I couldn’t agree more with #1 and #3, and my husband and I are still–TWO kids later–trying to do #8. Sigh.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!

One of the things that has been recommended to me many times are homeopathic teething tablets or drops such as Hyland’s.  People swear  it is the ONLY thing that worked for their kid.  They say that they are “all natural” and “completely safe” so there is no harm in trying them! Well, I’ve done some research on homeopathy and yes, homeopathic remedies are completely safe, but it is doubtful that they actually work.

Homeopathic products often get lumped in with natural or herbal products. This confusion is completely understandable. Homeopathic products are marketed that way and are sold next to herbal products and vitamins on store shelves, but homeopathy is a distinct and specific form of alternative medicine.

What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy was developed in the late 1700s or early 1800s by Samuel Hahnemann and is based on two main principals:

The law of similars or “like cures like”

The law of infinitesimals or minimal dose

The law of similars states that a disease can be cured by administering a substance that causes similar symptoms in a healthy person.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) explains it like this:

The principle of similars (or “like cures like”) states that a disease can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people. This idea, which can be traced back to Hippocrates, was further developed by Hahnemann after he repeatedly ingested cinchona bark, a popular treatment for malaria, and found that he developed the symptoms of the disease. Hahnemann theorized that if a substance could cause disease symptoms in a healthy person, small amounts could cure a sick person who had similar symptoms.

Abchomeopathy.com uses this example:

For example, if the symptoms of your cold are similar to poisoning by mercury, then mercury would be your homeopathic remedy.

By that logic, if I’m having trouble sleeping I should drink a very small dose of caffeine. I’m just sayin’.

In Hahnemann’s defense, he developed his principal at a time when the predominate medical theory was to “balance the body’s humors” by treating a disease with its opposite which included letting out the offensive matter causing the illness by bloodletting, purging or enemas. His law of similars was at least partly a reaction to these horrifying and harmful practices. The thing is that when people got more information about how the body and the world work, bloodletting was abandoned in favor of a more effective and provable system.  But homeopathy continues to use the law of similars even though there is no conclusive evidence that it is effective or even plausible.

The law of infinitesimals states that the smaller the dose of the medication, the more effective it will be.

Again NCCAM explains it like this:

The principle of dilutions (or “law of minimum dose”) states that the lower the dose of the medication, the greater its effectiveness. In homeopathy, substances are diluted in a stepwise fashion and shaken vigorously between each dilution. This process, referred to as “potentization,” is believed to transmit some form of information or energy from the original substance to the final diluted remedy. Most homeopathic remedies are so dilute that no molecules of the healing substance remain; however, in homeopathy, it is believed that the substance has left its imprint or “essence,” which stimulates the body to heal itself (this theory is called the “memory of water”).

ABC Homeopathy explains it like this:

Minimal Dose
The remedy is taken in an extremely dilute form; normally one part of the remedy to around 1,000,000,000,000 parts of water.

That’s a trillion! That’s a whole lot. That is so much that the likelihood of there even being one molecule of the substance left in the remedy in your bottle is next to zero.

The “law of minimal dose” contradicts the laws of chemistry, physics (yes, even quantum physics) and, in my opinion, common sense. By this logic, the less alcohol you drink, the more drunk you should feel. (This isn’t an actual claim made by homeopaths, but I’m using it to illustrate the point.)

As NCCAM states above, homeopaths believe that the healing substance leaves its imprint or essence in the water and that the water has a memory of the substance. As of now there is no plausible explanation of how this can happen.  Even if water does have a memory, how does the water know to keep the memory of that particular substance and not all the other stuff (urine, fish spawn, etc.) that has been in it before?  Let’s say that homeopaths have a way to purify or flush the memory of the water, how does the water know not to remember the essence of the container that they shake it up in?

Even the NCCAM acknowledges that homeopathy is inconsistent with established laws of science:

Homeopathy is a controversial area of CAM because a number of its key concepts are not consistent with established laws of science (particularly chemistry and physics). Critics think it is implausible that a remedy containing a miniscule amount of an active ingredient (sometimes not a single molecule of the original compound) can have any biological effect—beneficial or otherwise.

I agree that if a remedy is truly homeopathic then it is safe and will have no harmful side effects. The problem is that it will have no positive effect either. Or at least no effect beyond that of a placebo.

From NCCAM:

Most analyses of the research on homeopathy have concluded that there is little evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment for any specific condition, and that many of the studies have been flawed. However, there are some individual observational studies, randomized placebo-controlled trials, and laboratory research that report positive effects or unique physical and chemical properties of homeopathic remedies.

From Wikipedia:

Health organizations such as the UK’s National Health Service,[121] the American Medical Association,[11] and the FASEB[103] have issued statements of their conclusion that there is no convincing scientific evidence to support the use of homeopathic treatments in medicine.

From Pub Med:

CONCLUSIONS: The findings of currently available Cochrane reviews of studies of homeopathy do not show that homeopathic medicines have effects beyond placebo.

Teething

Whenever Duncan seems to be in a lot of pain from teething I give him some infant Tylenol or Motrin and that seems to help, but if you are looking to avoid these medications there are plenty of other things you can try.

Remedies seem to fall into two broad categories: 1) cold things to chew on and 2) various textures to chew on.

In the first category there are any number of teething rings that you can put in the freezer.  I’ve also heard of people freezing bagels, carrots and pieces of fruit for the little ones to chew on. I know it sounds a little gross, but my son likes to chew on an ice cube wrapped in a clean washcloth.

In the second category, my son loves the Wee Play Hand and Foot Teether. You can also try plush toys or wooden teething rings.

Teething is no fun and all we can do is try and help our babies be more comfortable as they go through it. If you still have some of those homeopathic teething drops in your medicine cabinet, I recommend freezing them into an ice cube, wrapping a washcloth around it and letting your kid chew on it. That is the best use of a homeopathic remedy.

If you would like to learn more about homeopathy, here are some good articles and videos:

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=2785985155605802136&q=James+Randi#

http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID.632/healthissue_detail.asp

http://www.skepdic.com/homeo.html#why

So now our son can say hello in Chinese, and all my smugness about my plans to keep him away from the TV have evaporated.  TV is a tool.  Example:  Daddy had to go to class tonight, and goodbyes are tough.  The answer?  Latest Ni Ho Kai Lan episode.  And a couple animal cookies.  Totally eases the pain.

Sure, you can judge me, but ask yourself:  wouldn’t that ease your pain?  Cookies and TV.  Does it get any better?  No!  Don’t even try to lie.

So here’s a study (found via Stats.org) that shows what the negative effects of TV on toddlers.  We try to limit it to thirty minutes.  But who am I kidding?  We fail.  Often.  This study has shown up in a few places, including the LA Times:

A large-scale, long-running Canadian study of children found that for every extra hour of TV time a toddler watches weekly, she is likely in fourth grade to have lower levels of classroom engagement and poorer performance in math, is more likely to be the victim of bullying, to be sedentary and to have a higher body-mass index.

Dangit.  How do I rectify this with my firm belief that TV is awesome?

We’re not really sedentary people.  We get the boy to the park daily.  Twice a day on weekends.  We play with him.  We build Duplo stuff with him.  And we also hang out with him while he watches his shows, and we chat.  I feel like somehow, we must be the exception here.  We’re just so amazing that TV can’t hurt our giant brains, right?

But I guess I’ll scale it back a bit.  Thirty minutes a day.  Fine.  I mean for the kid, not me.

The top places to be a mom are Norway, Australia, and Iceland. The worst places are Chad, Niger and then Afghanistan at the very bottom. Surprising (to me) was that the U.S. ranks 28th, which is actually down a spot from the previous year. Here’s why:

One in every 4,800 American women dies due to pregnancy. It’s one of the highest maternal-morbidity rates in the developed world. To put that number into perspective, in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Greece and Italy, the risk of maternal death is less than one in 25,000 — and in Ireland, it’s less than one in 47,600.

But it’s not just American moms who die due to pregnancy: American babies don’t fare so well, either. Our infant-mortality rate is pretty dismal for the developed world, with eight out of every 1,000 children dying before their fifth birthdays. A child born in the U.S. is more than twice as likely as a child born in Finland, Iceland, Sweden or Singapore to die before his fifth birthday. Also, the U.S. has the least-generous maternity-leave policy of any developed country, fewer women in elected government positions than other developed countries and fewer kids enrolled in preschool.

The list illustrates that access to education, economic opportunities and proper health care provide the best chance for mothers and children to survive and thrive. In the U.S., we should do a lot better. So, what’s the deal with the ranking?

First, let’s look at infant mortality.

“Infant mortality is defined as the number of children born alive who die after birth — but this differs state to state and country to country,” said Dr. Benjamin Sachs, a fellow of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

For example, he says in the U.S., a baby born at 17 weeks who later died would be considered a miscarriage. But, a baby born at 23 weeks who later died would count towards the infant mortality rate, even though it only had a 20% chance of survival outside the womb. In some other countries, this would instead be considered a miscarriage.

Abortion politics in the U.S. also are thought to play a factor.

“About 20 percent of the children who die in the U.S. do so from birth defects,” said Sachs. “In a country that has a liberal abortion policy, those children will die in abortion — some countries even allow third-trimester abortions so their rates [of infant mortality] are going to be lower,” he said.

Next, let’s look at maternal mortality, which is shockingly high for a country so rich as ours. Only, that’s the difference. If you’re a rich American, you’re more likely to be better educated, with better health care. But, if you’re in a lower economic class, or an illegal immigrant, you’re at greater risk.

Powers said Save the Children’s research has also found that pregnant “minority” women who seek medical care do not end up getting the same quality of care as pregnant women “in the majority.”

That is appalling.

There are 40 million people in the U.S. without health insurance, a large population of which are illegal immigrants. The doctors interviewed agreed that the rates would improve if every pregnant woman were guaranteed access to health care.

Also, other factors at play may include the obesity epidemic here as well as the older age of some mothers.

The bottom line: Maternal and infant mortality rates are complicated issues where more than one factor may be at fault. Still, the U.S. has a long way to go–especially when it comes to maternity leave, flexible workplaces, and affordable health care. We can do better for our mothers.

Photo

It seems like an interesting study. And the video is full of adorable little babies. I tried embedding it but it looked kind of wonky on our blog format, so click the link and watch. It’s only four minutes long.

In one part of the study, babies see a blinking light and feel a puff of air, and something about the timing of their blinks tells researchers how the hippocampus is developing. Amazing.

(The picture is of my son’s leg after getting his vaccinations)

Andrew Wakefield kicked off the anti vaccination movement with his paper published in 1998 that claimed to show a link between Autism and vaccines. His  findings  have been proven false over and over again. It was also found that he most likely faked his data.

Last week  the UK’s General Medical Council found that Andrew Wakefield acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” when doing his research. And now The Lancet (who published the paper) has issued a full retraction.

This is very good news and I hope that this will help put parents concerns about vaccinating their children to rest.

In other news, Bill Gates has committed $10 Billion (yes Billion!)  to develop and deliver vaccines to children in the developing world. “We must make this the decade of vaccines,” said Bill Gates. “Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before.”

I get a daily email from the American Council on Science and Health called “Health Facts and Fears”. In that news letter Dr Gilbert Ross is quoted as saying of Bill Gates, “We must give credit to him for taking a very effective, targeted, lifesaving approach to charitable giving as opposed to activists, who prefer to wage irrational attacks on substances that have no nexus with human health.”

I’m a Mac girl but this makes me want to buy a PC!

The French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while the German babies’ cries had a falling inflection.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, they say the babies are probably trying to form a bond with their mothers by imitating them.

The findings suggest that unborn babies are influenced by the sound of the first language that penetrates the womb.

Very cool stuff.

Photo

In order to make antibodies to a virus (or bacterium) the body need to “see” the virus. In other words, it needs to have direct exposure to the virus, but that virus doesn’t have to be functional, and it doesn’t even have to be whole. A virus can be inactivated (live attenuated) or killed and still produce an immune response. It can also be broken down into its constituent parts and the parts can produce an immune response. Any future exposure to the live virus (though contact with others who have the disease) will be met with rapid and massive production of antibody, preventing the individual from getting sick at all. A vaccine is merely and inactivated or dead form of the virus, letting you learn to make antibody without getting sick in the process.

Tuesday’s post is a piece called “Is breastfeeding a moral imperative?“  It’s actually a summary of an article by Michele L. Crossley published in Feminism & Psychology.  If you’re not interested in reading the entire article, you’ll the gist of it from Amy’s post, because she quotes Crossley’s article extensively.  This is personal piece about Crossley’s attempt to breastfeed and her feelings of failure at not being able to do so.  Here’s  little taste:

I felt like a failure because … I had ‘taken on board’ the message that breastfeeding was really difficult, it was hard work and ‘many people didn’t manage to do it’. One had to be ‘really determined’ to succeed, but if ‘you tried really hard, you could manage it’… [M]y experience was entirely consistent with a woman in Lee and Furedi’s study who commented that women who ’succeed at breastfeeding are made to feel like it’s such an achievement, they have done so well, they deserve a medal…’ As Lee and Furedi argue, some women have come to view breastfeeding as a ‘measure of motherhood and consciously or unconsciously judge other mothers accordingly’…

Happy reading.

I really would panic if my baby looked like this.

At Let’s Panic you’ll get lots of really great advice.  For example, this fantastic quiz helps you to interpret your baby’s cries and begins by asking the sensitive question:

What’s that sound coming out of Baby’s face-hole?

I also enjoyed reading “Your Post-Childbirth Vagina: Get To Know It!”

All that stretching and tearing and stitching. Will you ever be pretty again, down there? Will you ever be able to feature your vagina in your annual Christmas portrait?

Thanks to Molly for the link!

duncan @ five minutes

By Dean Cameron

This past August 1, 2009 at 10:45am, my son, Duncan Huxley Cameron was born.

Not only is he quite a bit bigger now than he is in that photo, his ability to melt me with a look, has increased.

We are raising him as rationally as possible. Obviously, he’ll make his own decisions about how to interact with his world, but we’ll tell the truth as we see it and let it go. There’s plenty of woo out there for him to encounter and deal with on his own, so we don’t need to burden him with more at home. It’s going to be intersting as, even before he was born, people I consider rational were saying really weird and irrational things.

It makes sense, I suppose. There’s so much about having a child that is completely out of ones control that, like the rest of life, we tend to look for patterns to apply to random things. Here in the west, where we have an abundance of food and nutrition, once you’re out of the first trimester of pregnancy, if you’re not behaving like an idiot, your kid is probably going to come out just fine.

But… because that stuff is out of our control, people start making up rules to follow. Sure, some of ‘em might make sense and actually keep you healthy, but, again… as long as you’re not being an idiot, that kid is going to come out and, most likely, come out fine.

Childbirth as an Extreme Sport
Extreme Sports came about because of great medicine and the boredom of practice. Back in “ye oldene tymes” no one, except for inventors, had the time or inclination to go hang gliding because a) broken bones meant death or worse, suffering and disfigurement for the rest of one’s life and 2) life already had enough fucking terror, what with everyone dying because of disease and war.

Here in the future, if you survive a hang gliding crash and break your legs and crack your spine, the worst part is your drunken friends driving you to the hospital in the back of the 4-Runner. After that, it’s 6 weeks off of work, Fentanyl Patches and 150,000 hits on YouTube. As far as skill goes, it’s a matter of being able to buy the gear. The wealthier you are, the more three day weekends you can spend hang-gliding and the better gear you can buy. You can’t buy the skill that comes spending 4 hours a day doing boring tennis drills for your entire youth.

So, like extreme sports, unless there is a rare complication, the sheer terror of having a child is gone. Western Infant mortality rates are extremely low and mothers dying in childbirth is almost non-existent so, to shake things up, we make it exciting by having a kid at home or with people beating drums or standing up in the shower or in a hot tub with your family there or in a dumpster behind chuck e. cheese. If something goes wrong, you’re a quick ambulance drive away from the hospital and all is well.

(A side note… We had our son at Cedars Sinai here in L.A. Our hippie friends told us that it’s a bad place to have a child because they have such a high record of emergency births. We aksed (yes, aksed) the doctor about it and she said the emergencies were mainly home deliveries gone haywire and since Cedars has the best Natal Intensive Care Unit, the botched home births are rushed to Cedars.)

“Pitocin is Evil!!!”
Because we wanted to feel like we were “doing something”, the bride and I went to a Lamaze class. I made it through the three hours without having an episode. I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s the extreme sports thing, but we encountered quite a bit of anti-science bias associated with having a baby. The point of the Lamaze method is to have the baby “naturally”. Since we’re living in the future and having the baby at a hospital “natural” really just means “without an epidural”. This is fine, if that’s how you roll, but there was no reason for it. The instructor hinted, quite strongly, that it’s better for the baby if it’s “natural”, but wouldn’t come out and say as much (because it’s not true). She made the claim that medical students today aren’t shown “natural” child births. When I questioned her about this; pressing her for a source for her claim, she said she learned the med student facts from “articles”. The larger subtext was that women who chose to receive epidurals were less woman than those who went without because they weren’t completely experiencing the delivery. Not only that, it is, somehow, better for the child if it’s “natural”.

Yep, after a full term of pregnancy what’s really going to have an affect on junior is that final few hours.

We were told “don’t let them give her any drugs!!!” a couple of times. One of the drugs that the bride was given was Pitocin, a drug that induces labor.

Back in the “good old days” one of the many ways a woman could die in childbirth was bleeding to death after being ripped open by a too large baby.

Duncan was full term and ready to come out, but the bride’s body wasn’t ready to let him go. Instead of waiting another two weeks and getting a Caesarian, or worse, a drip of Pitocin induced labor and we were on our way. (Before you say “body knows best”, aks yourself if cancer is the body knowing best?)

When you google Pitocin, the very first result is an anti-science web page, childbirth.org. It’s so sad. It looks official, but it’s just some anti-science people picking and choosing their facts and scaring people.

We were told that Pitocin keeps the mother from producing milk. Once the bride had the epidural she was able to calm down, as she didn’t realize how freaked out she was. It was only a matter of minutes after the Pitocin kicked in until she began pushing. Duncan was born within the hour. The bride was breast-feeding almost immediately. So much for the horror stories.

(I know, personal experience is one of the worst ways to come to an understanding of how the world works. I’m just saying that our experience with Pitocin and the epidoodle was aces! )

The bride is a genius. She made the point that people now use bleeding edge science to get pregnant; in vitro pregnancies are so common now, and that is, rightfully, considered a beautiful and excellent thing. BUT, using science for the delivery cheapens the experience. If someone is of the mind that “nature knows best” then why take the shortcut around nature and go in vitro? Hmm?!?!

Genius, I tell you. Genius.

Infants as Unemployment Insurance
Since the turn of the century (I love saying that!) I was fortunate enough to have a nice career doing voice overs for radio and television. I began the century writing front end code at an online games web site. I also helped a friend develop a web service, Tightcircle.com, which he later patented and sold to an “unnamed company in Mountain View, California”. My main income was voice overs and I would, occasionally supplement it by doing web work.

About two years ago, the voice overs began slowing down. Thanks to strikes and technology, fewer people were needed to do voice overs. Finally, the work seems to have dried up almost completely. I had been averaging a couple of gigs a month. At this point, I haven’t had a VO gig since early 2008.

Once we discovered the bride was with child, I began looking for web work in earnest. Thanks to technology, I found myself a bit behind the curve as far as front-end coding goes. I’ve been on all the tech job boards for years so I started scouring those and other resources and by January of this year started sending out at least 2 resumes a day and doing tutorials online on the stuff I’d missed.

Our plan had been that by the time the bride finished her latest editing gig, I would either have some foot back in showbiz or a web coding gig. Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening and it began getting hairy.

I kept hearing “babies bring luck” and it only pissed me off more. What is the method? How does it work? Gravity? Hmm. The week before Duncan was born, I received two job offers. Some poor soul on MyFaceSpaceBook wrote “babies bring luck!!!” and I kinda/sort jumped down her throat. See… by saying that not only are you simply being an idiot, unaware of confirmation bias, you are discounting the work I did to get those jobs. If a baby is born every minute, wouldn’t there be more “luck” in the world? I can’t even begin to start deconstructing this…. The week before he was born, I had to put a new radiator in my car. Lucky? As Linus Van Pelt often said: Aaargh!

Pisces Virgo Rising is a very good siiiiignnnnnn
Racism is just lazy. Instead of investigating cultural differences, racism just lays down blanket statements about large groups of people. The only criteria is how they were born. Not who they are. People are different through their cultures, but it’s more about geography than biology. But, even then, I realllly hate it. It makes me so sad when I hear someone describe themselves based on their race. “I’m Italian, I can’t help being jealous!” Well, you were raised to think that. It has nothing to do with you being Italian, except everyone you know who is Italian has told you that you can’t help but be jealous. There are lots of Italians who aren’t. I bet there are Italians at swingers clubs.

The worst manifestation of racism is astrology. Because of the date and time of your birth, you are endowed with personality traits that are inescapable.

I think this is so maddening to me because I’m a Taurus.

duncan y bride @ one minute

But seriously… This country was created so we can be free. We are free to try to do whatever we want and be whoever we want. We are free to choose our own identity and make our own lives and yet people voluntarily yoke themselves with zodiac signs, shrug and say “I can’t help that I’m clumsy, I’m a gemini”.

Obviously, you are absolutely free to do this in this free country. You’re totally free to hamstring yourself or create excuses based on your deep misunderstanding of the gravitational effects of the planets. Please don’t do it to my son. Please don’t tell him how he is before he can walk. Please don’t make up your mind how he is before he can walk. Let him find out who he is and how he is. It’s going to take a long time and, this is important: it will change. Duncan may start out shy and become an extrovert, but let’s not keep him one way by telling him it’s preordained. It may be. But it’s not because of the moon and jupiter. As William Shakespeare wrote: “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.” (Edmund has a great deconstruction of astrology in King Lear.)

There are so many real mysteries and phenomenon, both explained and unexplained, associated with infants. When does he begin recognizing us? Is he thinking abstractly? How does language happen? The nature/nurture question. All of those things. They are fascinating, vexing and beautiful. Why throw crap in there like ass-trology, babies bringing luck and anti-science? I loved him before he was born. Isn’t that enough?