Comment by grog454
2 years ago
> If a hospital gets a toddler with fractures on their skull, society should damn well figure out how it got them and stop it from happening again.
What a leap (the kind the article is calling out by the way). Do you really think all causes for toddler skull fractures are a societal problem?
I do.
If a child has a serious injury the circumstances should be examined, as it should be quite rare for children to have serious injuries.
That's why places have Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committees.
So in order to form an informed opinion we have to figure out the relative costs and benefits of various options. Lets start by examining assumptions. Here we have
Fractures among children: incidence and impact on daily activities
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/4/3/194
wherein we discover that kids 0-12 break bones at an incidence of 128 per 10,000. Over 12 years that's more like 1536 or about 15% of kids if injuries were evenly distributed, although they probably aren't. Still in the right ballpark.
So serious injuries among kids are incredibly common.
If we launch investigations and get it right 95% of the time we will none the less fuck up millions of kids lives. We would probably be better off selectively investigating when there is at least some reason to believe something is afoot instead of every injury.
First things first - 85% of the fractures you're talking about are arm and leg fractures. Skull fractures, which was what I was talking about, are a significantly smaller number.
But yes, we should investigate why the child broke their arm. Does that need to be an in-depth investigation? Not usually. But it's important to understand why these things happen; that's where the data for the study you cited comes from.