The Syndrome

The Syndrome
Freestyle Digital Media
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Logic 101 teaches us that you can’t prove a negative. If I ask you to prove you have never scratched your armpit, you can’t do it. That is why, in a court of law, you must be considered innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof must be on the prosecution, not the defense. Any court that operates otherwise is corrupt. In many cases if you have to prove your innocence you are put in an impossible position.

This video documents many “Shaken Baby Syndrome” cases where parents are being put in exactly that impossible position. Parents bring their baby to a hospital with a problem, doctors investigate, find severe brain inflammation or similar damage and call the police. The medical and court systems assume the damage was caused by violent shaking and someone goes to jail, usually one or both parents or a caregiver who was with the baby at the time.

There is a problem with this. It is known by a wide range of experts that there can be many different causes for this syndrome. There is an even bigger problem. In many of these cases, the baby’s neck is undamaged. It is physically impossible to shake a baby hard enough to cause brain damage without also causing serious neck damage. So a lot of people have gone to jail and families have been ripped apart when they were not guilty. Experts have testified at trials, explaining that this syndrome can be caused by several things and cannot be caused by shaking. Sometimes the courts listen. Sometimes they don’t, maybe because they are too busy scratching their armpits. Then people go to jail not because they are guilty but because they couldn’t prove they weren’t.

There has been a lot of resistance to this truth even though a number of well-qualified experts from several related fields have stood up for it. But progress is being made. Some courts are throwing the cases out after preliminary hearings. Other cases that have already been decided are being overturned.

There is still a lot of work to be done. One thing that might be slowing it down is the connection between this kind of syndrome and vaccines. We all know what paragons of virtue vaccine manufacturers are and how they fervently believe that the greater good is better served by sending innocent people to jail than to reveal awkward truths that might threaten their precious profits. It will take a lot of effort to send the big pharma trolls scurrying back to the fiery underworld whence they came. The thumb is UP (for this video, not the trolls).

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2016

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