Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyororin
To an extent, yes. I can`t say I`ve been able to spend huge amounts of time talking to doctors in the US - I don`t really know all that many so my contact was limited. But I have talked to a few visiting Japan in depth.
The views do change depending on the education and the age of the doctor. It seems like there is a sweet spot with doctors. The older doctors are very set and completely ignore studies, saying that they don`t think it`s true because they`ve always been told one thing or another. The youngest doctors can quote the AAP from memory, but have never read any studies or thought beyond that. It`s usually those in between, who are still young enough to want to continue acquiring more information and old enough to parse it and form strong opinions of their own who are the most up to date and reliable.
But they`re a limited chunk, and are not at all immune from pressure and personal beliefs. If a doctor thinks - with no connection to medical information - that co-sleeping is something bad. They`re not going to offer up information to support it.
Doctors from the UK seem to be about the same.
We were actually advised by our doctor to sleep with my son at all costs when he first came home from the hospital. Premature infants have a higher rate of apnea and SIDS (he treated them as the same thing.) As head of the NICU, and over 10 years of working there, he told us every case of SIDS (or in his words, death by apnea) with a baby who`d been discharged from there had been when the baby was sleeping in a different room from the parents.
If there is already a risk, the differences are going to be a lot clearer... But there is no reason to think that babies who are at risk of apnea without anyone knowing about it wouldn`t also benefit from the same precautions.
Just did a search through the AAP website - it looks like they`ve finally stopped blaming SIDS on co-sleeping, and have started recognizing that a drunk parent crushing a baby should not be considered SIDS. (The last time I looked, they included those figures in the SIDS figures, counting all causes of death listed as suffocation as a case of SIDS.)
You can see some of the big differences in US opinions if you also compare breastfeeding information. AAP recently changed their tune to "breast is best" and breastfeed for 6 months to a year... But when my son was born, it was "Bottle is just as good, but try to breastfeed a little at first." A few years before that, they released pamphlets (with funding from formula companies) that said breastfeeding probably didn`t provide sufficient calories or nutrition even in the first month, and that any sign of crankiness was a sign of not getting enough milk - so you should supplement with formula. (I will try to dig that one out)
The WHO recommendations have always been 2 years of breastfeeding, at least.
Even now, AAP receives funding from countless places and tries to stay on the fence about anything and everything, regardless of the number of studies for or against something. I find it a little hard to take the opinion of an organization that has received funding from formula companies to come up with a "formula is just as good!" study every time somewhere else proves breast milk is better.
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Sometimes I think there may be an emotional connection, too. Maybe some of the SIDS vicitms are neglected babies who give-up emotionally. The decline of physical health follows. Hmm.