Monday, April 15, 2013

Shaken Baby Syndrome: Unsettling Science

Thought I would share this article, since as a Family/Child Advocate and keeper of the webfiles for NFPCAR, myself and many others have shared and supported many loving parents who were falsely accused  of Shaken Baby Syndrome

What is even more upsetting is that the symptoms, which could be "other" medical issues, have not been explored by the Medical Professionals as much as they should.

As a result, those allegedly accused of SBS are being found guilty and much of the Medical Proof is being discarded relating to other Medical possibilities.

Hey, I am not a doctor, but merely a scientist, but in exploring the answers, one must look at ALL sides of an issue, Without BIAS.
May you find Strength in Your Higher Power,GranPa Chuck
Check Out>>My Family Rights Affiliation

Read the Article
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Here is the Title: Unsettling Science: Experts Are Still Debating Whether Shaken Baby Syndrome Exists

Posted Dec 1, 2011 5:50 AM CDT
By Mark Hansen

 Link:  http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/unsettling_science_experts_are_still_debating_whether_shaken_baby_syndrome_

You can read this article, But I think even More Informational is a comment made on this article. 
Here is the comment:
3.Steven Gabaeff, M.D. Dec 4, 2011 8:07 PM CDT
You, the author, are being duped by the pro SBS leaders. The so called leaders are deeply invested in SBS both financially, professionally and psychologically. The prospect of being wrong implies they have been the linchpin to the destruction of thousands of families. They have mental health issues to begin with and cannot be trusted to be fair. There is a mountain of evidence that SBS as described, both from before and after Guthkelch and Caffey, never existed. Guthkelch himself has denounced the SBS proponents on NPR this year at age 95. Contrary to Levin’s statement that babies have never been shaken, babies have been shaken and that has been captured on nanny cams and the shaking, severe and protracted, did not show either RH or SDH as a result ever, not once! Isn’t that telling? 

Use the link below to download the 2 videos that exist.

Here is the link to the shaking videos with no injuries…

https://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=M3BtaklsaTFiR0pqQThUQw

Extract the files from the downloaded zip folder and start the PowerPoint file and press the slide show button in PowerPoint to watch.


A study by Lee looked at 1258 fathers, 26 of the worst abusers identified in that study were witnessed to shake their kids by mothers they lived with, and none had RH or SDH. Note how infrequent shaking is in general. Note how emergency physicians virtually never see babies who have been shaken who are brought in to be checked by concerned parents who have been warned over and over about shaking. I have never seen a case and the only one I know of was a mother who witnessed her husband shake a 5 week old. The child was examined immediately in an ED and there were no findings at all. There has never been a witnessed shaking that led to either finding.


Loving parents for all intents and purposes do not abuse their kids; this was made up to account for cases like Audrey Edmunds; a women who never hurt a child according to all reports. Furthermore, there is no scientific research to prove that happens among loving caregivers. The notion of parents flipping from loving to monstrous is fundamentally absurd. However, it is essential for the child abuse MD’s to speculate that people snap in every case. Of a thousand loving caregivers the odds of ‘snapping’; this made up event that is not seen among loving parents followed for years in other studies, is virtually zero. The real probability could be as high as 1 in 1,000,000 and even then with no witnessed events, it is still hypothetical. Yet it remains the key piece with Edmonds and thousands of other improbable abusers who are falsely accused based on nonspecific and nondiagnostic findings. The findings are used to prove abuse but even the child abuse MD’s now admit they are nonspecific. This is the sine qua non of the conviction; a speculative, extremely low probability event that is the essential component of the fabricated accusations, passed off as 95% likely by prominent SBS advocates whose business is >> 90% prosecuting innocent families. Their statements of certainty that this occurs would mean that 950 of 1000 previously loving parents would abuse their children every year. That would be millions of cases. It is an absurd presumption and has no place in the court room when those odds might be described as the polar opposite of beyond a reasonable doubt; they really are “fundamentally implausible”. Without a witness to abuse, presuming abuse in loving families is as farfetched as an accusation can be.


There is a gigantic business of prosecuting families, getting government funding and generating convictions to get more funds. DA’s, police, child abuse MD’s are all the beneficiaries of false convictions. They are not in the business of preventing child abuse they are in the business of generating convictions for child abuse. Currently I am seeing about 75 cases a year and >> 90% are innocent people being falsely prosecuted and convicted in about ½ of the cases. 
They are convicted when child abuse MD’s and their colleagues within institutions operating in a framework well defined by Irving Janis at Yale in the 1970’s, as “group think”, use medical problems and accidents to misdiagnose abuse. I take the time to study these families and read the letters written by those who know them, and for loving caregivers the letters paint a picture of caring people, with zero history of violence or impulsive behaviors. The probability of these people snapping is effectively zero, ruling them out as abusers. The child abuse MD’s believes all these people are liars when they tell the story of an accident or a prodrome of illness leading to a medical encounter. It is easy for an authority figure to accuse anyone of a fictitious event that is witnessed by nobody and a behavior, the type of which they or no one else has ever seen in the accused. The child abuse MD’s can literally say anything and because of the titles they have, these non-evidenced based opinions are given undeserved weight.  Judges, police, DA’s and social workers must stop just believing these child abuse specialists. They must go beyond relying on these people and explore the issues via legal documents like Tuerkheimer or medical research that my article references; studies predating the fabrication of SBS that show the dogmatic pillars of child abuse pediatrics are wrong. They must try to decide for themselves how improbable the majority of allegations proffered are. Disproven dogma, not science, is being used to inflict the most dreadful of problems on innocent families and in many cases stealing children from parents and destroying families. I know about abuse. I have held dead abused babies in my arms. When it real it is easy to see. When it is conjured up via the misdiagnosis of accidents and medical problems, it is equally obvious. The denialists in this calculus are those that refuse to acknowledge how often medical problems and accidents are misdiagnosed as abuse and the 1000’s of cases that could be accidents or medical problems that are dismissed with certainty that they can be “abuse and only abuse.”


Here is a link to an article that summarizes the evidence against SBS.

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z55j01t

Read this summary of the medical history and evidence base (you can download the references) showing how awful what they are doing is.


“He said she said” is not the approach to this issue. Their science is based on children precategorized as abused by their colleagues, the very findings they say diagnoses abuse. This is circular logic. RH and SDH are nondiagnostic findings but if every child with RH and SDH is precategorized as abused and put into an “abuse group”, how reliable is the conclusion that all children who are abused have RH and SDH. And when the dogma was finally shown to be unreliable after 25 years of analysis, the American Academy of Pediatrics decided by a committee made up people like the very people cited in this article, the ardent proponents of SBS, to stop linking their “beliefs” in abuse to any specific medical findings to “provide more clarity in the courtroom.”  Diagnoses like abusive head trauma or nonaccidental trauma were invoked that suggest both mechanism and intent to abuse when there is zero ability to infer that from the nonspecific findings they rely on. The purpose was to win more cases with even less reliable evidence then before and it continues to work. The scientific debate has been controlled by those with the power to dictate policies and publicity and is linked to the prosecution machine that operates in this area of the law. Hopefully that will change.

I have been in Emergency Medicine for 35 years and I am not a naïve do gooder. I have seen it all, plus. The child abuse establishment has seduced the media and the legal system using their undeserved fame and ill-gotten stature to influence the courts and the media. They intimidate colleagues and those that disagree, relying on the emotions the child abuse invokes. Yet a false allegation is child abuse and people need to come to grips with this since now false allegations most likely out number the number of cases of real abuse that makes it to court. This is the biggest medical fraud in history.
(End of Comment)

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