Shaken baby syndrome has found new life as abusive head trauma

That was a horrifying and infuriating read. I am a rather new parent myself so there's also a more personal note informing my terror and rage because it seems this could just as easily happen to me if my daughter had to go to the hospital. As a result, my comment is a bit more ranty and angry than I usually post.

Obviously it is possible that there's more to the story but it reads to me like these "child abuse specialists" are more interested validating their existence than actually protecting children.

There were also the post-operative notes of Arlo’s neurosurgeon, which described the subdural hematomas as “chronic,” suggesting they had been present for an indeterminate period of time. The blood on the infant’s brain was straw-colored, the surgeon had observed, not the pink or red typically associated with acute trauma. During a 2023 juvenile court hearing, Pham acknowledged speaking with the neurosurgeon and reviewing the surgical notes, but he said he did not include them in his report because he focused on other indicators, such as Arlo’s rapid decline. “The thing that I focused on is his acute presentation,” Pham said.

This indicates that they even went so far as to outright omit evidence from their reports that did not align with their desired outcome. The idea that a doctor would assume an acute presentation precludes the possibility of it being the result of a chronic condition is absolutely absurd. I may be typing out of anger, but that suggests a lack of qualification to practice medicine. A doctor should understand that sudden symptoms, especially severe ones that warrant a 911 call, can easily indicate an underlying problem that did not seem serious until it suddenly became critical. If I were found collapsed with no apparent injuries and the doctor told me, "You didn't previously report any relevant symptoms, so you must have been assaulted and knocked out. There's no reason to even bother testing for any of the possible chronic problems that could have caused this," I would seek a more competent doctor.

I also find it laughable that a prosecutor suggested that all the defense experts must not be acting in good faith. The same good faith that leads to the prosecution's experts leaving relevant information out of reports and stating the bold and legally questionable, "There was no other medical condition that could account for those injuries." That statement goes so far beyond safer "consistent with" framing all the way to an absolute that is not provable by the person that said it. Even in murder trials where the murder weapon is known, experts will not state the weapon definitively caused the wounds, but rather that it is "consistent with" the shape of the wounds.

If it were up to me the entire system that encourages this behavior would be harshly penalized for its behavior. At the very least, one of the doctors intentionally left potentially exonerating evidence out of his report and another stated an opinion as definitive fact on the stand. To me, this is a clear indicator of intentional wrongdoing. That's something you do if your goal is to get a conviction, not something you do if your goal is to help the child.

Like /u/zestier, I am a newer parent. My three year old fell off a lawn chair and hit his head on the concrete stoop a few weeks ago. I rushed him to urgent care, where they said they didn't have appropriate means to treat a toddler; raced from there to the pediatric ER. Eventually he gets seen and they're able to close his head wound. But I remember feeling so frustrated at the amount of time that went into basically interrogating myself and my wife about what happened, taking lots of photos, having three or four people in and out of the room before they even talked about sewing him up.

I was happy with his care overall, but it really made me feel bad. Like, I didn't do this to my kid! What kind of monster could? I kiss is tinyest injuries to make then feel better; I pet his back and snuggle him to sleep every night; I get up 3-5 times per night to soothe or feed or provide whatever he needs. I know these folks couldn't know that, but the feeling of having to assert my love for my kid was very strange. You could feel the suspicion in the air, and for a few moments I was really worried that I'd have to somehow prove that my kid fell over in our front yard... How would you even do that?

All this is to say that I'm sympathetic with the tone of the article. I cannot imagine how helpless a parent accused but innocent of this kind of abuse would feel. I'm glad we have safeguards in our society and people who are looking out for children. I grew up in an abusive home, and it's not a good childhood. But zeal must be tempered with absolute honesty and transparency because the damage that could be done to everyone involved if a doctor or prosecutor gets it wrong is immeasurable.

You're Wrong About did an episode on the dubious explanation of shaken baby syndrome as a finding of abuse.

Edit: I wonder if that's the podcast that the article mentions the mother being familiar with.

holy shit. What a horrifying article.