Readers who have brushed Twitter may know that there was such a hot search yesterday.
The mother was advised by experts to take Chinese herbs and continue breastfeeding her 3-month-old baby, and soon after the baby’s fever subsided, a review showed that both the baby girl and her mother had developed antibodies.
Readers here who have read the article “If it works, does it work?” If you’ve read the article or read the book I recommended the day before, you shouldn’t think it’s surprising that something like this would be on the news.
For readers with some scientific thinking ability, such a hot search is not so misleading, but the crowd with such ability is certainly still a minority, so we can see that the comment section of this popular tweet, in addition to a small number of critical voices, the most liked are still the following popular comments.
Picture
Such a hot search, or the news released by the central media, popular comments are again this category, no knowledge of these issues of the little white mother if you see, is very easy to form the perception that this child was cured because the mother took Chinese medicine, the child is sick, can be cured by the way the mother took medicine, which will cause a lot of harm.
There are also many people circling me on Twitter, and there are also people leaving messages in the background here asking me to talk about it, so it’s better to write this one to explain it.
How did this child’s new crown get better?
For individual cases, it is hard to know the exact cause, but based on current medical knowledge, the two biggest possibilities are that the child’s own immune system is to blame, and that the breast milk provides antibody protection.
The infant’s immune system, although not yet perfect, is still the body’s main protection system to prevent and clear infections, and the same for new crowns. Moreover, based on the previous clinical studies, children infected with neocuan have overall milder symptoms and a smaller proportion of critical illnesses than adults, and most of them heal spontaneously [1], and these spontaneous healing is basically by the action of the child’s own immune system.
As for the role of breastfeeding, there are also studies suggesting that breastfeeding has a protective effect on respiratory diseases [2], and based on these relevant evidence, it is reasonable to speculate that breastfeeding also has a protective effect on infants’ resistance to new crown infections.
Is it possible for a mother to take herbal medicine and then the herbal medicine cures her child through breast milk? Almost never.
This is because the drug is filtered through the mucous membrane of the mother’s digestive system, which reduces part of it, and then it enters the bloodstream and is continuously consumed by the liver and kidney metabolism, and the concentration of the drug in the bloodstream is already low, and this concentration cannot be maintained for a long time. If the drug in the blood is to enter the breast milk, it needs to be filtered through the blood-milk barrier, and the blood drug concentration is already very low, and the amount that finally enters the breast milk is minimal.
This minuscule amount of medicine has to be filtered through the child’s digestive system and metabolized by the child’s liver and kidney functions, so it is almost impossible to maintain the concentration of the medicine in the child’s blood to be able to cure the child.
If you want to increase the concentration of drugs in your mother’s breast milk by increasing the amount of drugs she takes, you may need to take many times more drugs to increase the concentration, and it is very likely that the mother will still not be able to reach the concentration of drugs for her child even after she has poisoned herself. Therefore, there is no drug that the mother takes the medicine, using the “breastfeeding” method to give the child a cure.
But if you want to say: just because it was not available before, it does not mean that it will not be available now or in the future? Maybe herbal medicine, like breast milk, has a therapeutic effect on the child by means of antibodies or other active cytokines in breast milk?
This possibility is certainly not absolute, but from the current evidence and logic this is a desperate path, you want to run to the desperate path is of course their own freedom, but to take something so unlikely out of publicity, causing misinformation, so that other breastfeeding mothers think that they can cure their children in this way, causing these mothers to suffer drug overdose or delay the regular treatment of their children, is a kind of killing in disguise.
If one is responsible and wants to bring something like this out for publicity, one must at least have a shred of decent evidence. Does this child in Dalian count as evidence? If so, people have special powers, believe it or not, see the evidence in the picture below.
Pictures
References.
[1] SARS-COV-2 infection in children and newborns: a systematic review.
Liguoro I, Pilotto C, Bonanni M, Ferrari ME, Pusiol A, Nocerino A, Vidal E, Cogo P Eur J Pediatr. 2020;179(7):1029. epub 2020 May 18.
[2] Protective effect of breast feeding against infection. Howie PW, Forsyth JS, Ogston SA, Clark A, Florey CD BMJ. 1990;300(6716): 11.
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