Maternal Psychological Factors and Onset of Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders in Offspring, Baldassarre et al, 2021

Paywall, https://journals.lww.com/jpgn/Abstract/9000/Maternal_Psychological_Factors_and_Onset_of.95739.aspx

 

Why do researchers always think that mothers are easy targets for blame? And that women are all mentally ill hypochondriacs?

 

It is possible that mothers with problems have babies with colic, though a baby with colic could just as easily be the cause of the mother's problems!

But how on earth can they say that the babies have functional gastrointestinal disorders?

It is the type of research that closes doors on finding ways to help people. The gut is affected by stress hormones and babies do get stressed when their mother is not calm but calling it functional and blaming the mother takes us nowhere.

 

But which came first the chicken or the egg?

As a woman who hasn't had children and not spent a huge amount of time with babies, I ask have you heard an infant suffering from colic? Seen them wriggling about and drawing their legs up in pain? Of course the mother (& father) would be stressed and worried, particularly if it happens after every feed!

 

Feeding/eating problems is such a potentially stressful issue for parents. Feeding your child is part of your identity as a parent. When I worked with swallowing issues with adults with cerebral palsy, it was obviously necessary to work closely with parents/carers but at times you needed to address issues relating to previous medical intervention that had occurred twenty or thirty years before.

Blaming parents sets parents and children up potentially for a life time of stress and anxiety, that could have been totally avoidable. How many adults with physical disability die of aspiration pneumonia as their condition changes with age because their carers had been made afraid in early childhood of admitting there were any difficulties?

[added - it might not be an enormous number, but I would guesstimate maybe in England overall perhaps three or four preventable deaths a year]

 

The more I think about it the more it comes to my mind that we have a typical double problem here.

[Thank you for pointing out, btw.]

 

Like a stuck record spinning round round. Without Marshall's team peptic ulcers would still be stuck in the psychosomatic void of failure, saying the exact same things as this nonsense here, exact same as the old nonsense there:

 

b.s.

 

Don’t you just love the way research seems to be conducted now in psychology?
So the results show “No significant association was found between FGIDs and psychiatric symptoms and maternity blues at any timepoint.”
And they state in the conclusion that “Maternal psychological factors might contribute to the onset of infant FGIDs in offspring.”

Dammit - the pesky results don’t show what we wanted them to - never mind, we can still suggest that we know better.....

 

It reminds me of something i read as of late. Right before the turn of the century, there was a major ice storm in Montreal and area. Dozens died frozen in their house, due to power outage. Researchers at McGill University saw this as an opportunity to study pre-natal maternal stress effects on the offspring.

https://www.mcgill.ca/projetverglas/icestorm

 

Yes to this! Why do we need to prove that neglecting people in distress or treating people badly "causes health problems" in order to justify not doing these things? If a person doesn't develop some sort of health problem as a result of such poor treatment, does that make it okay? Surely, its about having some basic standards of care.

Its like when people draw on "neuroscience evidence" to advise people how to bring up a child. Yes, studies with animals show that early stimulus deprivation (like being locked up and kept in the dark) can slow neural development. But surely we don't need science to tell us that its not okay to keep babies/toddlers locked up and in the dark

 

One inescapable conclusion from the systematic pattern of arguing that there may be a relation (and that relation must be causal and in the preferred direction no matter how many straws have to be grasped to pretend this is a serious argument) no matter what to every null result is an admission that the process of EBM is so unreliable that nothing can be concluded unless it validates the assumptions. They don't even trust their own process when it invalidates their assumptions, literally thinking "well, that can't be right, it's not the answer I want".

In a nutshell: with unlimited mulligans, you can hit a hole-in-one every time if you only count the times it worked. Also another time-honored EBM process: just build the green and dig the hole at the exact spot the ball rested (or draw the bull's eye around wherever the bullet hit). Magical evidence-based perfect hit ratio!

Seriously it's important to step back and appreciate this: they don't trust the process when it gives them answers they don't want, arguing the assumption must be right regardless. The complete opposite of the scientific method. Beyond the fact that it's just a system to produce whatever results are fashionable, everyone involved explicitly distrusts the process, dismissing the outcomes unless they give exactly what they planned to argue.

Sometimes there is a meme that is just too perfect not to use: