This study isn't "skin to skin care is good." This study was aimed to answer the question, as contextualized, "We have established that skin-to-skin care for healthy children is good (pile of studies); for unhealthy children that have been stabilized is good (pile of studies), but is it good for kids that are still unstable? (controversy)"
"I'm skeptical of a single study" is only a valid criticism if you're familiar with the body of scientific literature. Otherwise, what you're actually saying is, "I'm skeptical of results that pop magazines and press releases have only surfaced to my attention once" - which is a shoddy mechanism for curating your knowledge.
> Otherwise, what you're actually saying is, "I'm skeptical of results that pop magazines and press releases have only surfaced to my attention once" - which is a shoddy mechanism for curating your knowledge.
At the risk of nitpicking, this seems like a good principle to follow? Like, assuming skeptical means "I won't instantly buy into this being as great as the pop magazine claims" rather than "I will strongly presuppose that this is untrue because it was in a pop magazine".
I think it's a poor mechanism because "appeared once in a pop magazine" isn't a good signal for knowledge curation regardless of whether you assign it a positive or negative weight; especially when the original comment implied (to my reading) "the topic has only surfaced once, therefore the existing knowledgebase is only one study."
The existence of a single study in pop literature is a very poor predictor of whether the study was accurate or not, and a very poor predictor of whether there are other studies on the topic. So I think it a mistake to substitute "it has come to my attention once" for "it has only been studied once."
At least this is 'med life style news', arguably not really 'pop', by the time this hits, I don't know, 'ifl science' or whatever, Techcrunch for general science/medicine, I wouldn't count on 'with unstable' in the headline, or perhaps even the body.