This weekend my grandma gave me a newsclipping she found while cleaning out her cedar chest. It was an article about natural childbirth that appeared in the local newspaper the year I was born . Two of the people in the class were... my mom and dad. Yes, I was newsworthy even before birth. My parents were in two of the pictures from the story. I had never seen this article before, and I thought it was really cool. I later read the article, and I was struck out how radical the idea of natural childbirth seemed to be. I asked my mom about it, and she said it was very rare at the time. Prior to this time was the "drug the mom totally out and deliver the baby" school of childbirth. It struck me as how funny it is that the shift was back to the way babies had been born for thousands of years (but thankfully with the availability of medically indicated c-section).
This shift to the "old" way of doing things made me think about something my grandma had said before- when she had her 3 kids, women didn't breastfeed. She said they gave you a shot to dry up your milk after the baby was born, and the baby was fed formula. My mom said only the really poor people breastfed. It's funny, because there is so much research now that shows how good breastfeeding is for the baby (there are benefits for the mom too). So now the expert advice is back to the old way here too (formula is of course still the best/only option in some cases).
In a similar vein, I remembered something I'd read a long time ago about China. At one point in history the elite ate white rice. Only the poor ate whole grain. This led the elite to develop a nutritional deficiency while the poor did not (unfortunately I can't remember the name of the disease).
Morale of the story: Just because something is "new" does not necessarily mean that it's a true improvement. Sometimes the old ways are indeed the best ones.
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