The Skeptical OB

When you frame an issue, you control the discourse. That’s particularly true in politics (Make America Great Again), but it’s also true in healthcare. That’s why lactivists have owned the breastfeeding debate for the last decade or more. Their frame — Breast Is Best — was meant to be the beginning and the end of […]

Today on Slate, Elissa Strauss asks Paying Low-Income Moms to Breastfeed Might Raise Breastfeeding Rates, But Is It Ethical? For the study, a team of researchers, led by Dr. Yukiko Washio of Christiana Care Health System and the University of Delaware in Newark, divided 36 low-income, Puerto Rican new mothers enrolled in WIC into two […]

Last night Sen. Elizabeth Warren joined a long list of brave, brilliant women who persisted despite being warned not to challenge the status quo. These included Rosa Parks, Marie Curie and Susan B. Anthony. Please share other brave, brilliant women who refused to be silenced. #NeverthelessShePersisted

One of the greatest ironies of the train wreck Trump presidency 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 president who thinks he is a special snowflake. What’s a special snowflake? [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Trump allows […]

I’ve made no secret of my visceral disgust with Donald Trump and his effort to inaugurate American fascism and I can get behind nearly any non-violent protest of Trump’s policies and behavior … except one. I’m very uncomfortable with complaints about paying for Melania Trump’s decision to stay in New York with her son. I’ve […]

I’m beginning to think Republicans in general, and Trump supporters in particular are intellectually incapable of recognizing Trump’s burgeoning fascism until one of his enablers pistol-whips them. In the hope that it’s not too late yet and at least some Republicans are capable of following an intellectual argument, I offer Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco’s […]

Many people like to imagine how they would have reacted had they lived in cataclysmic times. They tell themselves that they would not have joined the Nazi party, they would not have owned slaves in the pre-Civil War South, they would have behaved like George Washington in the Revolutionary War, not like Benedict Arnold. Those […]

Donald Trump reminds me of someone I used to know. Actually he reminds me of four little someones, my children when they were toddlers. Our president is a big, fat crybaby and the first two weeks of his presidency have been nothing more than an extended temper tantrum. Unfortunately, his Republican enablers like Mitch McConnell […]

Why is there so much crappy medical research? The latest example, complete with press release, was just published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). It’s entitled Early death after discharge from emergency departments: analysis of national US insurance claims data. The authors found: [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]It’s not clear that the death […]

In an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, a geology professor Robert S. Young decries the planned Scientists’ March on Washington in a display of shocking naïveté: Among scientists, understandably, there is growing fear that fact-based decision making is losing its seat at the policy-making table. There’s also overwhelming frustration with the politicization of […]