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The lonely scientist rants.
"[Rh incompatibility] wasn't an issue for all of human history until interventions were performed, like episiotomy and early cord cutting or Cesarians. Again, what gives?"
Okay, I have to get this off my chest here, because if I say it in response to the actual post I'm quoting I'll probably be banned:
For God's sake, isn't some kind of basic education in logic and science required in the schools? Don't people listen to themselves when they talk?
(Okay, never mind, I know the answers to those questions: no, and no.)
Rh factor wasn't even discovered until 1939. For "all of human history until interventions were performed," in that golden age of medical-provider-free natural homebirths in which nothing ever went wrong and there was no maternal or perinatal mortality, there was NO WAY TO TELL if Rh incompatibility existed.
Sometimes your baby was stillborn. Sometimes your baby had heart failure shortly after birth. Sometimes your baby was incredibly weak and sickly, but pulled through. And that was ALL YOU KNEW. It's not like your fellow tribeswomen would've stood around nodding sadly and saying, "Yep, this baby has hemolytic disease of the newborn. Just look at these abnormal red blood cells, which you can clearly see through the microscope I made out of vines and bark."
And even after the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century... even after the discovery of blood grouping at the turn of the 20th century... people still had no freaking idea why some newborns developed hemolytic disease and died. You could go from one end of the world to the other and never hear a single person utter the phrase "Rh incompatibility." THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT NO ONE EVER HAD IT.
I'll be the first to agree that there are plenty of screwed-up things about standard medical management of pregnancy and birth. However, I solemnly assue you: Rhogam for Rh incompatibility is not among them. If you are Rh- and your partner and baby are Rh+? Get. The. Freaking. Shot.
Okay, I have to get this off my chest here, because if I say it in response to the actual post I'm quoting I'll probably be banned:
For God's sake, isn't some kind of basic education in logic and science required in the schools? Don't people listen to themselves when they talk?
(Okay, never mind, I know the answers to those questions: no, and no.)
Rh factor wasn't even discovered until 1939. For "all of human history until interventions were performed," in that golden age of medical-provider-free natural homebirths in which nothing ever went wrong and there was no maternal or perinatal mortality, there was NO WAY TO TELL if Rh incompatibility existed.
Sometimes your baby was stillborn. Sometimes your baby had heart failure shortly after birth. Sometimes your baby was incredibly weak and sickly, but pulled through. And that was ALL YOU KNEW. It's not like your fellow tribeswomen would've stood around nodding sadly and saying, "Yep, this baby has hemolytic disease of the newborn. Just look at these abnormal red blood cells, which you can clearly see through the microscope I made out of vines and bark."
And even after the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century... even after the discovery of blood grouping at the turn of the 20th century... people still had no freaking idea why some newborns developed hemolytic disease and died. You could go from one end of the world to the other and never hear a single person utter the phrase "Rh incompatibility." THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT NO ONE EVER HAD IT.
I'll be the first to agree that there are plenty of screwed-up things about standard medical management of pregnancy and birth. However, I solemnly assue you: Rhogam for Rh incompatibility is not among them. If you are Rh- and your partner and baby are Rh+? Get. The. Freaking. Shot.
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I visit MDC only for the trainwreck factor anymore. It was actually my very first parenting-related message board: I bought a copy of Mothering, saw an ad in the back for the message board, and was very much a regular for quite a long time when my older daughter was little. Then came the day Peggy O'Mara discovered the board and was TOTALLY SCANDALIZED that MOTHERS (MOTHERS!) were exchanging tips on blow-job technique. The board has never been the same since.
I subscribed to Mothering for a year, but around the time I got the renewal notice in the mail, they had the issue with the very pregnant Christine Maggiore on the cover to go with their article about how HIV was a plot by the MAN to make people take bad, toxic drugs. I did not re-subscribe. There are things about the magazine that I really like, but they don't make the fanatical devotion to pseudoscience tolerable to me.
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A lot of MDC I lurk on because I am fascinated about how people think - I disagree a lot of the time, but I still find it fascinating (but then I have a degree in anthropology).
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I am also interested in seeing how people's minds work, but a lot of the rhetoric that I've seen on MDC has just made my blood boil, or has honestly frightened me. There are other online places for me to get the interaction that I enjoy, so I just don't go to MDC except for working parent issues.
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So you can't even tolerate the Diapering forums? Wow. (Never been over there, since we used disposables.)
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Admittedly, I haven't explored all of MDC because a lot of the places where I've peeked in, I've been turned off. Nice to know that there are pockets of sanity.
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I haven't found a supportive parenting community that fits the happy middle ground that we try and live in...where we lean towards a working in the real world, AP minded parenting style. You know the one where you "do the best you can."
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Maggiore is what we call a "long-term nonprogressor." Some people, for whatever reason, have immune systems that are successful at fighting off HIV without treatment, year after year after year. The Institute where I work has a whole registry of them, and I know several of them personally. (All of the ones I know are current or former IV drug users, so Maggiore's super-healthy lifestyle isn't as much the answer as she pretends.)
It's too bad her daughter wasn't a long-term nonprogressor.
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The phenomenon of long-term nonprogressors is really interesting. To expand on Maggiore's "why would undeserving mothers who feed their children Lunchables not lose their daughter, when I lost mine," I can think of a number of gay men of the 1980s who could've made better use of long-term nonprogressor status than Christine Maggiore. Sigh.
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There is evidence to suggest that it's critically important to exclusively breastfeed, and never supplement with formula or solid foods. Once mixed feeding is introduced, the protective factor is lost.
However, it should be noted that the tradeoff only works in developing countries. In the US and Western Europe, whatever the lactivists say, the overall health risks of formula feeding are so small that they are not, not, not worth the increased risk of HIV.
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I may be overstating my case very slightly, but unsafe water kills so many babies that I don't think there's much of anything that would make breastmilk the worse option by comparison.
If you're dealing with women who are HIV+ and in a place with a safe water supply BUT they're about to be packed off to somewhere without one, these women should be advised to breastfeed. Which is counterintuitive to first-world medical professionals, so I can see this causing problems.
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He actually makes pretty good money giving drug companies periodic blood and tissue samples so they can try to reverse-engineer him. Not that that's really compensation for having had to watch everyone he's ever loved die horribly ...
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