Homebirth and natural childbirth advocates are incensed that anyone might think a healthy baby is compensation for a less than ideal birth “experience.” The piece by Kathy at Woman to Woman Childbirth Education, At least you have a healthy baby, is typical of the genre bemoaning C-sections and other life saving methods of modern obstetrics. […]
I am sick and tired of dentists medicalizing the tooth experience. Having teeth is not a disease, so why do dentists spend all their time worrying about tooth problems? I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with dentists treating me like my teeth are a disaster waiting to happen. Our teeth are the […]
Drumroll, please! I’d like to introduce a new word to the lexicon: quacktivist. A quacktivist is a person who proselytizes demonstrably false medical claims with cult-like intensity. The anti-vax folks are quacktivists by definition. Jenny McCarthy is a quacktivist and so is Joe Mercola. Andrew Wakefield is a quacktivist extraordinaire. Natural childbirth is promoted by […]
Ceridwen Morris thinks I am mean to her. Who is she and what is she upset about? Ceridwen blogs for Babble.com on the group blog Being Pregnant. And Ceridwen, like others in her group, routinely makes empirical claims about pregnancy and childbirth that are flat out false. For example, yesterday she wrote a post entitled […]
Even those who can’t tell the difference between a t-test and a chi-square are familiar with a basic principle of epidemiology: correlation does not equal causation. In other words, even if Event A happened before Disease B, it does not mean that A caused B. For example, in last 100 years deaths from infectious diseases […]
In addition to the problem of possessing inaccurate information, homebirth advocates have another, more serious problem, the tendency to construct illogical arguments. It is apparently such a pervasive problem that a brief review of these arguments is in order. Let’s look at the various types of illogical argument constructed against my core claim “the death […]
Excuse me for a few moments while I catch my breath. I’ve been laughing so hard that I can’t write. As anyone who has read this blog knows, I have no patience for vaccine rejectionists. They are uneducated, illogical and immoral. But even I am sometimes amazed at the naked stupidity and gullibility of vaccine […]
The Defensive Medicine series on The Unnecessarean has tried to be inclusive, offering the perspective of two obstetricians, two lawyers, two sociologists and a lay person. There’s one thing that’s missing from the series, though: an explanation of how defensive medicine works. According to Wikipedia: Defensive medicine is the practice of diagnostic or therapeutic measures […]
There have always been midwives. Ever since our ancestors acquired the ability to walk upright, human childbirth has been fraught with extreme risk to both mother and baby. The first midwives were those who recognized that assistance in childbirth can minimize those risks. They understood that something as simple as massaging a woman’s uterus after […]
It is perhaps the ultimate irony that advocates of attachment parenting who reject vaccination because of fear of autism have ignored the possibility that it is attachment parenting itself that causes autism. Consider the ever growing body of evidence: 1. Both autism and attachment parenting have increased dramatically in the past two decades. The origin […]
Dr. Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician gynecologist. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1979 and her medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine in 1984. Dr. Tuteur is a former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. She left the practice of medicine to raise her four children. Her book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting (HarperCollins) was published in 2016. She can be reached at DrAmy5 at aol dot com... More
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