The Skeptical OB

Bed sharing has always been dangerous. The first reported bed sharing death occurred nearly 3,000 years ago. Two women came to King Solomon and stood before him. One woman said: “My Lord, this woman and I dwell in the same house, and I gave birth to a child while with her in the house. On […]

Another study has found exclusive breastfeeding dramatically increases the risk of newborn hospital readmission. We’ve known for sometime that aggressive breastfeeding promotion has significant risks including hypernatremic neonatal dehydration and jaundice induced brain damage (kernicterus); indeed 90% of cases of kernicterus are associated with breastfeeding. Closing well baby nurseries in order to force infants to […]

Breastfeeding is causing otherwise mentally healthy women to lose their minds. Consider this piece from the Today Show. Donna Freydkin writes: [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Like mass hysteria, it appears to be contagious, directly transmitted by lactation professionals who suffer from their own version of Breastfeeding Derangement Syndrome.[/pullquote] Then my glorious globes failed […]

California is about to experiment on its mothers and babies. Ordinarily we would look with horror on a state’s desire to experiment on its own people. Yet when the purported justification is preventive care, we suspend our distaste under the theory that preventive care is always a good thing; as a result people get hurt […]

A new piece on NPR suggests that it’s okay to risk a baby’s death in order to bed share. The piece asks Is Sleeping With Your Baby As Dangerous As Doctors Say? and answers by suggesting that the “right” kind of parents can bed share while the “wrong” kind of parents cannot. [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” […]

Another day, another piece demonizing C-sections. How the C-Section Went From Last Resort to Overused was written by Rebecca Onion and appears on Slate. We don’t even get to the body of the piece before the first falsehood appears. The subtitle is: The history of the surgery is rife with horror, but today, 1 in 3 […]

Kavin Senapathy, writing in Self reports Giving Birth Made Me Question the Informed Consent Process During Childbirth. The issue: should we obtain informed consent for vaginal birth? After all vaginal birth is natural, not a medical procedure. [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]We must counsel women about the risks of vaginal birth for the […]

It is often said that randomized controlled studies (RCTs) are the gold standard in healthcare. As David Shaywitz explains in a piece in Forbes Will Real World Performance Replace RCTs As Healthcare’s Most Important Standard?: The value of RCTs lies in the random, generally blinded, allocation of patients to treatment or control group, an approach […]

A new paper published this month in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Mode of delivery after a previous cesarean birth, and associated maternal and neonatal morbidity, shows that attempted vaginal birth after C-section (VBAC) significantly increases the risk of poor maternal and neonatal outcome. Absolute rates of severe maternal morbidity and mortality were low but […]

I was very fortunate in my OB-GYN training. I did my internship and residency at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, a Harvard hospital. I prize that training, but over the past 35 years I’ve discovered that some of things I was taught were wrong. Three of the principles of obstetrics and gynecology that were accepted as […]