How to woo away from woo?

It’s another head-meet-desk week over at the clinic.

The big SIDS coverup

Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly turned into a conspiracy theorist . I’m talking about a new systematic review which appeared in the May issue of Archives of Disease in Childhood. It identifies head-covering during sleep as a major risk factor for SIDS.

Beware ‘Big Vitamin’

Dr. Harriet Hall of Science-Based Medicine has an excellent post about whether people should routinely take vitamins.

An interesting safe sleep resource

Cribs for Kids, brought to the public by SIDS of Pennsylvania.

A fair and square PEG

Anti-vaxers like to get all heated up over the notion that there is antifreeze in vaccines. Actually, this is not true: there is a precipitating agent in many vaccines called polyethylene glycol (PEG), which only bears a passing resemblance to ethylene glycol, aka antifreeze. PEG can be found in a variety of household and medicinal substances, such as toothpaste, laxatives and skin creams.

Interestingly enough, though, PEG not only has very low toxicity upon ingestion, it may even help repair cell membranes after traumatic brain injuries :

PEG eliminates the amyloid precursor protein (APP) that builds up as a result of traumatic axonal brain injuries. When this protein begins to accumulate, cells begin to die.

Not only does research find PEG benefiting brain injuries, but studies have also shown that it has helped repair nerve membranes after spinal cord injuries in guinea pigs. While PEG has been tested on animals up to this point, a good deal of the research has promising human application.

Take that and stick in your pipes, anti-vaxers.

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Veronika meets her match…

From Little Britain:

Like Monty Python, finally a bit of Brit humor even Americans can ‘get’ .

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Evolution is not an excuse

One of the more pervasive errors of thought among the AP/NPers that I see is the assumption that since humans evolved in a certain way, the solution produced by evolutionary forces therefore must be perfect in every humanly possible situation. “Babies have evolved to cosleep”, Tells us James Mckenna, the anthropologist whose studies on sleep physiology are used incorrectly as “proof” cosleeping prevents SIDS. “Human milk is perfect for babies, honed by thousands of years of evolution”, so say the lactofanatics.

While these statements are, in principle, correct, they are not the whole truth of the matter.

Interview with a Doula

A very interesting interview with a doula and childbirth educator, Lisa Gould Rubin. I don’t agree with everything she says, but what I like about her attitude is how the idea is to concentrate on the birth the woman wants, instead of scaring and guilting women into the doula’s ideal type of birth (Yes, I know all doulas claim to do that). I also appreciate her candor in admitting that having a homebirth VBAC herself, in retrospect, may not have been the wisest choice. And her taking on Lamaze, with its disgusting co-optation of the term “normal birth”.

Rubin is a co-author of The Birth That’s Right For You: A Doctor and a Doula Help You Choose and Customize the Best Birth Option to Fit Your Needs.

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Tina Kimmel: “Apples and oranges”

I noticed there were a lot of hits last night on this post from LACTNET, a listserv for lactation consultants whose general tone caters to the earthy-birthy LLL crowd (along with all their supposedly “unmixed” issues). I traced the link back to the following discussion about SIDS, started by a poster who brought up Tina Kimmel’s trumped-up claim that babies who sleep in cribs have a X2+ chance of death as compared to crib-sleeping ones.

An interesting look at vaccine refusal

Liza Featherstone’s Shot Down. An observation of hers I find particularly poignant (emphasis mine):

As Susan Gregory Thomas documents in Buy Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, this generation of parents is anxious not to be taken for dupes, yet our skepticism can be superficial and capriciously directed. We are often, as Arthur Allen points out in his new book Vaccine, more willing to believe a random article on the internet than scientists who have spent their lives studying vaccines. Many of us have been oddly credulous about the anti-vaccine activists, some of whom are charlatans who make Merck look like the Boys & Girls Club. In addition to serving the worthy purpose of reminding us that every medical intervention has risks, many of these characters have terrified parents with vaccine fears that are simply ridiculous, in one case evoking the possibility of “brain-eating bugs.”

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