How to arm Caesarean babies with the gut bacteria they need
economist.com
economist.com
>As discussed above, although the data are supportive of a difference in the early-life microbiome of infants born via CS vs. vaginal delivery, the evidence that this is due to the mode of delivery (i.e., differences in exposure to vaginal microbiota during birth) is unconvincing and lacking in critical data. Nevertheless, the perception among the public and medical health professionals alike is that CS delivery deprives the infant of exposure to vaginal microbiota and this leads to neonatal dysbiosis and increased risk of poorer health outcomes. As a consequence, attempts have been made to correct the problem—even though the “problem” may not exist and the benefits of exposure to any individual bacterial species have not been determined.
50%+ of the population has conducted simular tests and everyone lives.
Hence why there is a push to vaccinate children before they become sexually active: the effectiveness is around 95%.
Do we really need to feed newborns their mother's feces? I mean, how much feces would a newborn be exposed to during a vagina birth? They certainly aren't ingesting grams of fecal material.
And the only thing this seemed to prove is that you can match the baby's biome. The biggest question is "does that matter?". Sure, there have been some studies showing a correlation in biome and various diseases, but not hard, conclusive data.
Then again, it might be hard to put people in a lottery where half of them are made to feed their own poop to their kids.
Suppose there's a hidden gene that causes people to be able to fly like superman if they're given their mother's poop. The gene also causes people to not volunteer in poop feeding studies, because the experimenters unfortunately placed the adverts on the ground. You find volunteers, you give half of them the poop and the other half the placebo. You find that none of them can fly, so you conclude poop doesn't cause flight.
If you make this probabilistic it gets less obvious to pick apart statistically, but same problem.
Which generally ends up being that lots of studies are about isolating the effect of one factor on young white educated men, but you can at least say you've isolated the factor as opposed to just comparing young white educated men to the general population
This looks like the first step towards larger studies.
Also remember that given this was quite experimental and could've easily had adverse health consequences, it had to be on a volunteering basis.
You've answered your own question there. As I understand it, pregnancy and childbirth related studies often have this issue as the moral stakes are higher and there are issues around consent. Also under normal conditions neither is actually a medical condition/procedure which needs treating and the benefits are often only seen over a long timeframe, making obtaining volunteers less straightforward. As long as everyone is honest, less than perfect science is still useful.
》Alternatively, bacteria may be translocated to the mammary duct from the maternal gastrointestinal tract via an entero-mammary pathway, facilitated by dendritic cells.
The child transfers whatever it is fighting to the mom's nipple when breastfeeding, the mom's immune system reacts, and in the next feeding the milk contains a response for the child.
I guess it's the equivalent of web frameworks in other fields, only that the half life is 10 years instead of 2.
Best example are the nutrition fads.
Midwives had a body of knowledge related to childbirth that was lost in the medicalization of childbirth. They didn’t always have good results, but the doctors could have contributed to improve midwives’ practice, rather than do the takeover/exterminate routine. Modern midwives are mostly subsumed into the medical hierarchy, and many of the techniques passed from Midwife to midwife were lost.
Julius Caesar was an early c-section birth. IIRC, his mother did not survive. Just because modern doctors can extract a baby without killing the mother doesn’t mean this should be a common occurrence.
With that said, Weston A. Price DDS had some observations about well-nourished female children growing up to have hips big enough to facilitate easier childbirths... some women may need c-sections because they have small hips, for various reasons...
It is also true that some midwifes approaches are being rediscovered, like for example giving a fuck about mothers comfort or not yelling at her. Not that all midwifes always did, but still.
This is a myth. Julius Caesar's mother _did_ survive, which would be almost unheard of at the time for a c section. Some contemporaries thought that an ancestor of his was born by c-section, but there's no real evidence for this.