There have been a number of randomized trials of breast feeding vs formula. I personally know a mother who was randomized c1980. She was not happy when she learned that the hypothesis being tested was that formula had a (specific) negative effect. Which it didn’t. No RCT has found any effect. However, the RCT have been very wasteful. They should treat randomized children as a valuable resource, like a twin registry, to be followed for years and extensively measured, but they don’t; indeed, I don’t think they’re allowed to contact them again.
I don’t see how it’s possible to really randomize this. No one’s going to stick with a feeding method if they think it’s best for their child to switch, just because they signed a form telling some researcher they would. Baby sleep studies have the same problem.
As far as I know, the closest we have is the Belarusian PROBIT study (as Ozy mentioned above) where it was advising that was randomized.
Do you apply this skepticism to all non-blind randomized studies? If people have an opinion on the right thing to do, they don’t join the study. And studies do ask people if they followed the instructions.
I’m not talking about blinding, I’m just talking about randomizing. That’s right, in areas with obvious confounders like class, baby health, and maternal stress level, and relatively small differences in outcomes between the groups anyway, I don’t think correlational data is worth much.
Having parented a difficult-to-feed baby and having tried everything I could think of to get calories into her, I’m quite sure that even parents who start out willing to follow a given recommendation quickly change their mind if things don’t seem to be going well. (If not, you’re selecting for parents who are willing to prioritize following instructions over their baby’s health, which certainly gets you a different population than is typical.)
There have been a number of randomized trials of breast feeding vs formula. I personally know a mother who was randomized c1980. She was not happy when she learned that the hypothesis being tested was that formula had a (specific) negative effect. Which it didn’t. No RCT has found any effect. However, the RCT have been very wasteful. They should treat randomized children as a valuable resource, like a twin registry, to be followed for years and extensively measured, but they don’t; indeed, I don’t think they’re allowed to contact them again.
I don’t see how it’s possible to really randomize this. No one’s going to stick with a feeding method if they think it’s best for their child to switch, just because they signed a form telling some researcher they would. Baby sleep studies have the same problem.
As far as I know, the closest we have is the Belarusian PROBIT study (as Ozy mentioned above) where it was advising that was randomized.
Do you apply this skepticism to all non-blind randomized studies? If people have an opinion on the right thing to do, they don’t join the study. And studies do ask people if they followed the instructions.
I’m not talking about blinding, I’m just talking about randomizing. That’s right, in areas with obvious confounders like class, baby health, and maternal stress level, and relatively small differences in outcomes between the groups anyway, I don’t think correlational data is worth much.
Having parented a difficult-to-feed baby and having tried everything I could think of to get calories into her, I’m quite sure that even parents who start out willing to follow a given recommendation quickly change their mind if things don’t seem to be going well. (If not, you’re selecting for parents who are willing to prioritize following instructions over their baby’s health, which certainly gets you a different population than is typical.)