Archive for the ‘science and sensibility’ Category
Also found at Science and Sensibility, this very unscientific quip. Perhaps the reason they have so much trouble with meta-analysis or literature reveiw begins with the inability to find most of the data, in the first place.
Here’s a post that denies the existence of the bulk of the data and research cytotec. Like all drugs, most the research and data is within the pharmaceutical industry and for regulatory functions. Pharmaceutical companies recruit medical school faculty from large, big-name institutions to publish select parts of their work as their own.
This was not done for Cytotec and its OB indications because its manufacturer, Searle, did not want to be seen as pushing a drug that could also be used as an abortion pill, due to threats of boycotts. Only a few independent studies, case reports really, exist outside in the literature, as a result. The bulk of the data on this drug is in regulatory archives.
This author is blissfully unaware of this and expresses complete confidence in conclusions that are based on her skewed, minsicule section of the data.
http://www.scienceandsensibility.org/?p=1189#comments
Henci Groer
- August 7th, 2010 at 13:01 | #4
I’m not exactly sure what you are referring to, but Searle has NEVER conducted research into misoprostol’s use as an obstetric agent, and, as my blog post makes clear, other agents are just as effective (prostaglandin E2 results in identical cesarean rates) while carrying a lower risk profile. Specifically, with respect to pre-eclampsia, as I also made clear in my blog post, misoprostol is MUCH more dangerous than prostaglandin E2.
August 10th, 2010 at 06:35 | #5
“I’m not exactly sure what you are referring to, but Searle has NEVER conducted research into misoprostol’s use as an obstetric agent”
This is completely ridiculous. Searle and its successors have about 20 re-lablings of the drug. In every single blasted one of them, as in the original research, its abortifacient/obstetrical properties must be addressed.
Your extremely limited knowledge and unscientific skills don’t allow you to know about these and access them. This is obvious plain-as-the-nose on-your-face level stuff to anyone in pharma or medicine. And you don’t even know it exists!!!
The only way anyone knows cytotec can do these things is because it was found to cause spontaneous abortions in Phase III. Searle originally explored marketing this drug as the first abortion pill, but backed away due to threats of boycott or vandelism by anti-abortion groups. Its induction properties were also investigated at the same time, which is where the OB community got the idea from!!!!!
They have to file reports. They have to keep track of adverse effects and other things, whether they are in label or not.
Searle and successors have been able to have their cake and it too by not seeking FDA approval. They avoided the anti-abortion anger and then later any product liability related to for OB. Nevertheless, it is widely used for both. I mean really, who uses this drug for ulcers anymore? It would have been relegated to the generic heap a long time ago, if that was the case. They have also been accused from time to time for covertly marketing it as an OB drug. Its acquistion of Roche’s women’s health product line in the 90’s was partly motivated by the need to have an excuse for it to be doing things with OBs!!!
They have been researching this “side effect” for over 25 years.
If you disagree with the blatantly obvious facts presented here, what is your story as to how this drug came to be so widely used for these off-label uses? I can’t wait to hear the laughably implausiable “old midwives tale”. The OBs that, you know, just don’t follow the evidence, just grabbed any ol’ drug off the formulary shelf and gave it to a mom in labor…….
Bottom line is you don’t know what you are talking about because you know so little about medicine, research, and pharma. You only access data that unscientific amateurs can find through Google while watching Grey’s Anatomy.
Obviously, your comments demonstrate you know absolutely nothing about the pharmaceutical industry and its research and regulation. Your comments, like most of this forum are amateurish attempts to present your agenda, beliefs and professional self-interests as science.
b
August 12th, 2010 at 10:43 | #6
Oh, yeah, right Searle NEVER did research on cytotec for obstetrics. Geez.
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/29/world/us-may-allow-anti-ulcer-drug-tied-to-abortion.html
“Ms. Bruno said the drug’s abortion-inducing effects were tested only to assess the dangers to patients taking it for other reasons.”
“To test the drug’s hazards in pregnancy, Ms. Bruno said, Searle gave Cytotec to a small group of women in their first trimester of pregnancy who planned on having abortions. The tests, conducted in West Germany in the early 1980’s, showed that the drug caused ”uterine expulsion and bleeding,” Ms. Bruno said.”
“Dr. Richard Glasow, another official of National Right to Life, said the group had not yet decided what actions to take against Searle, but that a boycott of Searle products, including Nutrasweet, was a possiblity.”
This was in response to more of things raised by russ at Science and Sensibility. There was no attempt to post it. Presumably, it would not have gotten past the censors.
It addresses lay midwives that have gotten the licensure they have craved. Now, that it means regulation goes with it, oh they don’t want that part, they only want the advantages!! Note how on-line behavior mirrors off-line.
They seek to “delete” complaints made to the state licensing board about them, the way they delete critics on their blogs. Again, it turns into personal attacks on their critics and claims of persecution, instead of addressing the criticisms.
@russ
“Anony-b said – “In Oregon, this seems to have morphed into “have your cake and eat it too”. In other words, they licensing to get access to insurance and to help get the patients via the impression of the state’s seal of approval. They want all the benefits. But, they don’t people to actually be able to complain about them to the state licensing board!!””
“First of all, let me suggest you slow down and review your posts more carefully before releasing them. You make a lot of mistakes in putting your words together which does not help you develop credibility.”
No, most reasonable people in cyberspace will assume that my fantabulous geekiness and winning personality give me a lot of off-line competition for my time and attention. Therefore, I have little time to spend on this. Plus, my credibility is enhanced by the lack of self-promotion.
Those seeking objective information appreciate that I spent what little time I have to check the so-called “validation” of the Netherlands so-called “data” that is the main subject of this post. I discovered that it was fabricated by the researchers. Ya can’t get doozies like that from a spell-check can, ya? If I wrote “the dada wuz fabercated” its still the biggest news in the commentary, if it is documented via citations.
Why can’t anyone address this?
“As for the Oregon issue, the experience from around the country is that the vast majority of complaints against licensed midwives arise from healthcare providers in the hospital who are hostile to home birth after an intrapartum transport.”
Who cares? Answering complaints is part of what you sign up for when you get licensed. They might be patients who didn’t understand. Most professional discipline is from other health professionals who don’t like you. People who love you don’t file complaints even when they are deserved. None of this is anything new. Again, it shows how clueless midwives are about how things work. How self-referential they are. How often they expect special treatment.
You are supposed to answer them on the merits. Not evade them.
But this should surprise no one since they evade valid criticisms on-line and instead attack those who raise the issue.
- In: amy romano | dejonge | midwifery | midwives | netherlands | posturing | science and sensibility | statistics | Uncategorized
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UPDATE: Published late, after the next post (I think 2) were published and the conversation had moved on. Similar to what was done on the baby sling comments. I imagine they pat themselves on the back for not deleting and ignore the fact that this tactic, nevertheless, is designed to minimize the number of people who see it.
This was submitted over a day ago. It hasn’t been posted, yet. It is another example of an orchestrated ending. Debate is allowed up to a point. Then, it is cut off to give the false impression that the Midwifery side was soooo right, the opponent conceded and didn’t reply.
This post is essentially CBTS Cliff Notes. It summarizes all the bad behavior of midwives, just on-line and, by doing so, shows why those who debate them need to be anonymous to protect themselves from these sociopaths.
Their tactics of attacking dissenters instead of addressing the rather dry, boring scientific criticisms speaks louder than their words.
It also highlights the midwifery double standard. They can choose to be anonymous, but no one else should.
@russ
“Greetings Anony-b,”
Oh, no, you have me mistaken with your friend Anony-B (big B that is). That’s OK. We look so much alike that I mistook myself for her. Or maybe your other friend Anony-bennifer or your other friend Anony-bmanda, or pretty much all your friends.
“I must point out that there is a bit of a mismatch in this contest. You are entirely anonymous, b, and free to say whatever you like with no accountability, while I am accountable for my words.”
Not really. People can’t be accountable for their words when they can’t be assured they will be theirs. They are always subject to the selective censorship and the editing of others. And non-midwifery types don’t act like sociopaths, on-line or off-line, so you are not risking anything or doing anything noble.
If midwifery is such a great thing for women, why do they always have to resort to these dirty tactics. Why are they always trying to control the information women see? Why do they attack and silence dissent and dissenters?
Do you get your blog comments deleted? (https://childbirthtruthsquad.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/can%e2%80%99t-see-the-forest-through-the-trees/)
Do you get your blog comments held back, posted out of order and long after the discussion has moved on? (https://childbirthtruthsquad.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/keeping-baby-close-the-importance-of-high-touch-parenting-and-deleting-correct-information/)
Do you get your quotes truncated to change their meaning? (Indiana fanny comment #12, chopping and re-imaging #10)
Do your comments get banned towards the end so your debate partner can have the last word and orchestrate the ending she would like? (https://childbirthtruthsquad.wordpress.com/our-bodies-ourselves-our-delete-button/)
Do you get people telling tall tales about things that you never posted on your own blog on other blogs? (http://skepticalob.blogspot.com/2010/08/breastfeeding-and-what-it-means-to-be.html in the comment, I don’t mean the post itself)
Do you non-midwifery blogs not safeguard information covertly collected? http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/
Do you face tangible off-line retaliation ? (https://childbirthtruthsquad.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/midwife-on-midwife-violence/)
Do your comments get deleted on neutral websites via strategic use of the Flag for Abuse button?
“Why don’t we make it more fun and you can tell us who you are with all of your outstanding credentials.”
What credentials do you need to state the main counter-argument to this post?
If you look up the Mother of All Birth Studies, the subject of this post, it says nothing like what the poster or its authors claim it does when you look up the paper AND its citations. She posits we should all accept the conclusion and move along. But, the ‘data’ relied on here, the “study” that is supposed to convince us all to let midwives take over US maternity care, isn’t “data” or a “study” at all. It is a couple of midwives that used a completely invented connection between homebirth and its outcomes.
I mean, c’mon, why doesn’t any one address this, the silence is deafening. No pat answer in the Statistics for Non-Majors book eh?
REPEAT
Amy Romona opined:
“de Jonge: midwives routinely record the planned place of birth in a national perinatal database that covers 99% of births and is linked to another database of neonatal deaths by a validated method.”There’s no “perinatal database” RTFM. The entire thing was through statistical guessing linking Midwife to OB and then peds databases. There’s no actual data in this so-called study!! Where babies that died were intended to be born in this is no more than a guess.
THIS IS THE CITATION IN DEJONGE NEXT TO THE CLAIM THE DATA WAS VALIDLY LINKED
From the J Clin Epidemiol. 2007 Sep;60(9):883-91. Epub 2007 May 17.Probabilistic record linkage is a valid and transparent tool to combine databases without a patient identification number.Méray N, Reitsma JB, Ravelli AC, Bonsel GJ.
Academic Medical Centrum (AMC), Department of Medical Informatics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (document listed by DeJonge as the method they used)“All four perinatal caregivers create records in one of four independent registries: the registry of midwives (LVR1 or MR), of general practitioners (LVR-h), of obstetricians (LVR2 or OR), and of pediatricians (LNR or PR), respectively, with partial records in case of transfer. Because of privacy laws of the Netherlands, no unique personal identifier (of the mother or child) is available to combine records.”
And in case you weren’t aware, there’s no way to definitive validate anonymous databases, otherwise, ya know, they wouldn’t be anonymous. Only a small percentage matched on a small set of variables, and only a very small percent of those were unique.
The full text is up at science direct http://www.sciencedirect.com/
J Clin Epidemiol. 2007 Sep;60(9):883-91. Epub 2007 May 17.Probabilistic record linkage is a valid and transparent tool to combine databases without a patient identification number.Méray N, Reitsma JB, Ravelli AC, Bonsel GJ.
Academic Medical Centrum (AMC), Department of Medical Informatics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.“In absence of a large sample of validated pairs to independently estimate the awards and penalties, we used standard maximum likelihood techniques to estimate these weights from the data itself and to estimate the threshold”
In other words, they guessed.
This was published, but it is such a hoot of a ridiculous correlation conspiracy theory, that it warranted sharing. Your Grampa and the Nerds, since the 1930’s, have been conspiring to force women into hospital births to support their pensions.
You see, home birth declined in the 1930s… the exact same time social security was invented!!!! So, therefore….…..
Jennifer
August 18th, 2010 at 21:38 | #33
@Amanda- You might expect this kind of bias from someone with an interest in the collection and analysis of birth data. Before 1986, people didn’t get a Social Security number until around age 14. By 1990, the age was lowered to 1 year and now parents apply for Social Security numbers for their children at birth. Giving birth in an institution allows for cleaner data and facilitates tracking, which helps prevent fraudulent claiming of dependents. Which, of course, helps our country’s bottom line financially.
The idea that women who give birth outside of institutions and the notion that midwives are lawless rule-despisers working off-the-grid is old. Really old. Birth moved from the home to hospitals around the time that the Social Security Act of 1935 was enacted. The act was passed in 1935 and between 1938 and 1948, the hospital birth rate went from 55% to 90%. Social security taxes were collected for the first time in January 1937 and, obviously, the point of the SS number was to track individual’s accounts within the Social Security program and has become the de facto identifier of U.S. tax payers.
The tracking of maternally-linked perinatal data would be much easier if everyone just gave birth in the hospital. Out of hospital births are seen as potentially fraudulent and off-the-grid and midwives are viewed by statisticians as a potentially dishonest disruption in the production of clean, uncorrupted data.
“Giving birth in an institution allows for cleaner data and facilitates tracking, which helps prevent fraudulent claiming of dependents. Which, of course, helps our country’s bottom line financially.”
Keeping Baby Close: The Importance of High-Touch Parenting and Deleting Correct Information
Posted on: August 12, 2010
UPDATE: This comment was eventually posted, very belatedly, after new main posts were on the blog, and most viewers had moved on.
This one began at (the infamous) Science and Sensibility. A rude post (which supposedly they delete, oh but only when the alleged rudenss doesn’t agree with them) that portrays parents who use baby carrier/carseat as uncaring incompetent parents and was chuckful of misinformation got worse in comments.
The author a childbirth educator named Kimmelin Hull commented that studies proved baby sling’s only danger was suffocating by burying the baby’s face in the material and those nasty carseats caused death by compression due to C-shaped body positioning. Of course, Science and Sensibility won’t publish comments with links to real medical journals that show they are completely wrong.
http://www.scienceandsensibility.org/?p=1386#comments
SHE DOES NOT WANT YOU TO SEE THIS:
Well, I don’t know if I can compete with high-powered medical journals such as The Christian Science Monitor and Baby Wearer.com.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/110/2/401
“Positioning young infants in devices such as swings, infant carriers, backpacks, or slings may have similar physiologic effects in susceptible infants to positioning semireclined in car safety seats, and consideration should also be given to limiting the use of these devices as well.”
Meaning there’s been no direct research on these (obscure fringe practices don’t get studied much), but they share the salient feature of carseats — upright positioning. Obviously, the bio-physics of being more vertical verses semi-reclined are worse and the support (or lack thereof) of a soft backing leads to suffocation from rib cage/airway compression from the curved positions the soft back can cause doesn’t register here.
Here’s a news article about those light-weight government officials issuing formal warnings. I mean, not as good a source as suite101.com, but ya know.
“It’s the “C-like” position that causes safety advocates to shudder. They say the curved position can cause the baby, which has little head and neck control in the early months, to flop its head forward, chin-to-chest — restricting the baby’s ability to breathe.
Another concern: that the baby can turn its face toward mom’s chest or belly and smother in the parent’s clothing.”
There’s no studies, because the common-sensy type folks just react to the case reports and take action. Silly us.
Kimmelin who never gives up on this non-sense continues:
“Being physically close to one’s child boosts Oxytocin levels in mothers–the hormone of maternal love and bonding, among other purposes. I can guarantee you that having your baby in his infant car carrier in the next room does not boost “happy” hormone levels.”
Even better sources. None and your guarantees.
I can guarantee that “happy hormones” are not increased if the baby dies from being a in a sling. I can also guarantee that “natural” fanatics will say “yeah, but the experience was worth it.”
The Childbirth Truth Squad 