– U.S. National Library of Medicine
TRUE FACTS:
One of the most disturbing and informative documentary films I have seen in recent years is Meryl Goldsmith’s The Syndrome, which deals with a particular form of child abuse nearly everyone is familiar with: Shaken Baby Syndrome, or SBS. This supposedly occurs when a young child is shaken violently by an adult, causing the brain to repeatedly strike the inside of a child’s skull. The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s online resource MedlinePlus warns that just five seconds of shaking can result in irreversible brain damage or death. Goldsmith and her cousin Susan Goldsmith interviewed Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University, who estimates that from the mid 1990s to the late 2000s, there were more than 1,000 diagnoses of SBS every year, many of which result in criminal convictions for child abuse, reckless homicide, and even first-degree murder. At least two men in the USA – Robert Roberson of Texas and Jeffrey Harvard of Mississippi – are on death row as a result of charges resulting from an SBS diagnosis. An NBC News exposé cited in Goldsmith’s film put the number as high as 3,000 a year.
The three telltale symptoms of SBS are large subdural hematomas, cerebral edema, and retinal hemorrhage. The crux of the controversy is this: those telltale signs of brain trauma from SBS cannot occur without concomitant neck injury. It is an observation that most of us would find intuitively obvious. The cervical vertebrae in a child’s neck are not fully developed, and therefore vulnerable to the violent whiplash motions that would accompany SBS. That’s why, for example, 19 states in the USA now require rear-facing car seats for children.
One of the first skeptics of SBS was Dr. John Plunkett, a retired Minnesota State Medical Examiner, who points out in The Syndrome that there are in fact many conditions – 33 are listed in the film – that can cause the symptoms supposedly indicative of SBS. These include sickle cell anemia, meningitis, and even Vitamin D deficiency. The most jolting moment in the film starts at the five minute 30 second mark, where Dr. Plunkett says:
There is increasing awareness that you can’t cause brain damage by shaking without first causing neck damage. The neck is the weak point. I don’t think it’s a good idea for a parent to shake a child, but I have never seen a case in which there has been neck damage. None.
Then Dr. Ronald Uscinski, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Georgetown University, explains:
Particular in a little baby with no head control – and babies can’t pick their heads up until they’re almost four months old – you would have to transmit whatever forces were going to get to the head through the neck, and you would have to see damage to the neck also. I’ve never seen any real neck injuries… If you stop and think, and ask yourself “Could this be physically possible?” And take an objective look at whether it can or not, the answer comes up “No.”
Skeptics love to hear words like no, none, and never, because they bring clarity to controversy. When archaeologists tell you that dinosaur fossils never show signs of projectile strikes from humans, the creationist/evolutionist debate becomes a little less complicated.
Goldsmith’s film takes a much darker turn later when we learn that SBS grew into a quasi-cult, replete with its own center near Salt Lake City, Utah. Goldsmith focuses her investigation on three long-time SBS activists; Drs. Robert Reece, David Chadwick, and Carole Jenny. All three had links to the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunts of the 1980s and 1990s. Journalist Jim Okerblom of the San Diego Union-Tribune recalls annual conferences at the Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, where Chadwick was Director until 1997. “Their conference was instrumental in spreading that theory,” says Okerblom. “There was no skeptical presentation of this. And I remember sitting in that just thinking I was in the Twilight Zone… No one else seemed to think it was strange.”
Dr. Reece, for his part, wrote about “ritualistic child abuse” in The Pediatric Clinics of North America. Said Dr. Reece:
Although drug use, sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation are part of cult practices, children also may be selected and marked for abuse.
He also mentioned the eye of Horus, black fingernails and “heavy metal rock bands.” Reece’s colleague Dr. Jenny helped edit The APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment that included the chapter “Ritualistic Abuse of Children” by Susan Kelley.
Thanks in part of Chadwick’s influence, Shaken Baby Syndrome eventually became an accepted medical diagnosis. That diagnosis is now under intense scrutiny, as you can see in this article from the Washington Post, this one from the New York Times, this one from NPR, or this story from the Seattle Met. To date, at least 213 persons accused in SBS cases have had their charges dropped, dismissed, or overturned
There is one other remarkable development about SBS. In 2009, term “Shaken Baby Syndrome” somehow morphed into “Abusive Head Trauma.” This is a tiresomely obvious ploy among those who traffic in junk science, and who would like us to believe that one can change the nature of things by changing the name of things.
Remember Multiple Personality Disorder? It was all the rage in the latter half of the 20th Century, until the stories psychiatrists told crossed over into silliness. We went from The Three Faces of Eve to patients with upwards of 100 personalities, including some who were animals. The American Psychiatric Association changed MPD to “Dissociative Identity Disorder” in 1994.
Remember Repressed Memories? The Freudian term “disassociated” has been resurrected in its place.
Remember Facilitated Communication, that miracle therapy that brought the gift of language to non-communicative people on the autism spectrum, thanks to the interventions of trained facilitators and their keyboards? After it was thoroughly debunked, it became “supported typing.”
The Goldsmiths point out near the end of their documentary that self-anointed experts almost never face consequences for their intractable devotion to pseudoscience. Those who have been victimized by judicial zealots and their experts can count only on the moral outrage and activism of their rational fellow citizens and journalists.
