Shaken Baby Syndrome – Unscientific Dogma
The following text and quotes are from the UK’s Pathological Society’s Conversations with pathologists website.
Dogma
When I go and ask people who are defenders of the traditional theory of shaken baby syndrome and they say: ‘Well it’s like that because the judge ruled like that’, or ‘because I’ve never seen any other evidence’, I think: that’s not good enough. Don’t tell me something doesn’t exist because you haven’t seen it. Tell me why the physiological mechanism is not possible. I don’t like dogmas. I might be wrong, but I need to prove it
Irene Scheimberg (UK)
While a number of people talk about the importance of keeping an open mind, and being prepared to question and challenge received wisdom, a few interviewees have found their work has brought them up against more significant barriers.
Waney Squier, for example, became closely involved in the controversy surrounding shaken baby syndrome when her reading on the topic convinced her that “the whole basis for this syndrome was incredibly insecure”. Irene Scheimberg is also uncomfortable with the diagnosis. “You see, the problem with the Shaken Baby controversy is that it’s very dogmatic. If I don’t accept religious dogma, I’m not going to accept scientific dogma. If something is there, it can be proven. I need to understand the mechanism.”
“Before the introduction of technologies like immunohistochemistry, electron microscopy, molecular genetics,” says Christopher Fletcher, “a lot of the clinical stuff…was all a matter of opinion… If you’re big and famous then it is so and so!” He gives an example of coming up against this himself when trying to get a paper published that challenged the prevailing ideas about a specific cancer.
Bill Bass talks about the sensitivity of raising the issue of racial differences, and challenging the idea that this is purely a cultural construct. His work with skeletons and bones, and trying to establish the identity of individual bodies, has convinced him that race “is biological”.
Neuropathologist Richard Hewlett talks about barriers of a different kind: an unwillingness to cross professional boundaries. His championing of the value of marrying radioimaging with autopsy pathology has met with resistance everywhere but America. “The bulk of folk are on one side or the other side, and they go their own ways.”
QUOTES
When I go and ask people who are defenders of the traditional theory [of shaken baby syndrome] and they say: ‘Well it’s like that because the judge ruled like that’, or ‘because I’ve never seen any other evidence’, I think: that’s not good enough. Don’t tell me something doesn’t exist because you haven’t seen it. Tell me why the physiological mechanism is not possible. I don’t like dogmas. I might be wrong, but I need to prove it.
- Irene Scheimberg (UK)
So much of what we believe we’re told and we accept – somebody teaches us something and we say, “Alright, that must be true”, and we don’t ask enough questions. Somebody was quoting the other day one of his lecturers at medical school who said, “Lovely to welcome you students to my lectures here. What I’m going to tell you is that you’ll be given a lot of information here – and probably 50% of it will be proved subsequently to be wrong. The only problem is we don’t which half is going to be wrong and which half is going to be right!” So we all have to keep on asking questions…
Waney Squier (UK)
It rather frightened me that I’d just accepted what I was told, so I started looking at the literature, and I started reading what was actually written about shaken baby syndrome, and realised that the whole basis for this syndrome was incredibly insecure. Then I got into discussions with Jennian and with various other people who were questioning this, including a lively and informative group of forensic pathologists, biomechanical engineers, surgeons, radiologists, predominantly in the United States. We exchange letters and comments about cases and discuss and question everything that’s been written…
– Waney Squier (UK)
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