether there is a case for defamation for the publication of such an allegation.

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.

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