The Skeptical OB

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]