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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

It seems like all it's done is make people more vulnerable as adults.

In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended not allowing your kids peanuts until they were 3 years old. It was just parents following doctor's (bad) advice.

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Not to confuse: peanuts cannot directly be eaten because of risk of choke, as infants cannot chew them. The advice is to add as ingredient, as e.g. peanut butter.

Unfortunately everyone will ignore this comment and continue to respond as if peanuts were advised against because of allergy risk.

They were advised against because of the allergy risk, not because of choking hazard. Are you a parent? No shit you don't give hard nuts to a baby with no teeth.

A timely reminder that although doctors aspire to follow science, and many doctors are scientists, and most doctors advocate evidence-based medicine, the practice of medicine is not a wholly scientific field, and particularly the big associations like the AAP are vulnerable to groupthink just like any big org.

Also, science is persistently incomplete, and actually making decisions (or advice) requires making assumptions (often, neutral ones, but that can turn out to be quite wrong) about what is in the unfilled gaps. The advice to avoid peanuts was because it was clear that severe peanut allergies existed, it was clear that they affected a small fraction of children, and it was clear than when they affected very young children, those children weren't able to let people know what was going on as well as older children and adults to enable timely intervention.

There wasn't much information one way or the other on what avoidance did as far impacting development of allergies, and with the evidence available, delaying exposure seemed prudent.

> and many doctors are scientists

Is this true? What percentage of doctors are scientists?

How do you define "scientist"? Medical education includes training in research methods.

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