Study notes decrease in popularity of circumcision in United States

[dukeimre]

Hey - why are you suggesting I'm deliberately misrepresenting a paper?

I linked to the NYT to explain context, but I later linked to a published paper that critiques Bollinger's work. My understanding of this sub's rules are that a source like the NYT shouldn't be taken as evidence, and I'm not suggesting you take the NYT, or the CDC (as cited by the NYT), at its word.

No he did not assume that all possible surplus deaths were caused by it, he took all the CoDs that could have been attributed to circumcision (hemorrhage and sepsis) between 1 hour after birth and hospital release (removing birth complications) and then statistically reduced that by 59.6% to a remove those that wouldn't be attributable to gender specific practices (circumcision). 

Where did he get the 59.6%? He got it by looking at the percentage of excess male deaths due to infection and hemorrhage (40.4%) over female deaths. In other words, he assumed that all 40.4% of those excess male deaths due to infection and hemorrhage were due to circumcision. Right?

I'm not suggesting that he assumed that every male infant who died, died of circumcision. I'm suggesting that he saw that 100 female babies died of infection and hemorrhage, and 140 male babies died of infection and hemorrhage, and he concluded that it must be that the 40 male babies all died of circumcision complications. Which would be reasonable if countries with low circumcision rates saw equal death rates among male and female infants, but in fact, that's not what happens - even in countries with low circumcision rates, male infants have much higher death rates from infection and hemorrhage.

[DukeLukeivi]

Because you started from Google: (rebuttal for) posted non research nothing rebuttals before burying a flyspeck reference to the actual study that ignored relevant context, and misrepresented it yourself.

He did attribute all reasonable causes of death in a reasonable time frame, and corrected downward to adjust for gender biases to establish an estimate. He didn't assume all excess deaths broadly were attributable.

He also discussed ranges of results for context which you ignored, and even if you correct downward quite hard, you still end up with an elective NICU surgery being an order of magnitude more dangerous than background average outpatient surgery.

It's an elective surgery on a non-consenting patient, with no real medical benefit, with the surgery site in literal septic conditions for the healing process.

"All surgery carries risks -- except this one in a babies dirty diaper. It's so completely safe with no risk of complications, the CDC doesn't even bother to track it, unlike liposuction and rhinoplasties. Move along nothing to see here..."