How do you make your baby healthy? If you live in Solapur (in Western India), and if you believe in religion, ritual and tradition rather than modern science and common sense, you drop your baby from the top of a tall building. I cringed while watching this video, thinking that I was about to see a baby turned into a lifetime paraplegic. This could easily happen if the baby fell in an odd angle and its neck snapped when it was suddenly caught on a stretched-out blanket at the bottom of the fall (check out Paraquad’s site on this mechanism of injury). Even if the baby appears to be OK, damage can occur due to a deceleration Injury.

Oh, and the bit about “there never have been any injuries” is something I truly have to wonder about. When your baby acts lethargic after the fall, are you going to speak up and risk blasphemy?

I suspect that baby dropping is yet another instance where the felt need to socially bond by publicly participating in a ritual overwhelms any concerns one might have with this procedure. This is a good example of just how strongly humans feel the need to placate the herd.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Religion, Science, Whimsy, snake oil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.