First time I opened that link I got a full screen scam ad about "Someone is stealing your data"....
Here's an outline link:
The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
41–50 of 55 posts
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#42> The newborn’s skin was blue and he wasn’t breathing. A few years earlier, the doctors would have documented the baby as stillborn, not believing there was anything they could do to help. As someone who scored a 1/10 on the Apgar at birth, I'd like to thank Dr. Apgar for saving my life.
As a father whose 3 children were all born emeregency c section and blue I also want to thank Dr. Apgar for the joy they have brought into my life.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#43> The newborn’s skin was blue and he wasn’t breathing. A few years earlier, the doctors would have documented the baby as stillborn, not believing there was anything they could do to help. As someone who scored a 1/10 on the Apgar at birth, I'd like to thank Dr. Apgar for saving my life.
My mom was born at an Air Force base in the 1950s. She said she was born silent and unresponsive, and they put her in another room to die, but then she recovered several hours later. That story always struck me as very odd, and heat breaking, but now it makes sense.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#44https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score This is linked in OP, but gives very slightly more detail around how the score was actually popularized, and what Apgar's career looked like. (Plot twist, she wasn't "just" a practicing anesthesiologist, but the founder and head of a whole new Anesthesiology dept. at Columbia) I think the short version is that she published a paper in 1953, and managed to get ob…
> She also carried around a scalpel and tubing for giving passers-by emergency airways (tracheotomy?), and apparently did so over a dozen times.
My mother does the same (well did, she's retired. She was an ER doctor). Before seatbelts and other safety devices were common there were a lot of gruesome accidents on the roads and we would have to stop. I remember several episodes were my sister and I were bored and annoyed because my mother had departed in the ambulance and my dad would drive us to the hospital to wait for her. Kid's perspective.
I've been trained to do emergency procedures like a tracheotomy, move a patient with a back injury* et al and in my life have encountered zero situations where my so-called "skills" would be useful. I don't even drive past many car accidents any more, nor have I ever seen a diner choke to the point where they needed assistance. But as a child I knew several kids who'd been hit by cars or fallen out of trees and been hospitalized, not to mention kids who'd lost a parent. Has the world become safer?
* Obviously you only do this when the victim would be in even more and immediate danger where they are, else you leave 'em in place for the professionals.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#45Having recently had a child, I learned about APGAR and marveled how the emotional "is my baby ok" was put into a super easy process. The chart from the article can be followed by absolutely anyone and babies can be sent to specialists as needed - or not. As the article mentions, it may not get everything 100% right, but it's useful enough - and more importantly easy enough - to save a lot of lives. I can highly recom…
After my daughter was born, my parents showed me the booklet containing the results of the routine examinations I had as a child (where I come from, this booklet has been standardized for decades, so it can be compared pretty easily). Interestingly, we both had the exact same Apgar scores 6 / 10 / 10 (scores are measured 1, 5 and 10 minutes after birth). For the emotional "is my baby ok" aspect, before you are even i…
That's a pretty typical score progression (it's very rare for a baby to be a 10 right right out of the gate).
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#46And worsened maternal heath while deskilling obstetrics.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score
Blind Taylorism is dangerous. What we measure gets managed at the expense of unmeasured things.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a really dumb statement. Did I miss where the article said they were making this decision based on the genetics of the baby?
This is not me trying to be edgy or snippy. During an era when eugenics was the predominant belief of the professional class in America, when they openly promoted "mercy killings" of certain classes of people, withheld treatment of deadly diseases from citizens on the basis of race, and sterilized thousands without their consent, and with all of this being so well-documented, no, I don't need the author to spell out…
Leaving aside the dubious assertions there, you are inferring that all these doctors would prolong life saving measures for preferred classes while leaving non-preferred classes of people to die.
Completely from inference. With no evidence. Nonsense.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#48And worsened maternal heath while deskilling obstetrics. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score Blind Taylorism is dangerous. What we measure gets managed at the expense of unmeasured things.
You may want to read that article more attentively, because it does not support your claim at all.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been thinking about this since I started working at a metrics driven company. One thing we often lose sight of is that metrics are coarse grained. Something like GDP for example is very good at telling you that the USA is a better place to live than Somalia. But it fails for more fine grained comparisons. We should refrain from doing micro optimizations on coarse grained metrics or ranking people on its basis un…
GDP is an excellent example, I think. Basically, it measures the total flow of wealth inside a country. If everyone behaves rationally this is a good proxy for wealth as a whole. But what happens if the government would setup a group of companies that trade immaterial or trivial products amongst each other at absurd prices? The faster that group trades, the higher the GDP. A metric has become a goal.
One issue with GDP: how do you define wealth? It's hard to incorporate more abstract assets like social trust or environmental conditions (latter can have direct impacts on things like tourism)
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#50> "blue all over" = 0 > "blue at the extremities, body pink" = 1 > "no cyanosis" = 2 I wonder if they have updated guidance and training for scoring non-white babies. Brown and black babies probably don't turn blue in the same way white babies turn blue. In fact, a brown baby that's off color may appear to be a "healthy looking" - to the untrained eye - pink when in fact they should appear brown when healthy. I'd be…
> Brown and black babies probably don't turn blue in the same way white babies turn blue.
FYI: "Brown and black" babies are pretty pink at birth (or should be, when they have adequate oxygen).