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

cambridgeblog.org

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

#311

Post by amluto »

katzenversteher wrote: post #176

This always scared me because I don't even know what counts as shaking. 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…

re: the bouncy houses and such. Other than kids banging into each other, this never seemed like much of a head or brain injury risk. But watch out for knees! Trampolines with more than one person on them are incredibly dangerous, and bouncy houses seem likely to be pretty dangerous with occupants of widely varying sizes. The specific issue is that the floor may move abruptly and unexpectedly when someone is trying to land, causing a potentially severe knee injury.

If you’re in a bouncy house with kids, consider avoiding any bouncing yourself.

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

#312

Post by kergonath »

TeeMassive wrote: post #136

"What happened is that during my literature review, 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. And yet, this “shaking hypothesis” (sometimes referred to as the theory of the “triad”, si…

> This is why using experts for advice is great but everyone should still be encouraged to do their own research.

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.

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

#313

Post by [deleted] »

rossant wrote: post #278
eru wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article says that shaking a baby will give you lots of different symptoms, including bruises etc. And you can't really get AHT from shaking without also getting bruises etc. That means if you see 'AHT' without bruises (etc) it was probably not actual shaking.

Yeah, it's hard to say for sure what kind of injuries you'll get from violent shaking, as we obviously can't reproduce it on actual babies, and there are so few well-described cases. Studies have been made on animal models, showing a constellation of traumatic injuries, but no clear, obvious, and reproducible pattern so far. Strikingly, the isolated "triad" of subdural and retinal hemorrhage with brain edema hasn't r…

[deleted]

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

#314

Post by mabcat »

rossant wrote: post #271
gwd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another factor in this, which makes it hard to change: 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…

This is spot on. This psychological barrier is probably the number one obstacle to a wider recognition of the existence and extent of this problem. 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, cancellati…

Closest name I can think of is "commitment and consistency". People tend to behave as they have behaved in the past, doing so is both a cognitive shortcut and a source of positive emotion. We go to great lengths to maintain consistency (see also: confirmation bias), and being consistent even in the face of conflicting evidence feels better than being inconsistent but right.

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."

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

#315

Post by gwd »

rossant wrote: post #271
gwd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another factor in this, which makes it hard to change: 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…

This is spot on. This psychological barrier is probably the number one obstacle to a wider recognition of the existence and extent of this problem. 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, cancellati…

It certainly would be a form of cognitive dissonance, but that's much more general; I experienced cognitive dissonance hearing the word "nicht" pronounced by a native German speaker yesterday evening, because it wasn't at all like what I expected it to sound like.

"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.

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

#316

Post by mike_hock »

raducu wrote: post #226
Muromec wrote: post #215

Oh the good old, violent Easter European bias mixed into crap science.

It could be, but communication issues could also be at play, plus overeager doctors/social workers. In Romania they go at great lengths not to pull children out of family environments, in Denmark and other more developed countries it could be the opposite.

Implying ripping children out of their families willy-nilly is "more developed."

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

#317

Post by tokai »

raducu wrote: post #184
Justsignedup wrote: post #10

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…

Similar case in Denmark/Romania where a baby was taken from his romanian parents because of the shaken baby syndrome, parents spent time in jail, but the hemorage continued over time so they had to concede it wasn't the shaken baby syndromd.

Even if the kids hemorrhaging continued, it was brought to the ER initially with fractures in the right side of the skull.

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

#318

Post by rossant »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #141
sneak wrote: post #47

> I couldn’t live with this uncertainty any longer. But first, I had to get my son back. As a precautionary measure, the hospital followed mandatory reporting statutes and my wife and I temporarily lost custody of David. 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. I…

Is the criminal justice system in France based on a presumption of innonce?

Yes, as others have said. However, this is a legitimate question, because in these specific cases, the burden of proof tends to be on the side of the defendant who needs to prove they didn't harm their child. That's obviously impossible, and probably unconstitutional.

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.

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

#319

Post by rossant »

gwd wrote: post #315
rossant wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot on. This psychological barrier is probably the number one obstacle to a wider recognition of the existence and extent of this problem. 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, cancellati…

It certainly would be a form of cognitive dissonance, but that's much more general; I experienced cognitive dissonance hearing the word "nicht" pronounced by a native German speaker yesterday evening, because it wasn't at all like what I expected it to sound like. "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 specifica…

> 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".

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".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance

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

#320

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

jauzj wrote: post #308
coldtea wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything comes with evidence, nor is everything a court case. If you have experienced racism again and again though, you can often tell when you see it, or you can quite safely deduce it in a case or wrong treatment, even without hard proof.

[flagged]

Well, now you've learned something.
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