Sue Luttner
technical and medical writer
technical and medical writer
Sue Luttner is a technical writer and occasional journalist who has found herself following an astonishing medico-legal controversy. Her work on this blog presents what is today the minority opinion in an ongoing debate surrounding shaken baby syndrome, renamed "abusive head trauma" in 2009 by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Her blog posting "My Front-Row Seat at a Bitter Professional Debate" explains how she was drawn into the arena through a family she knew and then followed the story to the medical library and beyond.
She maintains a web site about shaken baby syndrome at http://onsbs.com/.
She administers a Facebook page about SBS at
Pediatric neuropathologist Dr. Waney Squier has distilled decades of professional and personal experience into a potent and provocative TEDx talk, “I believed in Shaken Baby Syndrome until science showed I was wrong.”
A series of legal developments in the past few weeks highlights the devastating effects of misguided child abuse diagnoses on innocent families.
A British High Court judge has reinstated Dr. Waney Squier’s right to practice medicine, in a decision that dismissed as “unsustainable” a number of findings by a tribunal appointed by the General Medical Council (GMC) in 2015 to investigate her testimony in a series of shaken baby cases. A well res
Dr. A. Norman Guthkelch, the pioneering pediatric neurosurgeon who first proposed in print that shaking an infant could cause bleeding in the lining of the brain, died quietly last week in Toledo, Ohio, a month short of his 101st birthday.
Physicians and attorneys in Boston, Massachusetts, where the Louise Woodward trial brought shaken baby theory onto the national stage, are heading into another battle over infant shaking, as pediatricians clash with the medical examiner about the diagnosis.
After winning 9 awards from 13 nominations at independent film festivals since its premiere in the fall of 2014, “The Syndrome” by Meryl and Susan Goldsmith is now available on demand in North America, the first documentary distributed by Freestyle Digital Media.
In a 96-page decision packed with irony, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) in Britain has declared pediatric neuropathologist Waney Squier guilty of practicing outside her area of expertise and bringing the reputation of the medical profession into disrepute.
Another convicted child care provider has won a new trial with the argument that medical thinking about shaken baby syndrome has changed.
This season's wrinkle inspires both sides in the shaken baby debate to stake out their positions.
What started out as a feel-good story about the kindness of strangers has turned into a CPS nightmare for a family in the Pacific northwest, where doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital have accused Thomas Everson and his wife Brandi McNerny Everson of exaggerating their son’s disabilities.