This is an alternative birth method called “lotus birth” or more formally “umbilical non-severance” in which babies are left tethered to the delivered placenta until their cord desiccates and detaches from their body on its own, usually in 3-10 days, while applying salt to the placenta to increase the speed at which it dries. It will eventually fall off, however, after its delivery the placenta is no longer being supplied with the oxygenated blood it needs to survive, and becomes necrotic (dead). This can act as an easy entry point for infectious organisms to enter the neonate, and can result in life-threatening infections. Neither the American College of Obstetrics or the American Academy of Pediatrics have explicit guidance statements as to whether this should be recommended against. AAP has published that there have been multiple case reports of severe infections with various bacteria secondary to this practice.
This should not be confused/conflated with Delayed Cord Clamping, which is waiting 30-60 seconds after the baby’s delivery for some of the residual fetal blood in the placenta to be delivered to the baby’s circulation to prevent anemia. This has good evidence for benefit to the baby, is recommended by ACOG, and is basically standard of care in the US.
Source: ACOG and AAP publications, also I’m a 4th year medical student that has completed OBGYN rotations
I personally wouldn’t recommend it, I’ve seen babies die miserable deaths of sepsis and it’s heartbreaking. But I’m not going into pediatrics or OBGYN so thankfully this isn’t gonna be a discussion I have to have.
Good luck on your match! I’m still in second year, but I’m already reaching out to programs about setting up auditions and whatnot because I’m attending a small/new DO school, so I don’t really have establishment or prestige on my side.
You joke, but there are literally people who eat their own placenta. I know someone who did. Crystals and essential oils and energy healing and all that, you know. I don’t talk about that kind of stuff with her because for some reason we just can’t seem to find common ground lol
There is an assumption that everyone surfing Lemmy are from developed countries. I’m not generalizing the western placenta eating experience to Somalia or Bangladesh
I don’t really understand why you wouldn’t though? Like it’s just an organ, people eat organs all the time. At least this one involved bringing life into the world instead of death.
The only reason not to is if your brain is fucked up enough that you think it’s icky or something.
I’ve heard of people getting placenta pills to deal with the anemia after birth. I don’t plan on having kids and thus have never been interested enough to research it.
The placenta is not pleasant to look at, so I can imagine pills make it more palatable. I don’t think a lot of study has been done on the effects of eating placenta after birth, but it’s technically a separate organ that belongs to the baby.
So no matter how you spin it, they’re eating baby organs.
Ive heard of people using the placenta pills to help reduce postpartum depression. Not sure if that works. But research has been done to show it reduces bleeding after birth if consumed immediately.
Terrible source but its late and im tired: “Postpartum hemorrhage has been controlled by using a small quarter-size piece of placenta placed in the mother’s cheek or chewed by the mother first and then held between her cheek and gum” www.midwiferytoday.com/…/the-power-of-placenta/
Bleeding stops when the uterus shrinks back down so the huge open wound left behind by the placenta becomes a small wound. Oxytocin makes that happen, and you get that by just holding your baby. I don’t know how eating the placenta would contribute.
My money is on it being the elemental power of bullshit. It’s likely the same ingredient that makes homeopathy actually ‘do’ anything: time i.e., it would have happened at that point regardless.
I’m not sure it’s the meat…I think it might be the chemicals in the meat. This isn’t my hill to die on, but you’re totally OK to stick to the modern Dr’s advice if you hemorrhage after childbirth. I can’t think anyone will ever forcefeed you placenta 🙃
I’m a vegan who smokes weed and I think that’s the extent of my woo (though Ron Swanson would certainly disagree, I’m very often struck by how much woo German medical doctors are allowed to push).
I’d want to do it, partly because the large quantity of bioavailable iron calls to me, but also because of the oxytocin and potential bonding effects (if it doesn’t have any, it doesn’t have any: no harm done). I don’t think I want it enough to really push back against a doctor/hospital that didn’t want to allow it, but I might look for one that is open to it.
I have a friend that became one of those people after high school. She made a killing for a few years from whacky people who wanted her to make the placenta into Christmas ornaments… She tried showing me photos of her stretching it over glass balls but I couldn’t stomach it.
To somewhat play devil’s advocate, what’s wrong with a minute? What benefit are you expecting from leaving it on longer?
The long and the short is Delayed Cord Clamping is really the only thing we have data for, and that’s what we should do without evidence something else is better.
I have no evidence, just a general thought that there are millions of years of evolution behind the umbilical cord staying intact for longer than a minute after birth. Some people want to leave it on for a week, why? Maybe that’s a useful instinct.
But most animals don’t leave it intact. They chew through it shortly after birth. You can’t really have a tissue that is sturdy enough to survive tension during fetal development and vaginal delivery that then instantly falls apart, so it has to be manually severed after delivery. The vast majority of mammals don’t let it stay attached for long at all, because their offspring are pretty mobile immediately after birth. From my reading of some of the random websites that recommend this, apparently it was based on the observations of a single species of higher ape (a chimp I think) that doesn’t sever the umbilical cord quickly. But when we have been severing cords as a species for generations and the vast majority of other mammals sever the cord with their teeth, I think the evolutionary biology evidence points towards severing the cord quickly.
Now evolutionary biology isn’t a solid basis for medical practice, but we don’t really have much scientific data at all to base this on at this point. There have been reports of increased rates of serious infections from the practice, which has face validity with the fact that you’re leaving a devascularized piece of tissue attached to the vascular system of neonate with an immature immune system. Outside of infection, there has been some case reports of polycythemia (excessively high red blood cell count) and jaundice in these infants. This makes sense physiologically. While attached to the placenta there is a greater intravascular volume available to the infant, which is the entire basis behind delayed cord cutting. It stands to reason that continuing to allow that extra blood volume to enter the infant would result in polycythemia and jaundice.
I’m not intimately familiar with the foundational literature by which the standard DCC cutoffs of 1 minutes or cessation of umbilical pulsatility were founded upon. There could be a very real argument for saying, should the time be 2 minutes? 5 minutes instead of 1? Or should we at least study it if it hasn’t been already?
In summary, we have a piece of dead/dying tissue attached to a physiologically stressed neonate with an immature immune system. Leaving it attached for days is in contradiction to the vast majority of other mammalian labor behaviors, is inconsistent with the majority of human’s labor history, and has a clear pathological mechanism by which the commonly reported complications can be easily explained. Without some legitimate evidence to actually support benefits or disprove the risks, I think this practice should be discouraged by healthcare professionals.
I’m sorry you’re getting downvotes. I’m betting the bulk are because you’re in c/askscience saying you don’t have any evidence to support your question, but that’s kinda the whole reason to ask a question. You weren’t speculating in a top level comment so I think it’s rude to be downvoting. As far as I can tell you’re asking genuine questions which is kinda the whole point of this community. Fuck the haters, ask questions when you’re curious!
Well they don’t eat it to get it off of the baby. While I’m not a vet or a zoologist, my understanding is they eat it for the nutrients as well as to help remove the scent, and newborn animals are easy prey and targeted by predators.
It probably wouldn’t make any difference in the appearance of the belly button, because eventually it work dry up and fall off, just like if you were to clamp and cut it. There are definite benefits to delaying the clamping of the cord. There is a lot of blood in the cord and placenta that is lost that could be auto transfused to the baby if the cord is left intact.
The main problem with leaving the cord and placenta intact is that there is a risk for infection or blood loss. Also it would look really gross in the baby pictures.
The cheapest materials would be what can be acquired in space without having to launch from Earth. As a result, you're going to want to build your O'Neill cylinder out of some combination of iron, aluminum, titanium, and silicon dioxide.
The last of which might be particularly useful, as it is the main ingredient of fiberglass while also being the most common substance on Moon and asteroids. As a result, you probably want to build your cylinder primarily out of fiberglass. You can get pretty decently sized cylinders, as fiberglass has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. Apparently, 24km diameter is a viable figure. Scale up length the same way, and you'll get 96km. So a 24km x 96km O'Neill cylinder made out of fiberglass.
That would be about 7238 km^2 of usable surface area. Half that to 3619 km^2 to make room for windows (as originally envisioned by O'Neill), and assuming a density comparable to New York City (about 11,300 people/km^2), you'll get around 40 million people. Or about the population of Tokyo.
That's seems plenty for any sensible space colonization strategy we might adopt in the future. And what's best is that you don't really need any fancy technology. Just use solar power to power mass drivers and deliver raw materials from the moon or asteroid via electricity. And it won't be any special materials either. Raw regolith can be made into fiberglass, so cost can be kept surprisingly low. The only question is scaling it all up, which may unfortunately be too expensive or will take a very long time to happen. Ultimately, this is still sci-fi, albeit on the hard side of it, since no fancy new technology is require.
I’d like to see a pressure vessel made of fibreglass that size… Not happening. Wall thickness in pressure vessels scales
Simple calculator, assuming steel… a 24 km diameter pressure vessel at 15psi is over 13 metres thick steel wall to contain the pressure. checalc.com/calc/vesselThick.html
Just the volume of steel required would be astronomical. You might be able to do this out of a similar mass of fibreglass… But forget launching it from Earth (would have to be made in situ).
And, largely, forget the fantasy renderings of what O’Neill cylinders look like – they are anything but lightweight.
This is sci-fi stuff. No one is seriously saying we could build this anytime soon. It will require a radical advancement in space travel capability. But the interesting part of this is that it doesn’t any new technology. It needs only the technology that we currently have, just scaled up massively.
As it is an O’Neill cylinder, the raw material needs will be truly huge. We’re literally building a city on the scale of Tokyo but in space. So we are just assuming that someday, we can move around that amount of stuff in space.
It’s far more than building a city the size of tokyo. It’s the mass required. If you weighed Tokyo, and then engineered a hypothetical Tokyo in space, you’d find that the mass of the equivalent materials would be orders of magnitude higher than even your worst estimates.
Back of the envelope, you put Tokyo in a cylinder with a similar surface area to actual tokyo, the volume of steel in the walls of the containing cylinder (just the pressure vessel) would be about … 60 billion cubic metres, or something like 450 billion metric tonnes of steel. As a point of comparison, tokyo tower is… 4000 tonnes.
As another point of comparison: our global annual steel production is currently around 2 billion metric tonnes per year. It would take 200+ years worth of global production to build just the pressure vessel for a tokyo in space. Unless you’re building this at your source of raw materials, it just doesn’t happen.
Yes, that's the point. It's far beyond the actual city of Tokyo in terms of construction difficulty and scale. But it doesn't need any new technologies to be invented to be doable. Just the ability to build on that scale.
But the point is if you get your materials from the Moon, for example, it’s vastly more economical to just build a Moon colony (or another Moon colony) than a space colony of the same size.
Then you'll have to deal with Lunar gravity, which may be unacceptable for long durations. Humans may have to live in giant space stations if we want to live in space. And since they can be truly massive, it may be more desirable than what some might think.
The ideal solution is probably not to build a colony in the middle of space, but rather find a celestial body with the necessary materials with gravity low enough to be acceptable.
Moon gravity too strong? Try smaller moons. Phobos? Europa? Charon?
Why ship pieces instead of shipping manufacturing capability (nano 3D printing etc) and use resources at the end point? By then presumably we’ve got asteroid mining down, no?
I think it would likely be similar to engineering materials today. The highest performing materials are very difficult to manufacture and we are talking about pushing them near their limits. I think a lot of the substructure will be made in-situ, but I think the most stressed parts of the main structure will require the largest scales of manufacturing. Like Sam Zeloof made a chip fab in a garage, so why doesn’t he start producing the next Nvidia GPU. It is that kind of difference here. A lot can be done there, but nothing like what can be done on the cutting edge of what humans are capable of making at out largest and most advanced facilities.
First, you’ve got to realize that you’re making several very bold assumptions given current physics: (1) that we can build O’Neill cylinders with current or future materials that resemble anything like sci fi expects (probably not – pressure vessels are hard, mkay). (2) that we have a means to accelerate something larger than a probe to a significant fraction of light speed (this is actually the least difficult problem, but I suggest you look at the energy and travel time requirements). (3) that there’s any conceivable way for this thing to stop upon arrival (much harder problem without magic engines).
If all of the above are reasonable, then, well, you bootstrap manufacturing in situ in the asteroid belt or in a planetary ring or whatever. Not a huge problem. You obviously need to target a second or third generation solar system in order to find metals and heavier elements on arrival, but that’s trivial if you’ve solved the “stopping upon arrival using the energy and mass you brought with you” problem.
If you could send very small self replicating factories that could take their time to arrive, and upon arrival built a huge laser array used to slow down your larger shipments as they were inbound, you might be able to pull it off… With a few thousand years of preplanning. ;)
I agree with nearly all of your points. The stopping problem is the same as the accelerating problem. Assuming near infinite energy reserves, but limited power generation, then the ship would accelerate for half the trip, turn around, and then decelerate for the 2nd half. Depending on the amount of power that can be generated, earth gravity may be possible during the trip (except for the turn around in the middle).
The accelation problem is easier because you can build massive infrastructure in your home system that doesn’t need to make the journey, so it doesn’t incur the tyranny of the rocket equation. Still need massive infrastructure and huge amounts of energy, but it’s much easier to imagine a dyson swarm of lasers firing at the mirror at the back of the spaceship. :)
There’s no reason that we would expand out at the speed of light in one direction. It’s well within the realm of possibility that we can intercept rogue planets or large asteroids to use as long time habitats. Also we can expand in millions of directions at once at sub-light speed. The journey make take a million years, but we’ll reach a million places at once.
I didn’t say speed of light – just a significant fraction of it. Even 1% is extremely ambitious from an energy budget perspective. 10% or higher is probably achievable for small outbound probes using laser based acceleration – but they’ll just cruise by systems without any means to stop. For large “settlement” ships or similar, even getting 1% would be colossal amounts of energy (like percentages of the sun’s total output). So, yes, you’ll need to take the slow road.
Rogue planets come within a few light years of Earth. We could probably have a low speed, multi-generational ship to intercept one in a few hundred years. Once we’re on we’re hopefully good forever. Likely we’ll come close enough to some other interstellar bodies we could populate as we travelled. Exponential growth is bound to take off.
Yeah, if we aren’t in a hurry, and we can set up some fusion reactors and such on them and build whole civilizations on these rogue planets in the dark, it would work. Depends on how early and often we set up shop on passing planets, but in theory we could colonize much of the galaxy in a few revolutions around the milky way. So, under a billion years. ;)
The materials have been shown and proven in theory. It is simply a matter of building the space based manufacturing and infrastructure required. This is like Romans talking about what it will take to build nuclear power plants if they could somehow imagine them. I laid out the economy scale that I am talking about at the outset. This is an order of magnitude, or more, larger total human economic output. An era when this construction scale is not very novel.
Assuming we are talking about an era when Sol has a thriving space industry and the Solar system is broadly colonized.
If we are colonizing the rest of the Solar system, we figured out large scale and pressure vessels already. Once we are building in space with materials sourced from space, most of the problems go away.
Worst case, a ship can use nuclear detonations to both accelerate and decelerate easily within the limits of known materials. This has been thoroughly researched in a US program that was only canned as part of anti nuclear proliferation act. This system can easily handle both ends and traveling faster than any current method. It is a worst case. If we can master fusion, there are other ways as well.
I said generation ships too. I don’t care if it is slow and I think humans could cope just fine on a large enough ship, assuming we don’t find ways to put humans on ice.
I highly recommend checking out Isaac Arthur’s content on YT as he goes though all of this kind of stuff in detail but even further into possibility and future tech. I’m getting much more specific into a time and constraints than what IA does in general.
we figured out large scale and pressure vessels already
No. This is an assumption not borne of physics or engineering. There is no magic material that will make large scale pressure vessels suddenly viable. It (and space elevators) are mathematical constructs, not real things.
Use this calculator. checalc.com/calc/vesselThick.html – punch in 15 psi for pressure, and 100F for temperature. Play with your pressure vessel. Wall thickness of large scale habitats will need to be many metres of solid steel (or equivalent material). Even if you magically mass produce carbon nanotubes or something, you still need hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon to pull off any large scale vessel. Your talking about ingesting entire asteroids just for building materials. You don’t launch that shit on an interstellar journey.
I don’t know about scientific studies, but in my experience I sleep best when the mattress side of the bed is positioned towards the ceiling. Also, putting the bed in front of the door can be somewhat inconvenient, specially if the door opens inward. Other than that, everything else seems to mostly be fair game.
It’s safest to keep your bed against an interior wall instead of a window, in case of earthquakes or other natural disasters. Or even someone crashing their car into your house, bombs dropping, etc.
The important facing questions are “where is my window facing” and “where is my bed facing in relation to the window and door”. Magnetism is irrelevant, as we are no migratory birds who can actually sense that field.
Although you’re practically right, we can technically actually sense magnetic fields. It’s incredibly weak and you have to drown out all other senses, but it’s possible.
Facing away from the door (I.e. having the door in the back) makes some people anxious, like people usually turn and face the door in an elevator. That’s why a hotel bed often faces the door.
The position relative to the window is a question of light.
situational awareness. humans instinctually need to feel safe. sleeping with your head right by the door gives you the least amount of reaction time/space to stave off invasion. inagine a rabbit sleeping with its nose out of a rabbit hole. in modern times with modern locks and security, its not a big consideration to be faie. but the instinct is there. people like headboards on beds for the same cavelike feelibg of protection. so yea head away from the door, bed not by the door. windows used to be avoided for being drafty or leaking light.
I don’t have any data to bring to the table, but just think about our evolution. It makes sense to me that we evolved to be able to get our sleep when we can where we can, rather than needing to face a certain direction or have the window to a particular side.
Psychologically, it makes sense to me that you’d be most comfortable in a position where you can see the door, but I have to assume our ancestors 10,000 years ago didn’t have the luxury of pointing northward or something. Maybe it’s best to have a window facing east so you can get natural sunlight in the morning.
The only real effects that I know of are light related. If you’re trying to sleep, making it as dark as possible is best. So using an eye cover or blackout curtains can help. But when you want to wake up, sunlight helps us wake up easier. This can be tricky in the winter when the sun rises later and doesn’t peek into your window until after you’ve already had to wake up. I think there are some phone alarms that will slowly add a warm light to the room to help with this, but I couldn’t say if they actually work or not. Hope this helps.
askscience
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.