Pot-smoking moms birth crack babies says Fox News medical expert

I’m lovin’ the way he calls it …“the marijuana.”

He must smoke a lot of it since he’s on a first name basis with it.

1 Like

Well, medical research is:

  1. Full of researchers who are shockingly bad at statistics
  2. Heavily constrained by funding
  3. Heavily constrained by ethics
  4. Often paid for by special interests
  5. Reported on by people who don’t understand the research

Sadly it is the best we have.

1 Like

What about vaporizing? Honestly, I’m more about pregnant women who smoke.

1 Like

I’m not sure what people will make of this story (I’m not sure what to make of it 20 years later), but I knew a woman who, as an angry unconcerned teen, smoked pot nearly every day for most of her pregnancy. Surprisingly the child turned out OK, even had above average intelligence (however I have since lost touch with her, so who knows what the long term effects were on the child.)

You missed one:

  1. Often ignored or misinterpreted by practicing physicians

But, yeah, medical research is at least an attempt to inform the art of medicine with the scientific method.

Apparently he legally removes cancerous prostates for a living when he’s not weighing in on crack babies born without the use of crack. But it’s not the first time he’s shown extreme disdain for women and their healthcare (probably because they aren’t customers of his).

Well, I don’t think the average physician should be reading any medical research outside of large-scale human clinical research.

It takes a lot of time to understand a research paper, validate the significance of the experiment, cross-check the result in other papers, ensure the paper’s authors are legitimate and determine if and how it should be integrated into your practice.

Physicians are already inundated with self-diagnosing patients who read in vitro studies or rat model studies that they should get less/more chemical/mineral/food/exercise/cosmic energy/etc, the idea that they might reinforce their patients research with their own half-hearted research efforts is scary.

Fox “News” “Medical” “A-Team”

Came here to mention this, am pleased you did so much better than I could have.

1 Like

Frustrating, yes, deeply so. Astounding, not really; that’s pretty normal for Western medicine. Historically your chance of changing the way medicine is practiced has more to do with your charisma and various economic factors than anything else, and really very little to do with evidence.

I pity the fool that watches FUD…

2 Likes

I’d have gone more with

1 Like

And he is an idiot. Obviously he never saw the medical research that came out of Jamaica on this very subject.

http://www.ukcia.org/research/can-babies.php

The results of the research were the following:

The course of the pregnancies were similar in each group and the two groups of neonates were not significantly different according to physical examination data, including birth weight and length and gestational age. 23 Because Apgar scores were not recorded by hospital nurses at standard time intervals, they were less reliable. Nevertheless, there were no significant differences in the Apgar scores between the two groups.

t tests were used to compare the performance of neonates of users (n = 24) and nonusers (n = 20 on the NBAS cluster scores and on the supplementary items on the third day of life. Table 1 shows that there were no significant differences on the seven clusters. There also were no differences on the seven supplementary items. To examine the degree to which heavy marijuana use may have an effect on neurobehavioral outcome, we then compared the performance of the heavily exposed and nonexposed neonates on the NBAS on day 3, by examining group differences on the seven Brazelton cluster scores and on the supplementary items scores. As Table 2reveals, there were no significant differences in performance on the Brazelton cluster scores on day 3. Similarly, no differences were found on the supplementary item summary scores.

At 1 month, however, comparisons between exposed and nonexposed neonates revealed that the neonates of using mothers had significantly higher scores on the Autonomic and Reflex clusters of the NBAS (see Table 3). On the supplementary items, these neonates scored higher (were less irritable) on the General Irritability item.

Comparing the heavily exposed and the nonexposed infants, the Brazelton clusters on day 30, showed that the offspring of heavy-marijuana using mothers had significantly higher scores on the Orientation cluster, on the Autonomic Stability cluster, and on Reflexes (see Table 4). Due to the intercorrelation among the variables comprising each cluster, no t scores or P values are reported for individual items. Nevertheless, a comparison of individual item scores showed that neonates of heavy users had higher scores on habituation to auditory and tactile stimuli, and to animate auditory stimuli, the degree of alertness, capacity for consolability, irritability (i.e, less irritable), and had fewer startles and tremors. The comparisons on the supplementary items revealed significant differences on all seven variables, with the neonates of mothers who were heavy-marijuana users performing more optimally on these items.

And memory loss.

1 Like

They say memory loss is actually the SECOND problem with excessive Mary-Jane intake. I’d tell you the first problem but, um, ah… I FORGOT.

I’ll just let myself out…

1 Like

What is more scary, as a female patient, is how little is understood about the differences between men and women’s bodies when it comes to prescribing medications. Most doctors prescribe based on studies conducted on a group of “average males” typically white males. Throw into the mix that the accuracies of blood tests fluctuate from lab to lab. Science and the scientific method is clearly something needed for society but please, everyone, don’t assume the individual with the MD behind their name is all-knowing. Learn to question why certain tests are being performed and specifically, how certain medications are supposed to work for your gender and ethnic group.

Could you cite some research to back this up. Please. Something from the 21st century, ideally.

How did you smoke four whole marijuanas and not get syphilis!?

3 Likes

You liar! Everything said by those on the right side of the war on drugs is undeniably true and doesn’t require investigation.

Smoking crack-babies kills, man.

I think you’re right: smoking crack babies would at least kill the babies, and then decades later the lung cancer would kill the smoker too.