Although I think morphine and lidocaine have been around that long, right?
I’m pretty sure epidurals have been around that long but now they let you control the dosage with a handy button. I doubt they had that in the '80s, in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the doctors set the dosage and often overcompensated.
~Max
Demerol was long used for labor, and later Stadol (butorphanol). IDK when epidural analgesia was invented, but in the 1990s, one hospital in Des Moines advertised with much fanfare, “You can get an epidural if you have your baby here!” and a few days later, the newspaper printed a letter from a retired female OB who said she had stopped delivering babies in 1964, and at that time, she had been using epidurals for more than 20 years. Both drugs can cause respiratory depression in both mother and baby, and the only time I saw anything like that ordered for a laboring mother was when the baby was going to be stillborn, or had a known condition that would cause its death shortly after birth.
Spinal analgesia is still the best method for c-sections, if the mother can be conscious (that’s not always feasible).
I was born in 1964, and my sibs in the next few years, and my mother said she always got saddle blocks, which she never understood “because they didn’t do that until it was almost over.” It did numb the perineal area, FWIW.
And when fentanyl and bupivacaine, the most common ingredients in epidural analgesia regardless of why, were both in short supply ca. 2010, one of my co-workers joked, “Give them some nitrous oxide.” Actually, that too was being done!
Not to speak for am77494, but I think they were referring to me mentioning “Western _”; looking back through the thread I thought I might have used the term “Western Science” but I only see that I made a ref to “Western Medicine” as opposed to traditional Asian medicines.
Just to clarify, I’m not making a general argument about the superiority of Western civilization over others. Sure, Western civilization has given us modern science and technology, which has resulted in cars and TVs and the Internet and Penicillin and other wonderful things, but it’s also given us pollution and microplastics in our food chain and global warming and nuclear weapons and an overload of information into our Cro-Magnon brains. It’s very much a double-edged sword.
It’s the scientific method I feel is superior over pseudoscience. Using the scientific method, we make an observation of the world, form a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis. If the testing reveals results that do not support the hypothesis, then the hypothesis is unceremoniously discarded. At least, that’s the way it should work.
Pseudoscience starts with a preconceived notion of how we want the world to be, or how we feel it should be, discards any test results that do not support that notion, and cherry-picks the ones that do.
For example, I’ll use ‘belief in a flat Earth’ which has been mentioned in this thread. I watched a documentary about Flat Earthers called “Behind the Curve” on Netflix. One segment concerned a member of the Flat Earth Society who had purchased some fancy digital gyroscope or some gadget for around $20K that was supposed to be able to detect the rotation of the Earth. They assumed it would show no rotation, proving the Earth was flat. When it did show rotation, they said “well, the Sun does rotate around the disk of the flat Earth, and the Sun’s radiation is affecting the gyroscope, so we need to build a sealed box made out of Magnesium to shield it!”.
Then they did an experiment in which they aimed a laser attached to a telephone pole to another telephone pole (x) miles away. If the Earth was flat the laser should hit the second pole at the same height as the point the laser was attached. When it hit higher, at the exact point that would account for the exact diameter of Earth, they had yet some other explanation for why that was. It was almost comical. They refused to throw out their beloved hypothesis, despite all evidence to the contrary. They just kept moving the goalposts.
The application of the scientific method is not always to our greatest good, but it’s why we don’t stay home in bed whenever ‘the moon in the house of Saturn rising’ or whatever is supposedly telling us bad luck is coming because we’re a Virgo.
There are certainly practical reasons to be interested in the Sun’s motion through the sky, and to a lesser but still very significant degree the Moon’s. But for a non-spacefaring culture, there’s almost no practical reason to be concerned at all about the motion of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn. If you’re studying those, it’s either knowledge for the sake of knowledge, or astrology.
Absolutely true. If we are defining “astronomy” very narrowly to mean specifically the study of non-sun-and-moon planetary motion, or even models that must include the planets along with the sun and moon, then it’s quite fair to say that “astronomy emerged from astrology”.
IMHO though, it’s more descriptive and historically accurate to include purely luni-solar calendrics as part of “astronomy”.
Purification rituals go back to the earliest days of multiple religions.
The idea that we are “contaminated” by various bad things and must be “cleansed” also has a long and dishonorable history in pseudomedicine which continues to the present time. Step right up, and get your Toxin Cleanse!
Of course, there’s also a lot of rational, scientific “purification rituals”, and it’s quite possible that the psuedoscientific “cleansing” arose from the real cleansing. When you use the bathroom, or handle a corpse, you really are unclean, and need to wash your hands.
As for astronomy, I think it’d be fair to say that parts of astronomy originated from purely practical concerns, while other parts originated from astrology.
Is it necessarily a binary choice, though? Long ago, the rabbi teaching a Jewish history course I took was covering the early prophets’ denunciation of Israelite’s worshipping foreign gods. His guess was that incoming Israelites learned agriculture from the indigenous Canaanite farmers: “After the solstice, you grub up the fields, then plant your seeds in rows. Add fertilizer, cover with dirt, and sacrifice a dove to Ba’al to protect the crops”. Of course, most scholars now think that the Exodus is a myth and that Hebrews arose from indigenous Palestinian tribes, but his point remains: it’s plausible that early stargazing societies drew no distinction between practical astronomy and what we now call astrology.
I don’t know if this is a scholarly theory, but it sounds plausible.
Everything else you mention is indeed claptrap, but I just needed to mention that we practiced attachment parenting with our son and, while it was occasionally burdensome, it sure didn’t force my wife (or I) to “suffer as much as humanly possible.”
Did it help him become the great young adult he is today? Impossible to say, of course.
Galileo’s time measuring system used Jupiter’s Moons as a celestial clock, and in turn helped measure longitude at sea.
IIRC Jean Picard of France used Galileo’s method and a lot of celestial triangulation to measure earth’s 1 degree of arc. This was crucial to navigation and also to land measurement.
In 1684, Haley went to meet Newton to understand “the motion of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn”. In large part, he wanted to know that if the law of inverse squares (1/R2) were valid for he attraction between planets and the sun; what would be the resulting trajectory of the planets ? (It had long intrigued astronomers that planets followed elliptical paths) Newton retired for 2 years, it is said and produced the Principia !
Mason, an astronomer and a surveyor, led one of the first and largest International “science projects”: measurements of the passage of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun. Halley had said that triangulation could be used to figure out earth’s distance from sun, if you measured Venus’s transit
on the face of the sun from selected points on the Earth. You could then work out the distances to all the other planets / comets. I think “astronomers”/“scientists” from France, Germany, USA, Russia, Sweden … all travelled to different parts of the Earth to make measurements during Venus’s transit in 1761.
There was thought for a while that Jupiter’s moons would be useful for the longitude problem, but it turns out to be impractical, and in any event you need both telescopes and extreme precision to even make the attempt. Lunar eclipses are useful for the longitude problem, but that’s just sun-and-moon astronomy.
The inverse-square law of gravity, and the distances to the planets, were both great scientific achievements, but like I said, until you’re spacefaring, they’re purely knowledge for the sake of knowledge. There’s no practical use to either of those, for an Earthbound society.
I don’t know about that. I imagine the inverse square law of gravity has some practical benefit in ballistics.
~Max
No judgement here. If that’s what you want to do, and that’s what’s best for your family, wonderful. But there’s no evidence that whether you do it or not makes any meaningful difference in outcomes. What’s most commonly cited as evidence are anthropological studies of certain hunter-gatherer tribes who baby wear continuously, although it’s interesting to note in those observations the indigenous tribes are pretty much completely ignoring their babies while they wear them, and the main reason they cite for doing it is to avoid predators. The reality is that cultural attitudes about the proper way to care for infants, from co-sleeping to baby-wearing, vary dramatically all over the world.
Honestly it sounds like my worst nightmare to be attached to an infant 24/7. Which is why I didn’t do it. I also made a choice to go against the evidence by putting my kid in a crib down the hall within days of his birth, because I was in an acutely suicidal state and dysphoric almost to the point of psychosis. I was seriously disturbed. Sleep was of the essence and thank goodness it was a post-birth doula who recommended we do that, despite losing a protective factor against SIDS. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
I just have to note that these expectations around “doing what’s best for baby” are usually unfounded or exaggerated and almost always place additional burdens on the mother, such that women who are less privileged, who have fewer resources, who have less flexible jobs, who have less support from their partners (or no partner at all), who suffer from mental health problems, are often not able to sustain these high expectations, and thus feel incredible guilt or are shamed for not achieving the ideal. These ideas come not from science, but from individuals and entities who believe the proper place for women is not in the workforce, but at home taking care of children.
If that sounds harsh, my feelings about this are strong, because of what I went through, giving birth was nothing compared to the nightmare that awaited me afterward. And I want new mothers to know that it’s okay to make different choices for the sake of their sanity. You can do things so many different ways and still get a happy, healthy kid out of the deal.
Since this is the Dope…
“Because low socioeconomic-status parents juggle multiple challenges associated with low socioeconomic status, it may be helpful for them to know that holding a crying infant until fully soothed, even 50% of the time, promotes security,” the researchers said. “Such a message could help parents increase positive caregiving without raising anxiety regarding ‘perfect parenting’ or setting the bar so high as to make change unattainable in families that face multiple stressors.”
Methods of engaging an infant in calm, regulating connectedness, such as being available for eye contact without actively making eye contact and carrying an infant on the hip during daily tasks, also promote secure attachment in the baby, they said.
Focusing on the secure base also avoids emphasizing the importance of parenting practices that are often associated with white, middle-class populations, such as moment-to-moment attunement, prompt responses, sweet tone of voice and affectionate verbal comments. The new approach “captures strengths that can be present in parents who may be under economic strain or who ascribe to ‘no-nonsense parenting,’‘’ the researchers said. This also makes the secure base provision approach potentially more culturally sensitive and likely to be accepted across diverse low socioeconomic-status families.”
Oh, we didn’t go whole hog. If the kid fell asleep in his car seat or strollers we were delighted to leave him there as long as possible. We co-slept and allowed breastfeeding on demand, which of course was more of a burden on my wife since she had the only functional breasts in the family.
I agree with and appreciate the rest of your post, and I’m sorry you had such a hard time of it. Within reason, I believe whatever works best for the parents will be just fine for the baby.
I was delivered via c-section in 1964. My Mom said she wouldn’t have cared if they’d cut off her head after the drugs she got.
Thanks. I think what might have helped at the time was knowing how absolutely wonderfully amazing it would eventually be. Newborns are hard.
And it totally depends on the kid and what they need, as well. My son is extremely, extremely chill. We got one on easy mode, he slept through the night from six weeks on, so we took the attitude of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
These days, alchemy is the domain of well-funded scientists using extremely expensive equipment. (And nobody can afford to turn lead into gold for very long–it’s far too expensive.)
Ours was, too. Since he was conceived on a Mexican vacation, we always joked that he was 49% me, 49% his mom, and 2% Jose Cuervo.