Re: Clamping baby's cord - is baby still breathing through it?

From: P Harris (patberto_at_frontiernet.net)
Date: 06/18/04 

Date: 18 Jun 2004 06:59:41 -0700

Mxsmanic <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<cgn3d0h2db897ejesmben4dj9i3jetejp0@4ax.com>...
> P Harris writes:
>
> > Um, expression of an opinion starts with "I think..." or "in my
> > opinion..." or "it seems to me...". That is how one indicates that
> > what follows is an opinion.
>
> All statements made on USENET are opinions.

That is the silliest thing I have ever heard.

One can't just blithely assert that "Donald Duck was the third
president of the United States", or "water is actually composed of two
parts plutonium to one part hydrogen", and then disclaim any need to
back up those statements with references or fact just because "hey, it
was just something I said on usenet".

Even on usenet, if you say "I think" then you are billing something as
opinion, and if you do not put that sort of qualifier on it, then you
are billing it as an externally-verifiable fact.

Otherwise -- if nobody is expected to have any basis for anything they
say here, and no discussion of the factual basis of statements is
wanted/permitted -- then there is no point in even posting, unless you
just need some practice typing.

(And frankly, those who *do* just want typing practice, please do it
somewhere less underfoot of the people trying to have actual
discussions, eh?)

> > ...but frankly it would surprise me a good bit if there weren't at
> > least SOME reasonably-relevant semi-believable data on the subject of
> > early vs late cord clamping.
>
> Semi-believable data is legion. Unfortunately it's ... well,
> semi-believable, which is largely synonymous with useless.

Well, I have some really heartbreaking news for you then.

No data are EVER more than semi-believable. Ever, anywhere, in any
situation, period, full stop.

ALL data from ALL studies require their interpretation to include the
clause "but we can't exactly tell from this study whether some of X
result was due to This or That or The Other Thing" or "but the results
may have been different if we had done Y differently".

ALL studies have limitations. At the very least, even a double-blind
randomised controlled study will STILL depend on what population was
studied... for instance you might well get substantially different
results if you study 5,000 people randomly selected from all over the
world versus 5,000 people randomly selected from people admitted to Mt
Sinai Hospital in NYC versus 5,000 underweight male nonsmokers being
treated for asthma versus 5,000 identical clones. Likewise with other
aspects of a study's design and protocols.

This is just the way the world IS - there are so many factors that
help determine the outcome of an event, it is just impossible to study
or control or account for the effects of every single one of them at
once.

So, what do you want. You have to work with what this universe permits
:-> You get what information you can from the studies can be (and are)
done.

Hardly any studies (tho, yes, a few) are COMPLETELY useless. You just
have to bear in mind what *exactly* the limitations were of each study
and thus what exactly holes/questions/uncertainties there are in your
picture of The Answer. If a study isn't double-blind, you asterisk its
results in your head as "...though I wonder whether some subtle bias
could have caused subjective things to be measured differently between
the two groups". If a study didn't use what you would consider the
most relevant treatments (like, suppose someone's idea of early vs
late cord clamping was just "at 1 min past birth" versus "at 1.5
minutes past birth" whereas you're really interested in a comparison
to 5 or 10 minutes later) then you put the asterisk there and mentally
scribble "but that wasn't exactly the factor I was wondering about an
effect of". If a study is done in a major research hospital and what's
more relevant to your life is what goes on in a medical clinic in
rural Kenya, then you think about factors that could potentially give
different results there and put *that* in your mental Post-It note on
the results. Even anecdotal reports provide a *little* bit of
interesting information that's worth mulling over if there's not much
better information available, although you would not want to place
more than a millionth of an ounce of confidence that they really mean
what they appear to. But a millionth of an ounce of a clue is better
than nothing.

Saying that The One Perfect Study has not been done and therefore we
know nothing whatsoever about <some subject> is just a lazy cop-out.

The only things we truly know *nothing* about are those things that
nobody has ever in any way observed :->

Pat, strongly feeling that logic and experimental design should be
taught to everyone in high school, but giving up to go do something
more productive with the morning, and still curious what studies
*have* been done on the timing of cord clamping,
edd July 21

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