Swaddling

Okay, it's a weird topic I know, but I was browsing independent.ie and I came across this article which says that swaddling has come back into fashion and is causing an increase in hip dysplasia which we haven't seen in 25 years. Presumably women are being advised to do this at childcare classes or websites, so I decided to look up what it involved and why it's come back in to fashion.

I didn't really know anything about it, other than that it's mentioned in the bible story, but it involves binding the baby tightly in a blanket in order to sooth it and help it sleep more soundly by eliminating it's startle reflex. It's also said to reduce SIDS and colic. It was formerly believed that it was necessary in order to ensure that the limbs grew straight.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers and doctors realised that it was not necessary for straight limbs and was in fact overly restrictive for muscle development. Jean Jacques Rousseau (who I suspect didn't much like women) said that women despised their duty to nurse their own children and entrusted them to mercenary wetnurses who would have to pay less attention to a swaddled baby than one who could move freely.

Modern swaddling seems to be less restrictive and its advocates say that it simulates the closeness of the womb and calms the baby. It is believed to reduce SIDS because it keeps the baby in a supine position which reduces the risk of SIDS. But if the baby does end up on it's front, there is no way to roll over again as the arms are bound within the blanket. Recent studies actually suggest that it could contribute to SIDS. Of babies who died of SIDS, 24% were swaddled, while only 6% of the control group were.

So that's a brief version of what I learned from Wikipedia. Then I went to see what the rest of the internet said. Most of what comes up does say to be careful to leave room for the hips and legs, because of the risk of dysplasia. A lot of sites also recommend to stop swaddling at about one month old, presumably because the baby will want to start moving around at that time. That all sounds okay.

But I did find some video tutorials that said nothing about dysplasia, and a suspicious number of deleted comments. My guess is someone criticised the technique and it proved easier to delete the comments than to engage them. There was also a comment saying that more SIDS victims were unswaddled than swaddled. But that is simply a corruption of the actual statistics seen above as the control group had far more unswaddled babies who didn't suffer from SIDS.

Also, try doing an image search on google for swaddling. It does not look comfortable.

I'm inclined to think that the ideal way to mimic the womb to sooth the baby is to hold it closely. Hugging soothes the huggee and the skin on skin contact is a major part of the mother and child forming a bond. Binding it up just seems to be the lazy solution so you can go do something else. And I wonder if it is inadvisable to swaddle in order that the child will wake less. It seems like a good way of making sure everybody knows baby is still alive. Plus it's how they realise they need a feeding, a change, or maybe even can help prevent SIDS.

So anyway, back to where I started with hip dysplasia. Although some conscientious advocates of swaddling stress to be careful of the hips, not all sources do. And I have no idea what goes on at childcare classes or what hippy alternative women think is better than what the doctors say. I don't doubt that lots of people are shown a safe way to do it and mess it up.

It's really best to drop the practice altogether - when we weigh up the benefits, they turn out to be erroneous, or achievable in another way. It doesn't make for straight limbs, it doesn't prevent SIDS and if it does mimic the womb, a hug is better.

Again, I know it was an unusual topic for a post here, but it piqued my interest and I thought the re-emergence of a traditional method despite despite warnings of its danger might interest a few of you too. Especially when you throw in the misinterpretation of statistics. :)

Have you been Rolfed?

As the week ran on, I became increasingly aware that my two current side projects for this blog were not going to be resolved in time. So, rather than rush a post that really deserved a little more input, I decided to go ahead and be skeptical about the deep and interesting practice of Rolfing.

“Wait”, you may say, “surely what happens between two (or more) consenting adults is their own business?”. Well, get your head out of the gutter. Rolfing isn’t nearly as exciting as whatever it is you’re thinking about. Rather, it’s a fairly widespread form of woo with practitioners stretched from it’s founding school in Boulder, Colorado to our very own Ireland.

What is Rolfing? 

Essentially takes the form of a very deep tissue massage, aimed at realigning your fascia, or soft tissue. Why? So that your organs can be arranged into a better structure, allowing your personal gravity to ‘flow’ more freely. Depending on which Rolfer (As they are known. No, really.) you ask, this is either a metaphor for how the treatment allows you to better manage your body under the constant effect of gravity, or an actually metaphysical realignment of ones ‘gravity field’ to allow said field to reinforce your ‘personal energy field’. Presumably this gives you some benefit in deflecting photon torpedoes, but this goes strangely unmentioned. There is no lack of other claims of incredible benefits, however. The regulating bodies website, rolf.org, promises that the procedure will remake you ‘physically, emotionally, and energetically.’ Another practitioner promises to take 10-15 years off your biological clock, improve sports performance and leave you better equipped to deal with emotional difficulties. All this from a massage.

History

While clearly I’ve enjoyed writing the name over and over again, why exactly is Rolfing called Rolfing? The practice was founded by one Ida Rolf, who called the technique Structural Integration, a name which thankfully, for those of us with an appreciation for ridiculous sounding names, didn’t take. She established the school in the 1950’s, having previously left a career in biochemistry to experiment with Homeopathy, Chiropractic and Yoga. She’s the one who wrote the claim above that Rolfing could help align your personal energy field (whatever that is), and emphasised the link between Rolfing and gravity. Eventually a formal school was formed in Boulder, Colorado, which brings me to my main three criticisms of Rolfing. 

Conclusion

Rolfing makes a lot of claims to aid your health in a myriad of ways, and some of these claims even seem to have a kernal of truth about them. A number of studies have shown that Rolfing can help with stress, some muscle pain and a few other symptoms; for example, those which seem to respond with any other form of massage. It’s in the bold, metaphysical claims of Rolfing where the problems lie; there’s no evidence for most of it’s supposed benefits at all. It’s like massage mixed with Reiki in that regard, interacting as it does with a strange and untestable energy field which regular medicine for some reason ignores. 

My second complaint is the cost; at €1,000 for a 10 session treatment, it’s an fairly expensive form of not doing anything for your health problems. But that’s really par for the course when it comes to most forms of ‘alternative’ medicine.

Finally, there’s an extra element of exploitation involved in Rolfing; that of the practitioners themselves. Remember that school I mentioned in Boulder? It’s the only place you can become a certified Rolfer (thought rival schools do exist) and charges between $15,000 and $17,000 for the c.1,100 hours of training required to receive your certification. All that time, money and effort for what essentially boils down to a pseudo-scientific massage. After buying into the practice to that degree, I can only imagine most Rolfers are themselves more than a little insulated from criticism of their chosen profession. I know I would be.

So the moral of the story is this; if someone offers to give you a good Rolfing, just remember; they might be well meaning, and something of a victim themselves, but regardless they're unlikely to do you any good.

Ooops, new post wednesday! Podcasts & recommendations

As I was saying before, who minds so much if someone's post is a day late or even non-existent! I've been working up to write a big piece of semi-investigative work, but people and institutions are slow to write back with some information I need for my piece. Also, I'm in no rush. :)

So just another general information post for you today. It's impossible to understate how great and informative podcasts have become. In the spreading of information of all kinds, skeptical and otherwise, they're becoming a cornerstone of modern life. You could yak on and on about citizen journalism and the death of print and blah blah blah, but they certainly do form a cornerstone of whatever our consumption of media and information is becoming.

If you carry a phone around with you, you almost definitely have a platform to listen to some podcasts right there in your pocket. There are a huge amount of ways to get your home computer to download your podcasts automatically, from iTunes to Juice and a gigantic range in-between. In fact, now that smartphones are getting to the point where downloading podcasts directly becomes easier and easier, there are plenty of apps like Stitcher which let you stream your audio rather than download it.

For the last couple of years I've been listening to upwards of 40 podcasts a week. They keep you highly entertained at work, that's for sure. I do have a hardware question for the community though - my Sony Ericsson XPeria X10 is a great phone, but 6 hours of continuous audio kills the battery - these Android phones just don't make good mp3 players. My previous phone could make it more than 24 hours, playing music the vast majority of that time. But I'm kind of hooked on these smart phones now, so my question for you is, what is the Battery life like on the Blackberry range of phones? If anyone has any experience with them, I'ld appreciate the feedback. My enviromentalist sensibilities discourage me from charging my phone as much as I do.

Anyway, some podcast recommendations for you! If you haven't tried out the podcasting thing, I encourage dipping your toe in the water. Here's some pro-science, rational, skeptical podcasts for you to try. They're generally very entertaining too. Stick them on your phone or mp3 player and try one out on your commute/gym trip/while ironing - they just might change your entertainment habits.

Here's some recent Irish podcasts - local and skeptical:

Dublin SITP's Skeprechauns via RSS.

On DCU FM, Occam's Barbershop.

Just across the water, some great skeptical podcasts from the UK:

From Merseyside Skeptics, Skeptics with a K & InKredulous - very funny!

Righteous Indignation, a weekly podcast about skeptical issues.

And elsewhere, another bunch of podcasts to keep you informed and entertained:

The premiere example of skeptical podcasts, NESS' Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

George Hrab's hugely popular and entertaining Geologic Podcast.

From Australia, The Skeptics Zone - also worth subscribing to their email newsletter.

There are so many more that this is just the tip of the iceberg. But it's an iceberg that's well worth mapping out and investigating for yourself. If you haven't tried listening to podcasts before, you really should give a few a listen. I'll be back soon, hopefully with the results of what I've been looking into.

ps. The Birmingham Skeptics did a nice link page on their blog, which you can find here. We got a line there, as well as linkage to this blog. If you use google reader or some other RSS reader, you should give them a follow, they post good stuff there. If you're on twitter, follow them @Brum_Skeptics. I'm going to push the design of this blog around soon, put up a similar page for us and get a better look and feel to the page, as well as linking in all our members contact details, blogs, etc. If you have a blog and/or twitter account or other site you want highlighted, email galwayskeptics@gmail and I'll add it to the list!

Genesis (Not the band)

The Book of Genesis is the first of the Five books of the Hebrew Torah in which the author recounts, among others, the story of the creation of the World by Jehovah. The story includes many of the perceptions of the world from its era and location; for example, the sky is seen as a firmament or dome, parting the “upper waters” from the oceans, and the creation of Humans from dust, both comparable with contemporary Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian creation myths. While it might be expected that we, as a species would have collectively moved on from these simplistic views, sadly a disturbing number of people in the Western World, despite the immense scientific evidence amassed since the 19th Century, still hold this text to be an accurate account of the history of our world.

At least some forty percent of Americans believe that the world was created according to this text, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, in spite of radiometric dating of the oldest rocks on earth (indicating how much these rocks have decayed atomically) and microwave background measurements (light travelling through space since the Big Bang) which place the age of the Earth and the Universe respectively at 4.6 billion and 13.7 billion years old. The number of Europeans is considerably lower by most accounts, but still embarrassingly high. In 2006, a poll in the United Kingdom found that twenty-two percent of respondents professed a belief in Creationism, and seventeen percent in Creationism-by-another-name, otherwise known as “Intelligent Design”. Only a little over half of the respondents accepted that Natural Selection was responsible for the development and diversity of life.

There are two important questions here; why do these people believe these things, and is there any merit to their beliefs? The Science in these fields is well established; life originated from organic molecules (although the exact mechanism of abiogenesis has yet to be established or replicated) and then diversified and adapted to survive in an astounding number of ways. The Universe began to expand 13.7 billion years ago, and while what happened before that is unknown to us, we’ve filled a great number of gaps between then and now; Hydrogen clouds formed in the Big Bang coalesced into Stars, and as they died the debris from supernovae formed the heavier elements, which over time, accreted to form planets, you, me, and all life on Earth.

So, while the second question can be answered with an upfront “no” and I’ll elaborate on it later, why on earth do people believe these things? Well, although I hate to take personal experiences into these things, I will state that I have yet to meet a Creationist (out of the three or so I’ve actually discussed this topic with) who actually understood what Natural Selection is. They have a tendency to believe a misconception about Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; Usually that they think that the theory states that the complex life we see today sprung into existence ex nihilo. Feel free to take a moment to laugh at that. Creationism proposes that all life sprang into existence from nothing, but because they say “God did it” that makes it less ridiculous in their minds than a misunderstanding of a scientific theory. In essence, they believe that the book proposes a theory of abiogenesis, and this could not be further from the truth. In his lifetime, Darwin only ventured as far as to speculate about the conditions of abiogenesis;

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

But he was aware that the science of his era was not nearly able to tackle such an immense question. Natural Selection, often known as Evolution, is the process by which life adapts and changes over time. The theory doesn’t cover the origin of life, but rather the origin of the immense diversity of life. Darwin, and the co-discoverer of the theory, Alfred Wallace came to their conclusions after years of hard work, travel and observation of diverse forms of life. So, how did the author(s) of Genesis come to the conclusions which they came to? Divine revelation? Pshaw.

In all probability, Genesis was the product of an earlier Oral tradition, perhaps even several different traditions, which I have no doubt is related to the stories of contemporary societies in the Near-East. In a strange move for a monotheistic religion, God has an unusual habit of referring to himself in the first-person-plural ( Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ). Earlier in the narrative, the term Elohim “Gods”, is used to refer to God, but later he undergoes a name change to the more familiar name Yahweh. Interestingly, the Canaanites, another Semitic society had in their pantheon two deities, also known as Yahweh and El. Perhaps the story was a synthesis of several earlier narratives, and when it was codified the scribes decided to be mumpsimuses and not alter the polytheistic references. The Story of Adam and Eve bears a remarkable similarity to Mesopotamian Epic He who saw the Deep, or Gilgamesh which recounts the story of the wild man Enkidu, who after having sex with a Temple-prostitute, is feared by the animals he once hunted with, and said to be wise and “like a god”. Sound familiar? If you read the Epic of Gilgamesh, you’ll see that the chances of the Bible being either Holy Writ or divinely inspired are somewhere between “slim” and “none”.

Taking a moment to justify my earlier “no”, it’s plain to see that these archaic beliefs hold no merit. We have developed numerous theories which account for much that was unknown to us in the Bronze Age, and if new evidence comes to light, contradicting earlier evidence, (Rabbits in the Precambrian, or the like) then we’ll change our theories to suit the new facts, once again illustrating the difference between Science and Religion; Science has no holy unalterable text, no divine laws, science is the pursuit of knowledge, religion is the pursuit of fantasy. Essentially these people reject reality because they’re kept in the dark, either by parents, teachers, preachers, themselves, or a combination of the four, and don’t even know what the facts are. Anyone who has looked at the “arguments” against Natural Selection will see that they’re entirely based on a misconception of the theory, one of the most hilarious being “Well then why have we never seen a monkey give birth to a man?”. Aquinas would be proud.

Admin post from galwayskeptics

Hey everyone! Don't forget we have a gathering next monday in McSwiggans at 20:30 GMT. You can find the page for the event here - event!

Also don't forget to spread the word to any who are interested in Skepticism in the west of Ireland. You can jump onto our Facebook Page to stay in touch.

And we're still looking for you guys to sign on to the group blogging effort here on the blog! (no pressure!) :D

Blog Schedule/Rotation etc

 Okay, so we're looking for contributors to the Galway Skeptics blog. The basic idea at the moment is that there will be a fortnightly rotation, where each person will have a "day" to fill. The topic can be a full blog post, or even just a link/picture/item of interest the author found interesting in the days since their last post. The users' post may even just be a question they want their fellow Galway Skeptics to have a think about and respond to if they have a chance.

Our slots are slowly filling up:

Week 1

Monday - Admin post from galwayskeptics@gmail
Tuesday - donalfall
Wednesday -
Thursday - Charles Doyle
Friday -
Saturday -
Sunday -

Week 2

Monday - Admin post from galwayskeptics@gmail

Tuesday - Yolande O'Brien

Wednesday - 

Thursday - Podge Murphy

Friday - 

Saturday - 

Sunday - John Birrane

get in touch for a daily posting slot!

What a great day for Skepticism!

What a great day for Skepticism!

Why, you ask? Is it because Galway Skeptics in the Pub finally has its own blog? (Thanks @donalfall) Or perhaps because said blog is fortunate enough to have me as one of its contributors?

Nope, nothing so vain, thankfully. Rather, it is because today is April 1^st, widely celebrated as April Fools’ Day around the world. It’s the one day when even the most credulous of people will, upon reading or hearing just about any story, advertisement or article, think; “Is this really true?”

Now if only people applied the same thinking all year round.