subdural

The baby is brought to the hospital, doctors find subdural and retinal hemorrhage, she is accused of shaking her baby.

This is where doctors find subdural bleeding and the parents end up accused, the child is removed for months, etc.

Relatedly, this recent medical article [1] reports a case of an alleged short fall resulting in subdural and retinal hemorrhage.

The problem comes from concluding that every baby with head trauma/brain swelling/subdural hematomas must have been the result of frustrated parents/caregivers who shook the baby.

In 1989, just a few months after he completed his second term as president, Reagan underwent surgery to drain a subdural hematoma caused by a fall from a horse in Mexico.

They are judicial experts, appointed by courts to indicate whether they believe a baby has been shaken or abused, on the basis of specific intracranial findings (subdural and retinal hemorrhage, mostly).

The persons accused of shaking their baby because subdural and retinal hemorrhage were found are presumed guilty, and they have no way of proving their innocence, that is, that their baby was never shaken...

Emergency providers are in a bit of a quandary as they must choose between the possibility of missing a subdural hematoma on a patient refusing care and facing a wrongful death lawsuit, and facing a lawsuit for unlawful imprisonment and assault.

What has been discredited by scientific evidence over the past 25 years is the reliance on isolated subdural and retinal hemorrhages in infants to determine with near certainty that a child has been violently shaken, in the absence of a history or evidence of major trauma.

I'd have to dig into the latest literature to be sure, but I don't remember seeing even 1 case where shaking with no impact was independently witnessed or videotaped, and was shown to cause retinal/subdural haemorrhage, with or without any other form of trauma.

With a few thousands systems in the US population for example, we'd have within a single year a few instances of babies collapsing (most often at home), brought to the hospital and presenting subdural and retinal hemorrhage with the videotaped proof of what happened before the collapse: abuse or no abuse.

>It doesn’t help the underlying problems If the complication was a subdural hematoma then similar procedures are still the standard of care today, and certainly we wouldn't be drilling to people's skulls as treatment if our ancestors never did anything similar.

The foldable subdural ecog step feels like a "then draw the whole owl" situation.

Damn for a second I thought Steve Martin had released a new single called “Subdural Hematoma” and got excited.

Strikingly, the isolated "triad" of subdural and retinal hemorrhage with brain edema hasn't really been reproduced in any animal model so far [1].

Interestingly, the doctors did not conclude that their belief was wrong (short falls almost never cause subdural and retinal hemorrhage), but that it was an "outlier".