Shaken Baby Syndrome—A Forensic Pediatric Response

Forty years later: inconsistencies in reporting of child abuse

“…In the United States, Louise Woodward’s defence team challenged the scientific literature describing abusive head trauma,35 even suggesting that child abuse paediatricians were members of a cult. In the UK, a firestorm of publicity surrounded the testimony of medical experts in cases of infant death 36 37.…”

Traumatic brain injury

“…falls affecting infants and young children is less than 0.48 deaths per 1 million young children per year (Chadwick et al, 1998). Any complex skull fracture (crossing suture lines, stellate, and/or associated with significant intracranial pathology) occurring as a result of a household fall should be viewed as suspicious and investigated further.…”

What do pediatric healthcare experts really need to know about Daubert and the rules of evidence?

“…In these cases, the expert can use Daubert factors such as: (1) general acceptance, (2) peer-reviewed publication, (3) testability/falsifiability, and (4) error rates, to explain the associative but not causative relationship between SSVT and SDHs. Pediatric experts can use a similar approach to help judges and juries properly evaluate other alternative diagnoses such as the re-bleeding theory of SDHs and traumatic brain injuries attributed to short falls [23,24]. This last example also provides an excellent opportunity for the expert to explain to the court that some scientific-sounding opinions are belied not just by the science but by everyday experience [25].…”

“…Everyone knows this is not the case. Thus, as one scientific author has astutely commented, "when models do not conform with human experience, then there is something wrong with the model" [24].…”