Why do hospitals let bad things happen to good people? The reason can often be found in efforts to meet government quality metrics. As a recent editorial in JAMA, Unintended Harm Associated With the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, explains: … The HRRP [Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program] imposed financial penalties on hospitals based on rates of […]
Latest News
Breastfeeding and the arrogance of preventive medicine
Does this remind you of any providers you know? Preventive medicine displays all 3 elements of arrogance. First, it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy. Occasionally invoking the force of law …, it prescribes and proscribes for both individual patients and the general citizenry of […]
What’s missing from contemporary breastfeeding advice? Compassion!
Shell shock was first described one hundred years ago: During the early stages of World War I in 1914, soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force began to report medical symptoms after combat, including tinnitus, amnesia, headaches, dizziness, tremors, and hypersensitivity to noise. While these symptoms resembled those that would be expected after a physical wound […]
Breastfeeding increases right-handedness? Yet another example of misusing data to make insupportable claims about breastfeeding.
No sooner did I finish writing a post reviewing the large and growing body of evidence that the benefits of breastfeeding have been exaggerated out of all proportion to the data, another researcher comes along making another unsupportable and absurd claim. I’m glad because it can serve as an object lesson and in how and […]
Recent paper confirms that benefits of breastfeeding have been overstated
I have been arguing for years that the benefits of breastfeeding have been exaggerated far beyond what the scientific evidence could justify. In large part that exaggeration has occurred because of a massive marketing effort on the part of lactivists who repeated “breast is best” so often that it became conventional wisdom even though it […]
CORRECTION and apology to breastfeeding researcher Dr. Ronald Kleinman
Last month I wrote a piece condemning Harvard breastfeeding safety researcher Dr. Ronald Kleinman for failure to disclose financial conflicts of interest. My piece was based on an expose featured in WomensENews. This morning I received an email from Harry Orf, PhD, Senior Vice President for Research, and Research Integrity Officer Massachusetts General Hospital informing […]
How formula became the new crack cocaine
The New York Times recently issued an extraordinary mea culpa for its role in fanning hysteria around the purported epidemic of crack babies. Today, with some notable exceptions, the nation is reacting to the opioid epidemic by humanizing people with addictions … That depth of sympathy for a group of people who are overwhelmingly white […]
Disciplining the uncompliant breastfeeder
Breastfeeding professionals have discovered a problem. After nearly a generation of aggressive breastfeeding promotion undertaken at their instigation a lot of women and babies have been harmed. Sadly, that’s not the problem. The problem for breastfeeding professionals is that the women are fighting back. These women are uncompliant breastfeeders. Formula was not their initial choice. […]
Protect your baby from toxins … unless the toxins are in breastmilk, then don’t worry about them
Natural mothering advocates have a problem. They live in terrible fear that their babies and children will be exposed to “toxins” and go to great lengths to prevent exposure. But toxins — real, not imaginary — can be transmitted through breastmilk the purported elixir of life. What to do? Ignore the toxins, of course! [pullquote […]
My hope for 2019: we recognize the harm we are doing to mothers and babies by promoting the “natural”
Why do good mothers feel so bad? Because in the guise of doing what’s “best” for them, we are harming women and their babies with the dominant parenting ideology of natural mothering. How do I know? Because for decades, I have served as a witness. First as a practicing obstetrician and then as blogger, I […]
Amy Tuteur, MD
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
