The Skeptical OB

To stay healthy you need to eat right and exercise. Those who don’t can end up obese and sick. To stay informed about science you need to read “right” and exercise your critical faculties. Those who don’t often end up intellectually flabby and sick. Science denialists — be they COVID denialists, vaccine denialists or climate […]

One of the greatest ironies of the alt-right is how conservatives have eagerly embraced previously despised attributes of liberals. After years of decrying political correctness, micro-aggressions and trigger warnings, we now have a group of people — COVID denialists — who think they are special snowflakes. What’s a special snowflake? According to Urban Dictionary: A […]

Hi, folks! Jack Daniels here, spokesperson for CPRDD, the Committee to Promote Responsible Drunk Driving. I’m sure you’ve seen newspaper accounts of horrific crashes that happened after someone drove drunk, but I’m here to tell you that just because a person died or killed someone else while driving drunk, does NOT mean that drunk driving […]

Carl has done his research and believes stop signs don’t work. That doesn’t give Carl the “right” to ignore stop signs. Masks are like stop signs. The theory behind stop signs is that if you stop before entering an intersection, there’s less chance of being hit by another driver traveling through the intersection. If stop […]

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, It must be extremely difficult to run Facebook, a multi-billion dollar business spread around the globe. A lot of things are automated — for obvious reasons —and therefore subject to unforeseen error. That’s why I suspect you never intended for Facebook to become an instrument to censor science communicators. But sadly, that’s […]

Contemporary midwives and their advocates suffer from a lack of imagination. They view childbirth in Manichean terms, pitting the so-called midwifery model against the so-called biomedical model. It’s a false duality. There is a framework for maternity care that rises above both. It’s a framework that should govern the provision of all childbirth care. I […]

A new study shows — yet again — that breastfeeding has NO benefit for cognitive development. Let’s start with the money quote from Associations between breastfeeding and cognitive function in children from early childhood to school age: a prospective birth cohort study published yesterday in the International Breastfeeding Journal: Breastfeeding should not be interpreted to […]

Melissa Bartick, MD committed a Kinsley Gaffe. According to journalist Michael Kinsley: A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say. Furthermore: Another definition is a statement made when [he] privately believes it to be true, realizes the dire consequences of saying it, and yet inadvertently […]

Midwives have a fraught relationship with maternal autonomy. They tell themselves they are committed to autonomy. They believe deeply that women are entitled to choose place of birth, birth attendant, birth support, vaginal birth, refusal of procedures, refusal of pain medication and refusal of hospital policies (e.g. separation of mother and child after birth) that […]

Midwives are desperate for market share. As I wrote in my book Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting: No matter what obstetricians offered, midwives would insist that it was unnecessary, disempowering, harmful, and contradicted by the scientific evidence. Midwives would wrest childbirth back from paternalistic doctors and give it to those to […]