The Skeptical OB

Remember the biblical story of David and Bathsheba? David, while walking on the roof of his palace, saw a very beautiful woman bathing. He ordered enquiries and found out that she was Bathsheba, wife of Uriah. He desired her … [T]he king gave the order to his general, Joab, that Uriah should be placed on […]

You might think — I always have — that childbirth is about the birth of a healthy baby to a healthy mother. But according to many midwives, that isn’t enough. A mother’s birth experience is deemed critical and the experience is apparently ruined by technological interventions. Hence the dangerous campaigns for “normal birth,” defined as […]

Anti-vaxxers preen to themselves and each other that they are educated, empowered protectors of their children’s well being. They’re not; they are social parasites. I’ve written before about the fact that privilege is the sine qua non of the contemporary anti-vax movement. Vaccine preventable diseases have to become rare before it is possible to imagine […]

What if we’ve been approaching the anti-vaccine phenomenon the wrong way? We’ve been operating under the assumption that anti-vax is fundamentally a misunderstanding, reflecting lack of knowledge of immunology and statistics. But what if it is actually a culturally mediated phobia like triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number 13? That would explain why fear of vaccines […]

Imagine a study that compared the mouth microbiome of men and women and found that up to 1/3 of the common mouth bacteria differed between men and women. Plausible, right, since male and female hormones are different and might exert some impact on the bacteria that live inside mouths? Now imagine that the researchers concluded […]