The Real Deal on Bad Science, Breastfeeding Edition

Linked here is a long but good analysis of the paper on breastfeeding all over the news yesterday. You may have see it mentioned in misleading articles galore with sensational headlines like, Breastfeeding no better than formula!

Ugh.

The condensed version is as follows: it turns out the study is poorly designed. The breastfeeding contingent was all or nothing, meaning the kid could have been breastfed for one day and still included in the breastfed portion of the sample. This skews the data, when looking for potential differences in sibling pairs.

It’s just so sad when the media picks up a story like this, because in one poorly researched piece it’s easy to misinform the lay person. Most people aren’t going to read the actual study, and who really knows enough about medical research to recognize flaws in study design?

The WHO just put out a meta analysis with much more reliable data. It’s worth checking out.

Edited to add…
I just came across another rebuttal to the study:

Reports on breastfeeding sibling study are vastly overstated

Better written and researched than anything I could say on the matter 🙂

Pitch Perfect

Started working on a new story tonight, and after struggling through a few false starts I decided to write the pitch first. It forces you to encapsulate the main conflict in two or three sentences. For my myopic friends out there, it’s like looking through that contraption with all the lenses at the ophthalmologist’s office. All of a sudden everything comes into such clear focus.

It’s necessary for me these days to streamline my life as much as possible. Having a baby on the verge of walking leaves little time for the luxury of writing, or perhaps more importantly, reading. It’s such a vital pursuit for anyone who aspires to write. I have to ease back into this life gradually, like inching into a cold swimming pool. One book this month is my goal, read in stolen minutes between nursing sessions and nap time. That, along with my hour of writing time after baby goes to sleep, is as good as it’s going to get for me. It will have to be enough for now.

Miracles of Modern Medicine (and I don’t mean this sarcastically)

As I walked though the recovery room Tuesday morning, a patient was exclaiming how they felt like they had just fallen asleep. It got me thinking about the wonders of modern medicine, and anesthesia and asepsis in particular.

In a century, we’ve come a long way from ether. A little more than one hundred years ago, for instance, it was brutally painful to perform cesarean sections. The survival rate was grim, and many surgeons opted for the gruesome practice of craniotomy in an attempt to save the mother’s life. With anesthesia more sections were attempted, although mortality didn’t improve until aseptic technique was introduced.

Today, our patients drift off to sleep, for an hour, for twelve hours, and wake up like nothing even happened. Sure, they have pain, that’s unavoidable, but it’s amazing the things that we can do while they are sleeping. Excise cancers, reconstruct faces, fix bowel obstructions, while the patient slumbers peacefully. And with sterilization of instruments and pre-op antibiotics, for the most part they recover infection free.

We’re lucky to live in this time. In the future, I’m sure our current practices will seem barbaric, but I’m thankful for them all the same.

In short, the person I saw that morning reminded me of why I like surgery. After hours of hard work, no food or bathroom breaks, my hands cramping from suturing, arms sore from retracting, and neck stiff after craning to see into some dark body cavity, hearing someone say, “It’s over? I can’t believe it!” makes all the discomfort worth it.

Bonus: An interesting NIH article about the history of cesarean sections can be found here.

The Hunger Games

There’s been a lot of talk about the appropriateness of The Hunger Games for its target audience. When I was a teenager, I was an activist. At fifteen I was at a show (Against All Authority, I think–it was the mid-nineties and I was really into pop-punk and ska), and there was an info desk set up about the Cassini space probe. It was a rocket being launched from Cape Canaveral to send pictures back of our solar system and beyond. Apparently it was carrying fifty-two pounds of plutonium on board, and if it crashed, it would decimate central Florida.

For a kid who watched the Challenger explode, the threat of this was very real.

I drew up a petition and got something like five hundred signatures from the kids at school. Then I took it to my mom’s office and faxed it to the White House, with a letter along the lines of, “Dear President Clinton, please don’t let this launch happen, because the nuclear fallout would be devastating if this thing crashed.”

I don’t even think I got a form response.

The point of that ramble is that at fifteen, I knew the stakes, and was willing to fight to change things. So are kids today. War, poverty, hunger have always existed. Part of how to foster a desire to change those things is by reading books like The Hunger Games, that depict the horrors that autocracy and war and xenophobia and apathy can create. Not to mention the endless cycle of violence that retaliation can trigger (a point well-defined by Steven Spielberg’s film Munich). And the fact that it does it through the eyes of a strong, yet flawed, female protagonist? Even better.

We need more literature and art that inspires changes and doesn’t shrink from depicting what human beings can do to one another. Look out the window. Turn on CNN. It’s happening every day, all around us. We, as adults, can be just as bad as the Capitol, either turning blindly away, or participating in the voyeurism ourselves.

Complacent.

Complicit.

Happy Hunger Games.

Photo Credit: This interesting article from The New Yorker (be warned–it has spoilers through Mockingjay)

Economy of Movement

There’s a saying in surgery. Well, there’s a lot of sayings in surgery: eat when you can, sleep when you can, don’t mess with the pancreas; the enemy of good is better, etc. But this one is more of a theory. No movement should be wasted. Every flick of the wrist and pass of a suture should be like a dance: purposeful, choreographed, graceful.

The same can be said of a novel. Writing well is the arduous task of saying what you mean in the fewest words possible. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that (word up, Shakespeare). Editing again and again until all the chaff is cut away and something fresh and true remains. The delete key as literary equivalent of a weed-whacker.

And at some point, the thing will be done. That’s where surgery and writing diverge: your writing can always be better, and striving to make it so won’t lead to hemorrhaging.

Much.

 

Photo credit: Lake Nona Now Newspaper

As if you could kill time…

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Thoreau