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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

#451

Post by TeeMassive »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #343
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…

> using experts for advice is great 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.

Actual experts I talked too can tell you easily why the opinion they have are true and the evidence it is based on. They are also very good at vulgarization.

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

#452

Post by rossant »

ClarityJones wrote: post #401
firesteelrain wrote: post #321

“ Let there be no misunderstanding on the point that shaking is an absolutely real and dramatic form of child abuse. Inflicted head trauma is a devastating condition and a definite cause of traumatic brain injuries, including intracranial hemorrhage. Many medical determinations of SBS/AHT are made on children who have effectively been victims of violent intentional trauma. Prevention efforts against all forms of chil…

You're assuming that medical science is capable of providing an explanation in every case, when the whole point of this article is to say that these symptoms are insufficient to diagnose SBS. The author is saying if we have no alternative medical explanations, then we have no medical explanation at all. In order to diagnose SBS, the author suggests that you need additional evidence suggesting trauma such as bruising,…

> In order to diagnose SBS, the author suggests that you need additional evidence suggesting trauma such as bruising, broken bones, etc. Indeed, that seems to be what the SBS lobby is now saying as well, they just haven't communicated that to front-line providers.

That's exactly it.

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

#453

Post by irjustin »

CrHn3 wrote: post #436
irjustin wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least this one doesn't sound as bad as the other post, but it's still in the same vein - you've never been a mother who can't produce milk for her child. I've been as the husband there and are all your facts don't allow for people's situations. Formula is perfectly fine.

> you've never been a mother who can't produce milk for her child 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 f…

> That's your assumption.

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"

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

#454

Post by gilbetron »

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…

When my wife was pregnant 15 years ago, I did a lot of similar reading about various things. One was home vs hospital birth, and at that time at least, there was a strong vibe of "home birth is best birth" going around. Many people linked to a study (which I can no longer find!) in Norway maybe? It was a big study that "showed" that home birth was safer than hospital birth. However, if you dug into the study, you'd find one particular interesting nugget: if any of the home birth participants experience any negative medical event, even during delivery, they were removed from the study. It was preposterous. In the end, all the study said was, "home births that happened without incident were safer than hospital births", or, in other words, "safe births are safer than non-safe births".

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

#455

Post by murphyslab »

kergonath wrote: post #303
murphyslab wrote: post #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/peerRe…

> 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 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…

I can see encouraging authors to remove "zombie citations", but that should be rare nowadays, as many bibliographic databases will automatically flag retracted articles now, thanks to integration with the Retraction Watch database.

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

#456

Post by Macha »

the_af wrote: post #365
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 discour…

Yes. Romanians probably get the worst of it from the association with Roma in general who are generally discriminated against, but there is generally a base level of anti eastern-european discrimination among western Europe (and especially the UK). Not that all or most western Europeans do this, but it's a significant enough minority that does that it's unavoidable.

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

#457

Post by fusslo »

rightbyte wrote: post #295
charles_f wrote: post #212

Once my kid cut his butt cheek falling off his bike (to this day I don't know how). I brought him to the hospital for sutures, and was asked to live the room while he was questioned. I felt very uncomfortable, and almost guilty, while this lasted for all of 5 minutes. I cannot imagine losing custody of your child while he's in an emergency situation for a couple months. This must be a nightmare.

The scary thing in such situations is that if the doctor asks "did your daddy hit you?" the child might randomly say yes.

Shane koyczan has a fantastic poem about a cute thing between him and his grandmother that turned into an abuse investigation. And then he was bullied because of it!

https://genius.com/Shane-koyczan-to-this-day-annotated

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

#458

Post by rightbyte »

logicchains wrote: post #327
rightbyte wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a bad idea persoannly to become angry in such a situation if the local social service is authoritarian. But as an altruistic move for the greater good it is good.

>But as an altruistic move for the greater good it is good. 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.

I meant that protesting the bad process, increasing risk of having your child taken away, is good for everyone else except you and your child. I.e. altruistic.

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

#459

Post by tivert »

gwd wrote: post #356
rossant wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 psycho…

You could call it "moral self-image maintenance bias": A bias towards maintaining your self-image as an upright, moral person.

I think it's probably just a kind of "avoidance" or "denial."

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.

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

#460

Post by Justsignedup »

cornholio wrote: post #236
raducu wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trouble is: shaken baby syndrome is real and well documented. Because the crime is so abhorrent, people strongly want to believe the diagnostic tools to be much more sensitive and accurate than they really seem to be. 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?…

The better way to think of what you said is:

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.

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