The Infectious Myth - Fighting against Shaken Baby Syndrome with Keith Findley

Keith Findley is a law professor from the University of Wisconsin who has spent many years fighting injustices in the US justice system. One of them is convictions based on the Shaken Baby Syndrome hypothesis, sometimes treated as a dogma, now often called Abusive Head Trauma. Responding to an article in a pediatric journal, Findley and colleagues made a couple of major points in their responding paper. First, that the controversy over SBS/AHT is alive and well. In fact, a recent Swedish government panel reviewed the evidence and found that there’s no good evidence that the so called triad of internal symptoms in a baby are convincing evidence of abuse. Secondly, they assert that doctors are really going beyond a diagnosis of brain injury, and claiming that they can determine the cause of the damage, which is a legal finding (and often simply poor differential diagnosis, as many possible causes of the symptoms are ignored). David and Keith discuss these points, and also the biomechanical evidence which does not support the SBS theory, how those who testify as experts against SBS are treated (such as former guest Waney Squier), and some of the situations where convictions have been overturned after some people have spent years in jail. Even the godfather of Shaken Baby Syndrome, Dr. Norman Guthkelch, has spoken against the misuse of his tentative theory, that he proposed in 1971, so the times, they are a changing.

 

The article by Findley and colleagues is freely available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3328996