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

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

#361

Post by rossant »

jollyllama wrote: post #357
itsmemattchung wrote: post #16

> 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. Holy shit. Parents bring baby to ER ... results reveal that baby was shaken (article lat…

What's the outcome for the kid? Can the system even do much to help with the child's medical condition? If not, it's irrational for people to take their children in for examination; there's no benefit and you risk being accused.

He underwent surgery to remove the excess of fluid around the brain, and his condition progressively improved. It could have worsened without the operation, we'll never know. Now, at almost 8, he's doing great.

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!

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

#362

Post by eitally »

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…

The ironic thing here is that these sorts of innocuous bumps and minor traumas regularly lead to severe medical complications and deaths in older children & adults, too. The only difference here is that babies & toddlers are too young to be able to verbalize and advocate for themselves in ways that most adults recognize & respect.

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

#363

Post by slackfan »

zapdrive wrote: post #331

Imagine your child taken away from you just on the basis of some assumptions. This makes my blood boil. I have never had murderous thoughts even when I have been wronged really bad. I just forget and move on with life. But I don't think I can do that if my child is taken from me for something I didn't do. I'll definitely go postal. Land of "Freedom".

Not just a US thing. Europe is even more prevalent.

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

#364

Post by madaxe_again »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #250

When I was getting ready to turn dad for the first time, I read a few books on pregnancy, children and parenting. My trust on medicine dropped substantially when I discovered that doctors have poor notion of statistics, so they take for granted improper studies results. I remember one classic one is the "no coffee when pregnant", the study says this causes problems, the test was performed on rats and by feeding them…

You should see how the second hand smoke studies upon which all other second hand smoke studies were based were done - very similar methodology - cotton swabs were saturated with combustion residues from hundreds of cigarettes, making them into tarry masses, which were then applied to 100% of the bodies of infant rats, every day for several weeks - and they were then observed for developmental abnormalities. The discussion then explicitly states that this should not be taken as a human analogue, as the rats were seen to lick the residue off their bodies, thus consuming all of it, and that further research would be needed.

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.

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

#365

Post by the_af »

Muromec wrote: post #215

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

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

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?

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

#366

Post by P_I_Staker »

gwd wrote: post #243
tivert wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazing that bit about child welfare organisations fighting against the science, when clearly taking children away based on false accusations is clearly far worse for the child’s welfare, not to mention the parents’! 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 k…

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…

Interestingly enough, no bigger offender then the psychiatric and mental health community. There's a very sophisticated system for shutting down criticism and lashing out at patients that have civil rights concerns.

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.

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

#367

Post by seszett »

yawpitch wrote: post #358
seszett wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand? 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,…

If you exclude Western Europe and simply ignore Australia and New Zealand you’ve abandoned any reasonable conception of “the West” altogether. 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…

The data (linked in my comment) shows that incarceration rates have decreased in all of Europe as well as all of Northern America and increased in Australia and New Zealand.

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.

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

#368

Post by rossant »

losthobbies wrote: post #350

There was a infamous case in the UK around SBS: 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.

Yes, Innocence Project cofounder Barry Scheck was the defense attorney in the Woodward case and he wrote a long foreword to our book about it. It starts like this:

"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."

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

#369

Post by ceejayoz »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #45
ceejayoz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abusers sometimes take their victims elsewhere - new doc, new town, new state - when people start getting suspicious. The victim may also be retaliated against; accused of trying to get help. There’s a risk to consulting someone you suspect might be the perpetrator.

I doubt the proper answer to this risk is to assume abuse. I don’t mean to say the answer is easy but the described behavior towards this person for how they try to help their child is sickening.

Any approach here will have bad results on a population-level; there's no perfect answer. I'm very glad I'm not personally responsible for decisions that could destroy families or doom kids to torture if the wrong judgement call is made.

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

#370

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

bluGill wrote: post #117
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> latter seems to be evidence of the system working both well and as designed 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.

Sure, but the accused should have a lawyer who is screaming about anything that is unreliable.

Have you seen the caseloads of public defenders?
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