I think everyone is understandably squeamish about experiments involving babies, even if they are carefully monitored to keep at-risk infants safer than they might be at home.
It's not impossible to pay people enough to participate or pay the extra costs to monitor them in their homes.
It's sad that, because of (what is effectively) dogma, we probably can't even quickly test whether the new hypothesis is _better_, i.e. more likely to _save_ (more) babies' lives.
I hope we can at least just test treating the deficit, even if we retain the dogma too (and maybe forever).
This makes 'superstition' _much_ more sympathetic to me generally.
Left to themselves, people want to sleep with their babies or else to put nice warm cuddly things in with them.
That probably is dangerous by modern standards, but in those days the risk was a drop in the bucket compared to all the untreatable diseases going around.
I think everyone is understandably squeamish about experiments involving babies, even if they are carefully monitored to keep at-risk infants safer than they might be at home.
It's not impossible to pay people enough to participate or pay the extra costs to monitor them in their homes.
It's sad that, because of (what is effectively) dogma, we probably can't even quickly test whether the new hypothesis is _better_, i.e. more likely to _save_ (more) babies' lives.
I hope we can at least just test treating the deficit, even if we retain the dogma too (and maybe forever).
This makes 'superstition' _much_ more sympathetic to me generally.
Any decent research about how babies sleep in traditional or foraging societies?
The modern rules are extremely non-traditional.
Left to themselves, people want to sleep with their babies or else to put nice warm cuddly things in with them.
That probably is dangerous by modern standards, but in those days the risk was a drop in the bucket compared to all the untreatable diseases going around.