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 […]

Fed is minimal. Is there anything more emotionally abusive than this “rebuttal” to the Fed Is Best campaign? The definition of minimal is: barely adequate or the least possible Could there be anything more cruel than telling a mother who couldn’t or didn’t want to breastfeed her child that SHE is barely adequate? [pullquote align=”right” […]

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 […]

Janis, one of the characters in Mean Girls, says: There are two kinds of evil people in this world. Those who do evil stuff and those who see evil stuff being done and don’t try to stop it. There’s actually a third kind: those who see good stuff being done and harrass those who do […]

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 […]

Many years ago I received an urgent gynecology question at 11 PM. I was the OB-GYN Chief Resident on call that night so any outside calls came to me. The middle aged woman on the phone told me she was desperate for help. She needed to know if her son’s girlfriend had come to the […]

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 […]

It’s always the mother’s fault. There is a long and storied history of mother blame extending back millennia. Women who couldn’t conceive were labeled “barren” even though infertility is caused by male factors 20% of the time. Women who had only daughters and no sons were blamed for the sex of their children, even though […]

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 […]

It’s been nearly 20 years since I was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor, a meningioma. At the time the Gamma Knife (stereotactic radiosurgery, which is radiation not surgery) was relatively new, but as my brain tumor was deep inside my brain it offered an opportunity to avoid potentially destructive brain surgery. Nonetheless, I sought […]