The Skeptical OB

Opponents are clear about one thing; women don’t understand the risks. They aren’t giving informed consent because they aren’t fully informed. Sure, they may be counseled about the major risks, the ones that could kill you, but deaths are rare. The other complications are so much more common. If women only knew of the myriad […]

Much of what passes for contemporary breastfeeding “research” is meant to demonize formula, not to accurately assess the risks and or tote up the trivial benefits of breastfeeding. Consider a new paper is published in a journal of dentistry(?!). A cross-country exploratory study to investigate the labelling, energy, carbohydrate and sugar content of formula milk […]

Yesterday I wrote about the disabling flaw that renders meaningless nearly every study that purports to show the benefits of breastfeeding. Most breastfeeding studies compare babies who are breastfed with babies who are not breastfed at a moment in time weeks or months after birth (3 months, 6 months, one year). But when we only […]

Nearly all studies on the purported benefits of breastfeeding over formula feeding are meaningless. Why? Because the choice of the comparison groups is beset by a disabling flaw. Nearly all breastfeeding studies compare two groups of infants, those that have been breastfed and those that have not. Babies who were breastfed but failed to thrive […]

Natural childbirth advocates like to say that “there’s more to birth than a healthy baby.” Duh! No one ever said otherwise. That’s why epidurals and maternal request C-sections should be available to anyone who wants them. They’ve chosen a specific birth experience because there’s more to birth than a healthy baby; there’s pain relief and […]

It’s confusing. The UK, with an elaborate system for studying maternity care, publishes reams of statistics about stillbirths, perinatal mortality, infant mortality and maternal mortality through MBRRACE-UK, Mothers And Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries. Here’s the latest publication UK Perinatal Deaths for Births from January to December 2017. In 266 pages, with […]

It is a sad fact that women are the biggest fans by far of contemporary charlatanism. It’s true for astrology and tarot cards, and equally true for health quackery like reiki and homeopathy. In the paper The appeal of medical quackery: A rhetorical analysis, pharmacists Widder and Anderson note that believers in quackery are likely […]

What do you do when you desperately want to believe in something and there is no scientific evidence to support it? You call it “other ways of knowing”! What do other ways of knowing look like in practice? They look like this: Including the nonrational is sensible midwifery, by Jenny A. Parratt, and Kathleen M. […]

A piece in today’s Guardian asks the intriguing question: Is breastfeeding incompatible with American capitalism? And while it reaches the right answer — yes, it is incompatible — it fails to note the right reason: breastfeeding is promoted so aggressively precisely BECAUSE it is incompatible with capitalism. La Leche League, the engine of contemporary lactivism, […]

The New York Times Op-Ed Who’s Afraid of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop? by Elisa Albert and Jennifer Block is offensive for a variety of reasons. It’s offensive because it is another example of a prestigious news outlet publishing alternative “facts.” It’s offensive because it sugar coats the rabid consumerism promoted by a profit driven corporation. And […]