How to Calm a Crying Baby Like a Mesopotamian

For walking I'd say we're both average, but who knows it could be a minor difference like that.

As for slings I ruled them out early on - Finnish winters mean that babies, children and parents all need to be pretty warmly wrapped up. That made slings way, way too bulky and impractical.

I'm glad they were able to sort it out so quickly.

I don't think it's so much that doctors don't care as that most cases spontaneously resolve faster than any person can systematically figure them out.

There's a psychological benefit to the parents -- they're often pretty stressed out and feeling like they're the problem. Putting on a white coat and a serious face while diagnosing the problem as intrinsic to the infant relieves the parents of the burden of thinking they're bad at their new permanent job, and probably helps bolster their waning ability to handle trying to comfort a crying infant without snapping and harming the baby or themselves. I don't think the idea is to leave the baby to wail as much as it is to get the parents to stop taking the wailing personally.

Like most of the paternalistic little white lies doctors deploy, it's not usually the appropriate treatment for patients who know better. Sadly some doctors never learn to distinguish these little psychological tricks (which are an important part of the medical art) from real knowledge about human biology. If they frustrate rather than comfort you, and your doctor can't or won't be straight with you, it's time to find a new one.

Note, I would recommend against juggling a baby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling

Also adults should never take out their own frustration/anger on a baby. That’s not what we are talking about here.

It’s not that easy to accidentally shake a baby too hard. Babies are quite robust, and new parents (that I have seen anyway) are almost all extremely cautious. But make sure the baby is fully supported; you don’t want their head flopping around.

Go watch the nurses/midwives/doctors in a maternity ward sometime and you will see them manhandling newborns in ways that make new parents nearby feel pretty anxious... but the babies are just fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB2Fw3MFlhk (The original Happiest Baby video has a bunch more examples with live crying babies and makes it a bit clearer. I don’t know if those are online anywhere though.)

Regrettably. My med student samples were tiny, and a decade ago, but the best any of them managed for "how big is a (human) red blood cell?", with quite a bit of struggling (to for instance, remember the scale bar on some histology slides), was "really really small". Some, even when given the answer (in micrometers), didn't believe it. :/ I've continued to play the Sun color game with Harvard Center for Astrophysics students over the years. "A five-year old comes up to you and says, "I'm told the Sun is a big hot ball! Yay! What color is the ball? I really care about the color of balls - I'm five." What color is the Sun?" Adding "viewed from outside the atmosphere" as needed. And rejecting answers like "6500K" with "Five-year old!". Now CfA, in addition to being a first-tier astronomy research center, is also a leader in astronomy education research. And of the few students who get it right, about half (but small N) learned it in a seminar on common misconceptions in astronomy education, rather than from their own atypically successful and extensive education in astronomy. A sometimes follow-up question of "what color is sunlight?" often triggers something like an "oh, wait, that doesn't make sense, does it". Suggesting two bits of incompatible knowledge, bumping together for the first time.

These examples were selected for drama. But the failure modes they illustrate seem widespread. A failure to develop a sense of scale, and a rough quantitative feel for reasonable values in one's field. And a failure to integrate knowledge, with misconceptions persisting far beyond introductory courses. The software one-liner is "if it isn't tested, it doesn't work". And current testing... has poor coverage over the set of skills one might hope for all students. On the one hand, these failures have been remarked upon for decades. On the other hand, as concept inventories spread across fields, a common pattern is "I'm sorry to waste your time taking something so basic as this new concept inventory" followed by "oh bleep, I had no idea". Which is perhaps a metaphor for the bigger picture. It seems we sort of know it's a disaster, but that hasn't quite sunk in yet. Or something. The instructor of a bio lab course saying the thing they most wish their incoming students had, was a firmer grasp of central dogma... and this in a second (or third?) year course, mostly bio and pre-med majors, at a first-tier department and university. When they've likely seen it, repeatedly, since primary school. And yet how many pre-college biology educators view themselves being profoundly unsuccessful?

> Surely the important skill is knowing when you don't know, recognising when you need to know

The astronomy students who get it wrong are generally initially quite confident. At least some of the med students both knew they didn't know, and rejected the correct size. So we're not doing great even on such recognition.

> how big cells are

Attempting to teach a sense of scale is part of most every undergraduate science and engineering program. So some first-tier medical school students lacking in such, at least raises the question of how well that teaching is working, even among more successful students.

> knowing where to look up the relevant facts

Beyond recall of individual facts, is integrating them into understanding. One challenge when teaching stoichiometry, is apparently students not thinking of atoms as real physical objects. It's not that they are missing a fact, that atoms don't locally pop in and out of existence in large numbers, but that they've failed to make a connection, that after some chemistry happens, those atoms must still be around.

Having a misconception about the color of the Sun might lose you a game of trivial pursuit. But it will also interfere with your understanding of say blackbodies and color. And by hindering integration, make it less likely that you'll catch your misconceptions with those too. Recurse.

Lacking a sense of scale, means missing a powerful framework for integrating physical phenomena, and not having a feel for reasonable numbers, and thus struggling with rough quantitative reasoning.

> outraged

Ok... but awareness of the magnitude of current problems, and of available opportunities for improvement, is nice to have, no?

I have a genetic disorder that wasn't diagnosed until my kids were 11 and 13. The child in question has the same genetic disorder that wasn't diagnosed until a few weeks after I was diagnosed because they tested both my kids after I was diagnosed.

He and I both have found we continue to need to limit our consumption of peanuts because they are pro-inflammatory, having nothing whatsoever to do with allergy per se.

One size does not fit all.

Huh, I never knew you could be lactose intolerant to your mother's milk.

My sister was lactose intolerant but that only manifested when my mom tried switching to formula at 10 months. My sister was gasy, had diarrhea, spent the whole night crying but seemed fine during the day. Doctor just told my mom she needs some time to adapt. After weeks of sleepless nights, just holding my crying sister all night, she went to a different doctor. She was an elderly woman, old school, and immediately diagnosed her properly. At that point my sister has lost quite some weight and all the milk messed up her intestinal villi, so even after my mom switched to soy milk my sister couldn't really digest anything for another week or two, so basically lost some more weight and kept crying. One of the worst episodes of raising kids she says.

No offense taken. You didn't rub me the wrong way, I just wanted to clarify that part, including for a reader.

If you're talking about first world street dirt I agree. If you're talking about ancient Mesopotamian city street dirt, I think you're asking for norovirus, dysentery, cholera, etc. Yes they had sewers and even pipes, but stormwater and sanitary sewers weren't separate and often relied on open ditches.

Citation?