“One of the sad­dest lessons of his­to­ry is this: If we’ve been bam­boo­zled long enough, we tend to re­ject any ev­i­dence of the bam­boo­zle. We’re no longer in­ter­est­ed in find­ing out the truth. The bam­boo­zle has cap­tured us. It’s sim­ply too painful to ac­knowl­edge, even to our­selves, that we’ve been tak­en.”

— Carl Sagan, as­tronomer and writer (No­vem­ber 9, 1934–1996)

We seem to have en­tered an era where it’s in­creas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish fibs from lies, half-truths from truths, and truths from un­truths. Like the “boil­ing frog syn­drome”—the fa­ble of the frog in slow­ly heat­ing wa­ter— many of us, strength­ened by so­cial me­dia and our mon­key-like fas­ci­na­tion with news, have be­come de­sen­si­tised. We ei­ther be­lieve every­thing or, when un­sure, lack the con­fi­dence to call out false­hoods—un­like the lit­tle boy in The Em­per­or’s New Clothes. (Al­though, I be­lieve it was a lit­tle girl who first no­ticed his naked­ness and per­suad­ed the boy to speak up.)

For the past sev­er­al years in Trinidad and To­ba­go, there’s been a grad­ual rise in the num­ber of chil­dren who are over­weight— and an even more wor­ry­ing rise in par­ents who do not think their chil­dren are over­weight or obese. Many be­lieve their child’s weight is nor­mal; some even think the child is un­der­weight.

The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion’s Eu­ro­pean Re­gion re­cent­ly pub­lished a re­port on more than 470,000 chil­dren aged six–nine years across 37 coun­tries. It found that a quar­ter were over­weight and one in ten obese. Noth­ing new there—we are like­ly much worse off.

What’s star­tling is that two-thirds of the chil­dren liv­ing with over­weight were per­ceived by their par­ents to be un­der­weight or of nor­mal weight. In every coun­try with avail­able da­ta, more than half of par­ents un­der­es­ti­mat­ed their child’s weight sta­tus.

This false im­age of what con­sti­tutes a healthy weight has crept up on us, like the boil­ing frog. There’s no rea­son to be­lieve the sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent any­where else in the world.

We’ve been bam­boo­zled in­to adopt­ing wrong opin­ions about health through a com­bi­na­tion of false in­for­ma­tion from so­cial me­dia and our own gulli­bil­i­ty in trust­ing peo­ple we don’t know.

It’s rem­i­nis­cent of what hap­pened in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when women were told by food com­pa­nies—and their hired “milk nurs­es” and “milk doc­tors”— that for­mu­la was just as good as breast­milk. Over time, the im­age of a breast­feed­ing ba­by was re­placed with glossy pho­tos of glow­ing, bot­tle-fed ba­bies and smil­ing moth­ers. It took over 50 years to cor­rect that de­cep­tion.

To­day, the num­ber of cae­sare­an sec­tions be­ing per­formed is fright­en­ing. We’ve gone from about five per cent in the 1970s and 80s to over 30 per cent in the pub­lic sec­tor. In the pri­vate sec­tor, it can reach 60 to 70 per cent. As­ton­ish­ing­ly, this is now con­sid­ered nor­mal.

One won­ders how the hu­man race man­aged to sur­vive and thrive be­fore a life-sav­ing, oc­ca­sion­al­ly nec­es­sary sur­gi­cal in­ter­ven­tion be­came the stan­dard method of child­birth.

Just last week, The New York Times pub­lished an ar­ti­cle ti­tled “The ‘Worst Test in Med­i­cine’ Is Dri­ving Amer­i­ca’s High C-Sec­tion Rate.” It point­ed to the “around-the-clock foetal mon­i­tor­ing” that leads to un­nec­es­sary C-sec­tions. Foetal mon­i­tor­ing is used in near­ly every birthing process be­cause it’s sup­posed to iden­ti­fy foetal dis­tress. It does not. In­stead, it of­ten trig­gers un­nec­es­sary surg­eries as doc­tors over­re­act to its con­stant­ly chang­ing read­outs.

As a re­sult, in the Unit­ed States, one out of every three de­liv­er­ies now takes place in an op­er­at­ing room—a fig­ure far ex­ceed­ing med­ical rec­om­men­da­tions.

The re­al rea­son foetal mon­i­tor­ing is used so rou­tine­ly has more to do with busi­ness and le­gal con­cerns than with med­ical ne­ces­si­ty.

It has be­come stan­dard prac­tice, and chang­ing such rou­tine pro­ce­dures—in a risk-averse pro­fes­sion shaped by lit­i­ga­tion fears—will be near­ly im­pos­si­ble un­til the pen­du­lum swings the oth­er way. That may hap­pen on­ly when ev­i­dence grows that ba­bies born by C-sec­tion are more vul­ner­a­ble to dis­ease, and more C-sec­tion moth­ers be­gin suf­fer­ing uter­ine com­pli­ca­tions.

For the record, ob­stet­ric guide­lines in Cana­da and the UK rec­om­mend against the rou­tine use of foetal mon­i­tor­ing in healthy preg­nan­cies.

When­ev­er I walk in­to a de­liv­ery room and hear the beep­ing of a ba­by’s heart on the mon­i­tor, my own heart rate ris­es. I glance at the moth­er in labour and see the same anx­i­ety. She’s wait­ing for the ma­chine to tell her some­thing is wrong. That anx­i­ety im­pedes labour—and of­ten sets up the path to a cae­sare­an sec­tion.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, all three is­sues are con­nect­ed. Ba­bies born by C-sec­tion are more like­ly to be for­mu­la-fed and to be­come over­weight.

Poor med­i­cine breeds dis­ease.