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06/21/2006
This just in
This will be a quickie, because I'm still busy chiseling cantaloupe off my Wacoal 85185.
From the "Take that, milk-on-a-rag-bashers" desk: "The New York Times shocked women last week with an astonishing article in its Science Times section titled, 'Breast-feed or Else.' While laying claim to a balanced approach...the paper, nevertheless, ended up producing an extremely biased article...[T]he costs of nursing are substantial: the reduced time for work due to the need to pump, nurse, eat and sleep has a huge economic and social impact on women and their families. Nursing can also lead to depression or other unhealthy emotional states. It can be painful, and there are sometimes medical reasons why nursing is not recommended." This comes from "What Science Really Says About the Benefits of Breast-Feeding (and what the New York Times didn’t tell you)," on STATS.org, via MotherTalkers.
"According to the American Academy of
Pediatrics (AAP), breastfeeding leads to a 21 percent decrease in the
death rate of babies in an age range over one month and under one-year
old," the authors assert, "but turn to the AAP’s source. The scientific study used to support this claim found that babies who are nursed are less likely to die...of injuries!" So, um, does that mean that riding a mechanical bull while engaged in the act of nursing is okay after all?
From the "How many times do we have to tell you jackasses to relax?" desk: "Some women can become fertile again after cognitive behaviour therapy alone, said researchers." A teeny-tiny-micro-pico-nano study — sixteen subjects — found that "some perfectionist women who had stopped menstruating and ovulating" regained their fertility after 20 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is, as the article notes, much cheaper than conventional fertility treatment. I eagerly await the follow-up study examining the effects of vodka, which is much cheaper than cognitive behavioral therapy.
And finally, from the "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer up your catheter" desk: A researcher whose credentials include a stint in French mime school has found a significant improvement in pregnancy rates when IVF patients were entertained by a clown as they lay in bed after embryo transfer. (I know. I know. Make up your own joke. This is almost too easy. I know.) The researcher said that the response from the study subjects was wonderful, but he wasn't sure how many clinics would apply his findings. "For medication, you can get the patient to pay," he said, miming the trickle of a tear down his white-painted cheek, "but who is going to pay for clowns?" Thank you, Marcel Marceau. Now get back in your goddamn glass box before we make you eat your own beret.
A tip of the rainbow wig to Alison and Cam for the pointer.
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No clowns! For the love of god.
That would send me into a bad case of the heebie jeebies.
Well, my Dr. offered to juggle for me after my D&C, but frankly, I was more interested in peeing and going home. With drugs.
How can you relax with a clown in your room?!
Clowns. ::shudder::
"Shlomi?" Are you kidding me? Well, we all do need a little shlomi (in one way or another) to fall pregnant, don't we?
what struck me most on the ny times article (and which i read in a letter to the editor today) is that better educated, wealthier women are more likely to breast feed. These women are more likely to have healthier children. The studies done to date don't do a good job of controlling for those variables. DUH.
Clowns? My god, clowns?! Doesn't everyone hate clowns? Why couldn't they come up with an idea like music or something?!
Are they trying to scare you into being pregnant?
Hear hear, freakin' hear, Cat. My knowledge of the subject matter comes from a few short pages in "Freakonomics", but I can't help but feel that EVERY breastfeeding study I've ever seen was remarkably lax with controlling their variables. I'd love, love, love to see Levitt and Dubner tackle THIS one (two guys not afraid to posit that increased abortion rates lead to decreased crime rates would have a freaking FIELD day with breastfeeding).
Do you get to throw things at the clown? Is he there the entire time, staring at your crotch and walking an invisible dog, or does he come in afterwards, when you really really really have to pee, and laughing is maybe not a good idea?
Do you get the same benefit if your RE wears a red rubber nose and a rainbow wig? What if your RE just *IS* a fucking clown?
Gah! All these variables! Now I can't relax! NOW how shall I reap the curative benefits of relaxation on PCOS and Endo?
That's it. I'm doomed.
Send in the clowns.
On the same line as Akeeyu: apparently that's all the RE hires is clowns. Especially the ones who sit at the front desk demanding your payment in full before you can even sit your assfullofPIO down.
OMG clowns!! RUN!
Wait, are the studies controlling for RE's who are clowns? You've got to look BEHIND the stats people!
clowns?
CLOWNS?????
I'm just...
speechless.
Do you even know what that takes????
So, I guess what you really need is a clown who can perform cognitive therapy, who also brings vodka? Maybe this clown can also help with breastfeeding...while in a bar...where there's a mechanical bull.
At my clinic they give you valium for transfer, so I'm sure I would really enjoy a clown.
Even worse than clowns... MIMES. MIMES for god's sake. I can just see them now, stuck in their little invisible box, shoes being hurled at them from the bed. That would definitely make someone feel better.
Oh, honestly. The clown-thing I knew about (I wrote about it on my site this morning), but the CBT study? I hope to god my mother doesn't see that one.
And as far as it being so much cheaper than conventional fertility treatments...this annoys me. Are insurance companies going to start mandating these things before moving to "conventional" treatments, the way that some plans currently mandate lesser treatments (clomid, IUI, etc.) before more involved (read: expensive) procedures?
Ok - I can't hold myself back: when I was pregnant - I got gobs of advice from people on everything I couldn't do or it would KILL MY BABY - most of it based on crap science that didn't have good controlled studies. (Like the difference between drinking one damn glass of wine with dinner vs. a whole fifth.) I wish everyone was as mythbusty about that crap as they are about proving breastfeeding isn't that great. But I guess no one wants to clean the cat box.
I breastfeed because I'm too lazy to make/clean bottles. I sent the BF article to my MIL to shame her into stop asking me when I was going to quit nursing already.
Well, there are "studies" that show cancer patients recover better when they are prayed for. CancerBaby did a good job of debunking the "a good attitude will cure you" approach to illness. She also wrote about how cruel that attitude is.
I'm firmly convinced that almost everyone reacts to serious medical conditions with the urge to blame the patient. When my mother's first husband had a heart attack and died, my half-brother was saying, "Well, you know, he always had a very negative attitude and I'm convinced that that contributed to his demise. We did offer to buy him a puppy bu he refused, which just goes to show that he had given up."
When a friend's sister died of ovarian cancer at age 27, the friend said, "She had endometriosis and she didn't go to the doctor to get that treated the way she was supposed to, and if she had done what she was supposed to I don't think she would have gotten so sick."
When my mother developed multi-infarc dementia, my half-brother said, "she was always very suspicious of other people, and you just become more yourself as you get older" (i.e., if she'd had a more attractive personality, she wouldn't have had those cerebral vascular accidents that made her lose her mind & become paranoid).
It's sort of like women who say of rape victims, "she shouldn't have worn such a short skirt / been walking there late at night / allowed that man to get her alone." They don't want to acknowledge that life is scary, brutal, unpredictable, and there's no way to know when their number is up.
I would love to get whoever funded this lunacy to subsidize my very own scientific conclusion: clown scares the living hell out of embryo; embryo clings to the walls of the uterus with mad kitten-like fury; embryo implants successfully. Ta-da.
Seriously, doctor. SERIOUSLY.
I think that people blame the patient because they can't face the fact that sometimes there are no known reasons for why people die, are infertile, get cancer, etc. If it could happen to someone they know, it could just as easily happen to them, so they try to blame the patient to reassure themselves that something bad won't happen to them. "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" is a great book that talks about this tendency in people.
I think these "studies" are along the same lines. If researchers really wanted to know if relaxing helped women with amenorrhea, then they would have constructed a better study with a decent sample size to try and get a true answer to the question.
Bet the women with the clown went under with laughing gas. Cause otherwise, seriously...
My husband has trouble getting federal money to fund his research. Which is on global warming.
But clowns - hell, THAT'S important.
All of this seems very apropos of the current administration.
Costs of nursing? Breast feeding is when you put your baby up to your breast, it is not pumping and bottle feeding.
Sorry, I personally can't immagine anything eaiser then actually nursing your baby. But for those who pump and then bottle feed- that sounds liek twice the work.
I think they should have strippers at ET!!! Actually, I think strippers should DO the transfer!
I never would have believed the clown story if I hadn't heard it on BBC news (ironically enough while nursing my child in the middle of the night). Maybe fear and aversion to clowns is a risk factor for infertility/miscarriage that hasn't been discovered yet? God knows I hate the damn things.
And nice to know my two month old is less likely to die from an injury because I'm too cheap to buy formula and decided to breastfeed. That will keep me going on no sleep at 4am.
Just wanted to post an item I ran across recently that addresses this point by Cat,galloping:
"what struck me most on the ny times article (and which i read in a letter to the editor today) is that better educated, wealthier women are more likely to breast feed. These women are more likely to have healthier children. The studies done to date don't do a good job of controlling for those variables. DUH."
Another Gold Star for Breastfeeding
by Marin Sardy
We've read study after study that says breastfeeding is good for cognitive development, but here's something we didn't know: those studies left open some doubts which new research has finally closed. Melissa Daniels, a graduate student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, noticed that all such past studies looked at groups where women who breastfed also offered other strong advantages to their babies, such as a safe environment, greater parental responsiveness, and higher socioeconomic status. Thus, it remained unclear which advantages were truly aiding the children's brain development. To address this, Daniels looked to the Philippines, where women who breastfeed longest are usually poor, uneducated (mostly illiterate), and living in sub-standard health and safety conditions.
When she compared the test scores of two groups of eight-and-a-half-year-olds—those breastfed less than six months, and those breastfed 12 to 18 months—she found that, despite other factors, a longer duration of breastfeeding was associated with higher intelligence scores. Her results showed that the positive impact of breastfeeding on mental development was strong enough to override all other negative effects combined. The children with almost no other resources besides breastfeeding still fared better in intelligence tests than their otherwise markedly more advantaged counterparts. This correlation was even stronger for low-birth-weight children.
These findings highlight not only the incredible power of breastmilk, but also the importance of long-term breastfeeding even after the introduction of other foods. It also gives us one more reason to fight for better enforcement of the World Health Organization's International Code of Marketing for Breastmilk Substitutes, which states that infant formula “should not be marked or distributed in ways that may interfere with the protection and promotion of breastfeeding.”
Ooops, sorry, that last post was mine.
I read the "What Science Really Says" article, and, the extreme tone of the authors notwithstanding, I'm not buying their conclusions. They reviewed, what, 3 or 4 of the zillions of studies (google "breastfeeding research" for a sampling) empirically demonstrating the benefits of breastfeeding and have decided that "science really says" that breastfeeding's benefits are limited to preventing a couple of minor illnesses? Yes, and also the earth is flat, there is no such thing as global warming, and the holocaust didn't happen.
I don't care if these authors want to formula-feed their children, but to justify it by denying a huge body of scientific evidence is unfair.
Suddenly I appreciate my RE a lot more - yes, I had a grotesque number of embryos die before transfer, yes, the whole IVF experience was traumatic as hell, but at least they didn't make me watch CLOWNS, for the love of God. I swear, if I had looked up from the gurney and seen Bozo hovering over me, I probably would have stroked out (and I can't believe that would have been good for the embryos, no matter what studies might say).
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-06-19T234433Z_01_L19463264_RTRUKOC_0_UK-FERTILITY-BRITAIN.xml&archived=False
Have you seen this artical?? hmm anyone need advice on nice housing in Scotland??
Clowns, seriously?
Bring on Bobo, I guess.
If I ever found a clown=mime=chinadoll=demon entertaining ME while I lay bare and helpless in bed you can rest assured any existing embryo would exit my body through my nostrils, along with my soul. The only good clown is the one that's lion fodder.
[Housing in Scotland? Wha?]
Lioness,
UK government has comitioned a study that shows that paying for IVF is actually more profitable for the government in the long run. Scotland is giving all couples suffering IF a minimum of 3 cost free cycles (government picking up tab) with a sucess rate of 25-30% depending on region. ;) so does anyone need advice on housing in scotland??
I think it's important to understand that not everyone who throws around the phrase "junk science" is qualified to evaluate what is and isn't junk. The study cited by the authors of that article did NOT simply reveal that breastfeeding was associated with lower rates of death by injury. It revealed that breastfeeding is associated with lower rates of mortality due to, yes, injuries -- but also due to infections, SIDS, and all other causes (which were aggregated in an "other" category). The study DID control for extraneous variables, including the mother's age, race, socioeconomic status, smoking status, and level of education, as well as infant variables, such as gender and birth weight.
Sigh.
I don't even like clowns! I prefer a good red wine myself.
As for breastfeeding: I don't know if my daughter has been breastfed or not, since she was found outside an orphanage at age 14 months (approximately?), but I know she will be healthy and happy no matter what her start was. (I just received the news. We have a two year old daughter and are travelling to China in august!)
T]he costs of nursing are substantial: the reduced time for work due to the need to pump, nurse, eat and sleep...
Yes, it is simpler to formula feed, because then you won't need to eat and sleep anymore. Those bf moms are so greedy with their need to eat and sleep every single day!
???????
The study also categorizes the children of women who stopped breastfeeding at three months as not breastfed.
Isn't three months' worth a whole lotta breastmilk?
Breastfeeding for three months certainly is a lot of breastmilk compared to never breastfeeding, but it doesn't look to me as if they counted three months or less as "never breastfed." The article says:
The answer "yes" or "no" to the question, "Did you ever breastfeed this infant?" was defined as "ever breastfed" or "never breastfed" in the analysis.
They specifically did not look at duration because infants who die in the first year necessarily breastfeed for shorter periods of time than infants who don't. So they used a dichotomous (yes/no, ever/never) variable.
Sorry I'm referring to the 1995 study that they re-analyze and from which they conclude that breastfeeding reduces ear infections and diarrhea, full stop:
"those who used formula almost exclusively (defined as having never been nursed, or stopped nursing before three-months old)"
"Looky! We've found a poorly designed study that proves our point! Send in the clowns!"
Oh, gotcha. You're right, Slim. People who are determined to believe what they want to believe will find a way to do so, I guess.
But my baby is ok with Diet Coke in her bottle, right?
Slim, not only was three months of BF = not breastfed, but 120mL of formula a day= breastfed. Terrible study.
But I want to know why no-one ever told me that only lactating women need to sleep!! You've all been keeping a secret from me, you bastards!
You can find a study to support or downplay just about anything these days.
How about Diet Coke and Bacardi? According to the commercials "It gets the job done".
I think if you never wanted to have a child in the first place you are probably not going to breastfeed, and your child will also be more likely to die young of illness or injury. This doesn't mean that formula in itself is worse than breastmilk, just the parents feeding the infant.For example,my mother works for a child care agency and is a child advocate, and right now there is a two year old in the system that was never let out of her carseat except to be changed. When she was old enough to try and climb out of the seat, her mother actually put the baby and seat in a BOX so the child couldn't escape. This was how the advocate found her during a home visit. She is smaller than a one year old, and needs extensive physical and occupational therapy. Needless to say, she wasn't breastfed. Really bad parents aren't breastfeeding parents, they aren't even lovingly-holding-your-infant-while feeding a bottle parents...so yeah, their babies are going to have lower IQ's, poor health, and possibly early death...among other things. Breastfeeding is probably...possibly...best? in most circumstances. But what is really most definitely best is loving, caring, parents...period.
Hi everyone
Before I even read about the study investigating the NY Times claims, I wrote a post evaluating on my blog whether shock advertising about breastfeeding was helpful or counterproductive.
You can view it here . Would be great to have some views.
Cheers
Emily
here's a news article about a child that died from drinking his mother's meth-tainted breast milk. Thought it may interest..
http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/06/22/meth.milk.ap/index.html
Clowns? CLOWNS??
As I sit here recovering from a miscarriage, I officially lodge a complaint that my stiff drink and hot fudge sundae therapy was not covered by insurance.
Clowns. Dear Lord.
LOVE your blog!!! I, too, am a veteran to multiple ectopics (4), failed IVFs (2 negs, 1 miscarriage, 1 ect., and crazy enough to be trying again next month), but most importantly I had a single embryo transfer in 2001 that resulted in a nearly perfect child (no one is perfect, right???). She is 4 years old and loud and boisterous and social and happy and fun and the love of my life. Congrats on your sweet Charlie. Motherhood is hard, but all that misery is well worth it. Thanks for blogging, and I wish I had found your blog years ago!
Coming out of lurkdom... I love your blog and your thoughts. But did you know that that the STATS.org shares the offices and staff of the very right wing Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA)? They might not be the most unbiased interpreters of "What Science Really Says".
I wonder how much research isn't unbiased. Afterall, research costs money. Often it is corporate companies that commission the research.