Shaken Baby Syndrome: An Abusive Diagnosis

This is Archie Kalokerinos' last book, edited in 2008, never commercialized, and offered for free as a PDF download by the Robert Reisinger Memorial Trust. The PDF has been cleaned from his watermarks. Intro by Archie (from the book): Readers of this book will quickly realize that observations of illness patterns amongst Australian Aboriginal infants played a major role in enabling me to uncover mechanisms involved in the Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) and the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Before white settlement, Aborigines lived mostly isolated from the rest of the world. They ate fresh vegetables and a little meat. They were physically fit and free from the scourges of European diseases. When the white man arrived the Aborigines were forcibly removed from tribal land and their diet was promptly changed from fresh bush food to what I call ‘white man’s poison”, namely refined flour, sugar and alcohol. Within a short time the health of Aborigines descended into an abyss and infants and children developed diseases they never had. They were constantly ill with colds and a multitude of gastrointestinal disorders and the infant mortality rate (IMR) became one of the worst, worldwide. Astonishingly, no one seemed to care. As a medical student I was taught nothing about Aboriginal health and when I arrived in Collarenebri in 1957, authorities did nothing to alert me to what was going on. Worse still, when I tried to discuss what I observed, everyone became hostile. I owe a huge debt to Aboriginal children. Their deaths enabled me to see through a quagmire, learn a great deal and enter a world where infants’ deaths became a rarity. Had I established my practice in a ‘rich and civilized’ part of Australia my life would have remained much less productive and certainly less rewarding.