Interesting Links for 25-11-2011

[andrewducker]

• IPv6 for consumers on DSL at last
  (tags: ipv6 adsl isp uk internet broadband )
• Apple is the UK's second most popular shopping site (after Amazon)
  (tags: apple shopping uk )
• Google and Samsung confirm Galaxy Nexus volume bugs - glad I'm not upgrading until January!
  (tags: google samsung android )
• Badoo - the billion pound social network you've never heard of (massive in Brazil, Spain, France...)
  (tags: business socialnetworking sex culture badoo )
• Genetic Study Confirms: First Dogs Came from East Asia
  (tags: dogs asia genetics )
• Britain has had a record-breaking freakishly warm autumn
  (tags: autumn weather uk )
• Courts cannot force ISPs into broad filtering and monitoring for copyright-infringing traffic, ECJ rules
  (tags: law privacy internet copyright EpicWin )
• Offshore unit launched to tackle international tax avoidance
  (tags: tax uk )
• UK switching cervical cancer vaccine to one which also protects against genital warts
  (tags: uk nhs vaccine women )
• Seeing nude people tunes up the brain
  (tags: nudity brain psychology )
• Some very interesting stats on home births, midwives, etc.
  (tags: birth children healthcare )
• Ethical bank Triodos opens its first UK branch (in Edinburgh)
  (tags: uk scotland edinburgh bank ethics )
• Organising movie posters by different tropes they use. Strangely hypnotic.
  (tags: posters design cinema movies art poster )
• It's nice to know that there's at least one class out there getting decent sex education
  (tags: sex education sexuality society )
• Willpower Is more than a metaphor: Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source.
  (tags: glucose sugar willpower self-control )
• Journalists tried to reach JK Rowling through her five-year-old daughter. Can we shoot them now?
  (tags: journalism uk media jkrowling )
• 50p tax rate not actually causing a massive problem.
  (tags: tax uk )

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you forget the other side of the coin - for a birth that has no complications and proceeds in the normal and expected manner to produce a healthy child and healthy mother a hospital setting carries additional risks (generally speaking simply being in a hospital carries risks such as increased exposure to MRSA; specifically speaking many women experience hospital births as involving more stress, and more unnecessary/unwanted medical intervention during their birth).

There are many women and babies whose health post partum are vastly improved by not being in a hospital setting, and simplifying that to "home comfort" is unfair; it is desperately unpleasant to think about but, yes, I would venture to suggest that for most people there is a number of people in perfect rather than slightly-dodgy health that "makes up for" a single death collaterally caused. What you feel that number is, and how it fits into the evidence presented here, are things that I obviously do not know.

The risk equation also requires further information which is non-obvious (although presumably covered in this report) - exactly what procedures are there which you are very likely to be able to access in hospital but not at home? Home births supervised by NHS midwives are not the same thing as a birth free of medical intervention or assistance; not all hospitals are able to guarantee to offer all types of intervention that are theoretically available (that is, that exist, are approved etc); what is the likelihood of experiencing unexpected complications? Further - how far is your home from the hospital, how long will it take you to get there in an emergency situation, which you should compare with how long you would have to wait in the hospital for the appropriate teams and equipment to be available to you when you are considering what risk you are actually running by having a home birth.

So; yes. It's news. Just because the answer turns out to agree with your gut-feeling about the risks doesn't mean that you were correct to trust your gut-feeling rather than go out (well, send someone out) and collect evidence about the question.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Yes this. By their nature these things miss out the personal experience bit. I know two women who opted to give birth at home for their first child. Neither of them are stupid, they both did their research and decided the added comfort and reduced medicalisation outweighed the extra risk. They were both lucky enough to have no complications and found birth a more positive experience than several other women I know, who had a horrible time in hospital. Including one who still had to wait for an ambulance and be transferred because the hospital she was in couldn't perform the necessary intervention.

By which I mean that if we rely on people's gut feelings and personal experience, we get a story based entirely on who is in our sample.

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

It turns out that I am an opinionated old fart, lucky enough to have friends like Andy who are patient enough to keep arguing their corner. The result was that I went away, read some more around the topic and am now more sympathetic to other point of view.

Hurray!

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I can entirely sympathise with your position given your experience, it's very hard to be objective about medical statistics when it's you or your family whose lives are saved (I made a similar point here about mammograms).

[andrewducker]

I should point out that I think your approach is absolutely defensible, that 0.5/100 is perfectly common enough to be worried about, and that I'm sure there are cases where being right next to a bunch of doctors has saved people's lives.

Which leads me to think that either there _is_ something wrong in the statistics or there must be cases where being in a hospital is actively bad for your health (like increased chance of catching something nasty, or passing doctor's deciding to run experiments on you).

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

As well as the chances of catching MRSA etc, hospital births tend to be 60 % longer, which can increase the chances of complications. In a hospital, a woman is more likely to give birth on her back (not helped by a lot of medical professionals who think you need to be lying down if you have monitors attached to you) which is apparently much worse than squatting.

(This info is via the Boy who is training to be a nurse; I'd look up some articles to reference but a) I should be working or turning the laptop off and b) no-one without a journal subscription is likely to be able to read them)

I'm unclear whether the data on the length of hospital births is comparing like-for-like births, or whether it is affected by higher risk births being almost entirely hospital based, unfortunately.