Comment by hammock
2 years ago
TLDR:
There are issues with the way/how quickly we diagnose shaken baby syndrome without exploring other potential diagnoses, and with how severely/quickly we take kids away from their parents once we "think" we have a shaken baby
This doesn't do it justice. The damn name of the diagnosis makes it sound like a crime was committed. Guy runs an educational foundation on the issue that gets over 200 people a year asking for help in France alone.
> we diagnose shaken baby syndrome without exploring other potential diagnoses
It's more that 'shaken baby syndrome' is caused by more things than just a shaken baby (and evidence that shaking does not cause it even.)
> the more neutral and objective term of “retino-dural hemorrhage of infancy” (RDHI).
It's much worse. There's no evidence of any baby shaking. At all.
Well, I was very surprised to discover that shaking appears to be a highly common and widespread form of child abuse in the world [1]. It may affect 2-3% of all babies in the US and other developed countries, and the rate may be 10x or more higher in other countries.
I think it's reasonable to say that billions of babies may have been shaken in the past, yet the vast majority (of the order of 99.9% or even much more? [2]) are not diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome, since this diagnosis has an incidence of ~1/3,000 among children < 12 months in developed countries. In the countries where the incidence of shaking appears to be >50%, it is striking to note that the SBS diagnosis actually does not exist, i.e. doctors are not trained to diagnose it.
On the other hand, actual cases of severe inflicted head injuries probably affect < 1/10,000 children < 12 months, and I think most of them involve external evidence of trauma. Those that do not probably involve extreme forms of shaking far beyond what most of the billions of "shaken babies" sustain.
In other words, I've come to the likely conclusion that the intersection of babies who are effectively shaken, and babies who are labelled with "shaken baby syndrome", is an abysmal proportion of the first set, and a small proportion of the second.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074937970...
[2] Excerpt from the paper above: "the ratio of children hospitalized or dying from inflicted neurotrauma compared to the numbers of reported shaken children may be estimated at 1 to 152."