5 Most Controversial Health Stories of 2013
There are stories that are purely factual, while others are up for debate. These five stories — from a woman giving birth on the lawn of a medical clinic because she was denied care to a man believing he "debunked" homosexuality — have the been the most controversial on Medical Daily this year:
5. Woman gives birth on lawn of clinic after being denied immediate medical attention.
Twenty-eight-year-old Irma López Aurelio gave birth on a patch of grass outside an Oaxaca, Mexico, medical clinic after being denied care due to what the clinic called a “language barrier.” Aurelio is indigenous, so she does not speak Spanish. Her screams while in labor were heard throughout the town of San Felipe Jalapa de Diaz, Mexico. A photo of Aurelio made the front page of La Razon de Mexico newspaper.
4. Mother rarely bathes baby; Internet blows up.
Yes, you read that correctly. Massachusetts mother Caire Goss published a blog post entitled “Do You Actually Need To Bathe Baby?” in October. In it, she confessed to only washing her 3-month-old baby once a week. “As long as you are thoroughly wiping the diaper area, as well as neck and face, then baby is good to go ... It's not like he's touching every filthy thing he can find or running around and sweating a lot, so spot cleaning should be pretty sufficient,” she wrote in the post.
While mothers seemed outraged by the idea of only periodically bathing a baby, experts at the Mayo Clinic agree with Goss. “There's no need to give your newborn a bath every day. In fact, bathing your baby more than several times a week can dry out his or her skin,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
3. Exercise-obsessed mom of three asks other moms: “What’s your excuse” for being so fat?
It seems like exercise-loving mom Maria Kang just likes to stir the pot, and she’s pretty good at it. In October, after posting a photo of herself scantily clad and surrounded by her three sons with the caption “What’s your excuse?,” fellow mothers responded by calling her insensitive to mothers who struggle to shed their baby weight and accused her of fat-shaming. Kang’s response was a sincere non-apology:
“What you interpret is not MY fault. It's yours,” she wrote. “The first step in owning your life, your body, and your destiny is to OWN the thoughts that come out of your own head. I didn't create them. You created them.”
2. A study linked racism in white Americans to gun ownership … and gun owners didn’t like it.
In October, a study of symbolic racism found that there are strong links between biases toward minorities and gun ownership among white Americans. “For every one point increase in symbolic racism — measured on a five-point scale — the chance someone had a gun in the home rose by 50 percent, and the chance the respondent supported policies that allowed people to carry concealed guns rose by 28 percent,” Medical Daily reported, based on the study.
The results of the study didn’t go over well with gun owners, who took to the article’s comment section to let off a little steam. “This study was done in the UK, by a "doctor" that obviously has no clue how things work here in the U.S.,” wrote one commenter. “Typical. When they have no facts on their side, they resort to the racism card,” wrote another. But the researchers themselves didn’t shy away from the fact that there needed to be more research to come to any concrete findings about racism’s influence on gun control.
"The study is a first step,” said study co-author Dr. Kerry O’Brien,“but there needs to be more investment in empirical research around how racial bias may influence people's policy decisions, particularly those policies that impact on the health and well-being of U.S. citizens."
1. Nigerian doctoral candidate attempted to “debunk” homosexuality using magnets.
Chibuihem Amalaha, a post graduate student at the University of Lagos in Nigeria, attempted to use science to prove that homosexuality goes against nature in an effort to prevent his country from legalizing gay marriage. Amalaha used a basic electromagnetism experiment to substantiate his claim. The Lord, he said, has given him the “wisdom to use science as a scientist to prove gay marriage wrong.”
“I used two bar magnets in my research. A bar magnet is a horizontal magnet that has the North Pole and the South Pole and when you bring two bar magnets and you bring the North Pole together you find that the two North Poles will not attract,” he explained. “They will repel, that is, they will push away themselves showing that a man should not attract a man.”
Of course, here in America, Amalaha’s assertions were not received well. The controversy stirred in the comment section of Medical Daily’s post for quite some time. One commenter named Evan seemed to sum it up pretty well: “I think [Amalaha] missed the big problem with his experiment, being that a human organism is not a magnet,” he wrote. “We do not have north/south polarity, and we do not attract iron.”